Larry Ouellette has worked in information technology for over 30 years. When he started, there were only mainframe systems, and he was part of a small team that fully automated the mainframe environment. Then as dedicated, application-specific servers were added, he and his team created their own monitoring applications to ensure the health of these systems and to notify technical support when problems were detected. Soon, there were dozens of servers, then hundreds, then over a thousand. Multiple support groups brought in freeware, shareware and commercial tools to monitor their systems, resulting in tool spread of at least five different monitoring tools.

In 2014-2015, a project was created to look at all the various monitoring tools and to come up with one tool to replace them. Zenoss was chosen, and approximately 5-600 servers and other devices were migrated from the other monitoring tools to their on-premises Zenoss instance. In 2019, a decision was made to migrate to Zenoss Cloud, ensuring that the department’s primary monitoring tool was always up to date and to take advantage of the latest features of Zenoss.

In 2020 and 2021, Larry and team added a significant number of devices to Zenoss, including close to 3,000 network wireless access points (ping only) and over 200 Cisco network devices. They also started building out the service impact component by defining their “critical 1” and “critical 2” services, as requested by the CIO.