Loyola University of Maryland lowers administrative overhead with unified observability

Loyola University of Maryland, a Jesuit Catholic university located in Baltimore, Maryland, is home to 5,500 students across the main campus and three remote campuses. The Technology Services Department is the centralized provider of technology to the entire Loyola community, supporting applications, storage, security, connectivity, and all devices. The challenges of so many devices, combined with the importance of uptime and visibility, led Loyola to search for an observability platform after a radical redeployment of the university’s network. What started as a simple hub-and-spoke topology, where all services symmetrically overlaid the network elements themselves, was migrated to a flexible collection of virtual networks operating independently of each other to serve different constituents and functions. Because of this major network change, as well as an impending rollout of VoIP and the need to support new network-first facility safety devices, Loyola soon realized the mentality and capabilities of the native monitoring tools they had been using were not going to be enough. Loyola needed to minimize administrative overhead and day-to-day demands of an observability platform, as well as persistence in business continuity and disaster recovery type situations. Visibility was key to Loyola. If some or all of their services were disrupted, they didn’t want to waste precious time trying to bring those back up without any visibility into their environment. Loyola was also looking to the future when it came to its partnership with an observability platform. They were going to need to easily access not only their data but also their account team to make any changes to their evolving and growing landscape. Overall, Loyola needed a partner that would grow with them.

Loyola University of Maryland is a Jesuit Catholic university located in Baltimore, Maryland. It is home to 5,500 students across the main campus and three remote campuses. The Technology Services Department is the centralized provider of technology to the entire Loyola community, supporting applications, storage, security, connectivity, and all devices. The university has undergone a radical redeployment of its network, migrating from a simple hub-and-spoke topology to a flexible collection of virtual networks operating independently of each other to serve different constituents and functions. This major network change, along with an impending rollout of VoIP and the need to support new network-first facility safety devices, has led Loyola to search for an observability platform that can minimize administrative overhead and provide visibility into their environment.