CSAM Health Keeps Critical Systems Healthy Using WhatsUp® Gold

Nordic eHealth Solutions Provider Ensures Hyper-Available Systems for Critical Services such as the Norwegian Emergency Services

CSAM Health is a leading niche player in the eHealth solutions and services market with ten offices in five countries. Headquartered in Oslo, Norway, CSAM supplies the likes of the Danish Central Archives for Nationwide Clinical Patient Data, the Zealand Region of
Denmark and Stockholm City Council with best-of-class critical healthcare systems and outstanding human support.

The Challenge

Joakim Olsson, a Technical Specialist for infrastructure at CSAM Health said, “we currently have around 150 members of staff and offer solutions for blood management, oncology medication, non-radiology medical imaging, maternity, emergency services, ambulance management and more.” CSAM maintain big data patient systems and radiology image sharing for a number of the customers, which must be available to hospitals and healthcare providers at any time of the day or night. Due to their nature, CSAM Health solutions are of critical importance and as a result must maintain high levels of availability of more than 99.8%.

“To be able to keep to our strict SLAs and provide a best-of- class service to our customers, we need to measure key indicators of health in our infrastructure and applications consistently,” said Olsson. On top of the usual server resource monitoring such as disk space warnings, CSAM health generates over one thousand SNMP queries every minute to ensure its application queues are optimal.
“We have been using Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold for a number of years and have a lot of experience with the solution. We found that the 2016 edition lacked the speed and responsiveness we required, and that was being demanded by our customers,” said Olsson.

The Solution

CSAM Health were provided a trial version of the newer 2018 edition of WhatsUp Gold so that they could compare the difference in responsiveness between the two editions; and explore the enhanced interface. It was critical to CSAM Health that they would inherit a better system and not be left without any features they were reliant on.

Northern European partner of the year, Advanced Cyber Solutions worked closely with CSAM Health on the comparison, running a number of sessions to help to re-create customer-focused dashboards and reports from the previous edition. Something which CSAM health displays on large screens in their offices, so that engineers and technical support agents can get a quick-glance update.

“CSAM Health and Joakim have extensive experience with using WhatsUp Gold and knew what they wanted. We worked with them to create a comparable solution to their previous installation; and then worked through some of the enhancements and features which interest them,” explained Chris Payne, Managing Director for Advanced Cyber Solutions.

“I consider myself a WhatsUp Gold veteran with over ten years of experience,” said Olsson, “but being able to talk about old and new features with someone like Chris has been very rewarding.”

After a period of migration, CSAM Health and Joakim were able to recreate the customer dashboards and reports they were used to using, albeit with a new, modern and cleaner interface as part of the 2018 edition. In particular, CSAM Health continued to measure the application queues which are critical to its service offering.

With strict SLAs and the added pressure of the criticality of the service they provide to healthcare services, CSAM Health rests in the knowledge that its best-in-class innovative technology is being monitored by a best-of-breed network monitoring and incident response solution. “We have always been very happy with the Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold solution and are really pleased to see Ipswitch is adding new features and enhancements all the time,” reported Olsson. “Like with any new version of software, we had a lot of questions and so far, both Ipswitch and Advanced Cyber Solutions have been very helpful.”