CGI Brazil achieves high performance with Skylight proactive monitoring

Business issue

With considerable growth in its cloud hosting business, CGI Brazil realized that it needed to automate and scale its network performance monitoring capabilities. Additionally, while confident its network and cloud services were best-in-class, CGI Brazil often received help desk calls related to degraded user experience specific to customer applications. It was critical for CGI Brazil to help their customers find the root cause of issues, even when they often did not originate in the CGI Brazil infrastructure. This would help customers realize that a lower mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) was a business-critical priority for CGI.

By working with their customers to identify and resolve these issues as expediently as possible, CGI Brazil understood they would be perceived by these customers as a “trusted advisor,” which would reduce customer churn due to unnecessary “finger-pointing” performance issues prevalent between CGI and their cloud customers. By offering enhanced network and application monitoring services, CGI Brazil would not only drive higher customer satisfaction (e.g., lower operating costs) and reduce churn, it could result in customers potentially increasing their budgetary spending with CGI.

Solution benefits

CGI Brazil, through Skylight, now has a 360° visibility and performance monitoring solution that:

• Offers proactive performance monitoring of the network, applications, and Web services, measuring critical network and application performance
• Accelerates MTTR with significant ROI savings (i.e. productivity gains for CGI and customers) as well as higher customer satisfaction leading to potentially an increase in customer spend with CGI
• Identifies and pinpoints problem points of origin quickly and easily
• Troubleshoots any bottlenecks or degradations, identifying those issues occurring within the customer cloud environment

Business value and ROI

Since the Skylight solution was deployed, the company has achieved or surpassed its key business objectives.

ROI value: one-stop solution that increases customer satisfaction, achieves high availability, optimizes productivity, and accelerates resolution times

• Real-time, high definition visibility into network and application performance, which drives shorter resolution times (MTTR) optimizes productivity and ensures 24/7/365 availability of business-critical applications
• Fully robust, highly cost-effective performance monitoring solution offers proactive management, ex-post analysis, transactional analysis of file storage and transfer flows, and actionable insights
• Skylight, which was initially used only by the CGI Brazil data center team for the internal network, was then introduced to the network team to replace its existing network analyzers. It also was leveraged to meet the needs of managed cloud hosting clients
• Skylight helped CGI Brazil quickly identify and resolve network performance issues for one energy utility client. CGI Brazil was able to pinpoint that the impact was happening on the delivery of applications specific to a terminal server platform tied to both CGI’s and the customer’s infrastructure

Due to the stellar performance monitoring capabilities offered by Skylight, the solution is now a critical source of data for several of CGI Brazil’s offerings.