Saga benefits from real-time visibility, reporting and decision making

Saga, part of the Acromas Group of companies, is the leading provider of holidays and services for people over 50 in the UK. The company is focused on understanding and responding to the changing demands of its customers, who form the fastest growing demographic group in the UK - one that is forecast to increase to 25m by 2015. A fundamental element of this customer engagement is the Saga website which enables Saga to readily communicate with its customers and align dynamic content to their needs.

Monday, 15th April 2013 Posted 11 years ago in by Phil Alsop

The Challenge
Given the strategic importance of its web presence, Saga required the ability to create custom dashboards that would enable a more transparent and proactive approach to managing its environment. In addition, Saga had a requirement to show visibility of the web infrastructure platform internally, both from an active management perspective and a reporting module.

Saga had the option to purchase an internal monitoring system or use Max3000 which is offered by ControlCircle as part of its management services. Having partnered with ControlCircle for a number of years, and satisfied in its comprehensive approach to delivering managed IT services, Saga decided that leveraging the range of capabilities Max3000 offered would be optimal for their business.

The Solution
The Saga website is one of the top sites used by the over 50s, making it imperative that it is always available. “ControlCircle ensures that our website is both performing and available,” commented Phil Buley, Director of IT Operations at Saga.

Max3000 provides detailed information enabling the business to make informed decisions and produce reports customised to meet the needs of various technical and business-oriented stakeholders. The comprehensive and fully integrated monitoring platform and portal allows Saga to monitor and report on its key performance drivers in a more complete manner, enabling faster decision-making across teams.

Key areas of visibility for Saga include CPU, memory and utilisation that can be monitored in real-time, allowing proactive corrective action to be taken on incidents before they impact the user experience.

In addition, Max3000 enables weekly reports to be issued to development and IT management, driving greater transparency across the IT estate and a collaborative team effort.

The Benefits
Saga now has a full view of its entire web infrastructure platform, and with this visibility, the business is driving improved performance and communication within Saga.

This increased visibility has also narrowed the areas of operational concern, which in Saga’s case, has meant more time being allocated on identifying potential web performance improvements and focusing on future campaigns and differentiators Saga can deliver to its customers.
Issues can now be stopped before they occur and reports can be updated in real-time - the benefits of which are felt cross business as opposed to the department. This was demonstrated when Saga Travel fixed a memory problem after a weekly report identified a problem on a server.
Carmen Carey, ControlCircle CEO said, “We are pleased to see Saga deriving such measurable value from Max3000. The Saga team’s experience with Max3000 exemplifies ControlCircle’s overarching objective of delivering complete transparency of a customer’s IT infrastructure and business critical services ensuring that stakeholders have the visibility they require.”

Buley, comments, “ControlCircle understands what underpins our business and the relationships cultivated with both our account manager and TSM (Technical Services Manager) is further proof that we made the right decision to partner with ControlCircle.”

“The introduction of Max3000 has given us a clearer insight into how we can proactively stop incidents in their tracks. It’s an invaluable tool that we couldn’t be without,” concluded Buley.