The challenge: Structuring monitoring for the whole business

The local council had SolarWinds in place, but only within the network team (level 3 maturity). The rest of the business, including infrastructure and application teams, operated in silos, with no shared visibility or consistent alerts (level 1 maturity).

The challenge wasn’t pulling in more data; it was structuring that data in a way that could scale across teams and systems, and deliver on business use cases.

It’s easy to adopt a “what do we need right now?” mindset and label devices for immediate needs, without considering how those labels will support grouping, alerting, or dashboarding over time. This leads to a fragmented platform that’s hard to scale as more teams and systems come online.

What was needed wasn’t just broader monitoring, it was a structured data model aligned to how the business operates, enabling priority-based alerting, team-specific views, and organisation-wide reporting.

The solution: Business-driven monitoring architecture

We worked across teams to extend monitoring beyond the network layer to include servers, databases, and applications. We began with a full audit of the existing environment, keeping what worked, filling the gaps, and bringing everything under a unified data model.

This included:

• Defining key business services (e.g. ERP, workforce management, utilities)

• Creating alert tiers, so Priority 1 issues trigger alerts, while lower-tier issues show on dashboards

• Mapping dependencies to monitor functional health, not just availability

• Using custom properties and dynamic groups to structure by priority, team, and location

• Building operational and executive dashboards designed for 3-click root cause analysis

One example of a final result is the monitoring of their ERP system, Pathway. We created a clean 7-tile summary showing the health of each major component (shown below). Clicking into any tile, like Pathway Presentation Servers, opens an application map with status overlays (also shown below). Each device can be explored further, with most issues diagnosable within three clicks.

7-tile status summary of their Pathway ERP application

Application map shown when clicking Presentation Servers above

Sample images used for privacy reasons.

The final outcomes

This project:

• Enabled full-stack visibility across network, servers, databases, applications, and ERP

• Unified all teams under one platform with no more silos

• Gave technical teams and execs their own role-specific dashboards

• Structured alerting by priority, so teams act on what matters

• Sped up troubleshooting, with issues diagnosable within three clicks

• Improved business continuity for systems tied to 70%+ of council revenue

The key insight

What’s often missed isn’t the ability to collect data, it’s the business logic behind how to group, prioritise, and display it. Without structure, alerts overwhelm, dashboards lose clarity, and teams stay reactive.