MSP & Telecom Operator CELESTE Relies on Centreon for unified IT Monitoring and Data-Driven Client Insights

The project in a nutshell

CELESTE’s business objective: Guarantee telecom infrastructure and data centers availability across 16,000 client sites

• Ensure constant service availability to create value for clients.
• Provide clients with a single point of contact and interface for all IT services (hosting, cloud, telecom, etc.).
• Enable client reporting on service performance with full transparency and confidence.

The MSP’s ITOM objectives: Monitor all the company’s IT from a single monitoring platform

• Monitor 100% of client links to guarantee IT service availability and quality.
• Centralize monitoring for all the company’s MSP and telecom infrastructure across the 8 subsidiaries.
• Extend the scope of monitoring to include corporate IT infrastructure, optimizing systems in the 8 subsidiaries.
• Build a new IT monitoring architecture integrating the entire IT system within a single IT monitoring platform.

The solution: Centreon MSP Edition. Main benefits

• More performance and reliability in IT monitoring
• A global and centralized vision over the health of the entire IT system
• Improved client support thanks to data-driven advice

The project in a few figures

• 30,000 hosts capability, managing 15,000 hosts on average
• 8 subsidiaries
• 16,000 customer sites
• 2 main business lines: MSP and telecom operator

Summary

A French expert in telecom, cloud, data hosting, and cybersecurity solutions, CELESTE provides a modular, integrated package supporting organizations in the management of issues relating to IT infrastructure. Facing rapid business growth, the MSP and telecom operator was looking to diversify business and meet emerging communications and data availability challenges.

As a response, CELESTE’s IT department decided to overhaul the IT monitoring architecture so all metrics across its 8 entities and the managed 16,000 customer sites in France could be monitored using a single platform. Centreon was at the heart of this initiative, enabling CELESTE to conciliate the specificities of two distinct business lines and those of its eight subsidiaries. The Centreon solution’s ergonomics and performance ultimately helped reinforce quality and trust for CELESTE’s client relationships.

Present in France and Switzerland, CELESTE has grown its client base through business line diversification, adding security and cybersecurity services, as well as cloud hosting and managed services. « Quality of service and innovation have been core values for CELESTE from the start,” explains Philippe Jung, CELESTE’s CIO. “We can tailor services to each client because we control the value chain from end to end. We want organizations to benefit from a one-stop-shop for all infrastructure-related IT services, which is why we provide dedicated teams for each of our business lines, telecom operator and data hosting.”

Whether SMEs, major accounts, healthcare organizations, emergency service centers, and hotel or retail chains, CELESTE’s clients are all too aware that constant IT availability contributes to business continuity and value creation.

The company was already using IT monitoring tools, but with the acquisition of several entities and the ever-increasing demand for IT availability, CELESTE’s IT department was ready for next-level IT monitoring. The team decided to review their IT monitoring architecture so that it could encompass all the company’s IT environments as well as integrate the full scope of IT infrastructure.

Philippe Jung appreciates this was an ambitious objective: “Our goal was to have a single platform spanning several entities and business lines. To achieve this, we needed to evolve the IT monitoring scope to accommodate the company’s vertical and horizontal growth as well as new service proposals geared at clients. So, we optimized the IT system in eight subsidiaries and then merged the monitoring of those IT systems into a single IT monitoring platform. In simple terms, CELESTE’s vision was: One IT monitoring solution working for all our business entities.”

The relationship with Centreon, including both technical and business collaboration, was a key success factor in carrying out this remarkable project.

Philippe Jung enumerates the main resulting benefits: performance gains, improved ergonomics, and, thanks to Centreon’s flexibility, the ability to extend a new, carefully thought-out IT monitoring architecture that’s tailored to CELESTE’s teams. “Our monitoring architecture is much improved, and the new IT monitoring solution is very powerful. We have made significant efficiency gains. Before, we would need up to 30 minutes to get a response on an IT issue—today we work in near real time! Also, Centreon’s MSP Edition helped us grow our capabilities in terms of performance and scalability. While we may use an average of 15,000 hosts, we are scaled to accommodate 30,000 so we can respond swiftly to constantly evolving client IT systems.”

The Centreon platform has become an asset for customer relationship management, as Philippe Jung is pleased to note: “Sharing IT monitoring metrics with clients contributes to building trust relationships. The fact that we have a single source of truth ensures clients get the best data-driven advice and offers, both on the MSP and telecom sides of the business. We truly believe that a loyal client is a client that gets excellent support.”

The full story

CELESTE, a French telecom cloud, data hosting, and cybersecurity solution provider, offers businesses a modular and integrated service package so they can manage all their IT infrastructure needs under one roof. As leverage to support strong growth and business diversification, and to best meet emerging communications and data availability challenges, CELESTE’s IT department redesigned the company’s IT monitoring architecture.

The objective was to centralize, within a single platform, all metrics collected from eight subsidiaries responsible for 16,000 customer sites in France. Centreon was a key enabler for this project, meeting the specific requirements of CELESTE’s two business lines and eight subsidiaries. The solution’s ergonomics and performance contributed to reinforce client relationships, with the added confidence of data-driven insights.

An exhaustive range of business services

Seeing that the emergence of broadband high-speed Internet would usher a new industrial revolution, Nicolas Aubé founded CELESTE in 2001. His goal was to help businesses seize this new technological opportunity with high-end and innovative solutions and he positioned CELESTE as a market reference in that area.

Now counting 700 employees, 13 offices in France and Switzerland, and 122 million euros in revenues, CELESTE is today recognized among France’s top Internet and secure cloud hosting providers. What sets CELESTE apart from other providers? The company developed its own fiber-optic network spanning 10,000 kilometers—having understood early on the significant need for superior telecommunications and hosting services. CELESTE is also ISO 27001 and HDS-certified.

Doing business both in France and in Switzerland, CELESTE generated growth through building a diversified service portfolio, including security and cybersecurity as well as cloud hosting and managed services. “Quality of service and innovation have been core values for CELESTE from day one,” explains Philippe Jung, CELESTE’S CIO.

The challenge: 2 business lines, 8 subsidiaries, 16,000 customer sites, 1 IT monitoring platform

IT is changing fast, teleworking is now widespread, remote access and security needs are also evolving. For CELESTE, this brings the need to augment capabilities so an increasingly large and heterogeneous IT environment can be seamlessly monitored, and so the need to integrate clients’ IT environments as well as CELESTE’s internal environment into one monitoring platform, as Philippe Jung points out:

CELESTE’s clients are looking for global, turnkey, modular and integrated services that guarantee IT service quality, unfailing support, and security, especially as some of them operate worldwide. Whether SMEs, major accounts or healthcare organizations, emergency service centers, hotel or retail chains, CELESTE’s clients are all too aware of the role that constant IT availability plays in business continuity and value creation.

The company was already using IT monitoring tools, but with the acquisition of several entities and the ever-increasing demand for IT availability, CELESTE’s IT department was ready for next level IT monitoring. They decided to review their IT monitoring architecture so that it could encompass all the company’s environments as well as integrate the full scope of IT infrastructure. Philippe Jung appreciates this was an ambitious objective:

IT monitoring objective: find a solution fitting the projected architecture and the business lines’ specific needs

CELESTE entities were using four different IT monitoring tools. In 2019, Philippe Jung’s team started on their search for an all-encompassing IT monitoring solution, so that all IT monitoring could happen within a single, centralized platform, including hybrid environments, and above all, seamlessly adapt to CELESTE’s unique requirements. “We already liked Centreon’s philosophy, and we knew communication would be seamless between our team and theirs,” explains Philippe Jung.

The retained option: Deploy a single Centreon infrastructure in which all the metrics will be consolidated to control IT monitoring from a single, unified platform.

The relationship with Centreon, as well as their technical and business partnership were key success factors in accomplishing this ambitious endeavor.

Benefits: IT performance and client confidence

Among the main benefits of the Centreon solution-based IT monitoring project, Philippe notes added performance, ergonomics, and scalability. But more importantly, Centreon enabled the deployment of a new IT monitoring architecture which was carefully designed and better adapted to CELESTE’s teams’ needs.

The Centreon IT monitoring solution’s first task was to provide constant visibility over the health of the IT system, but now it goes beyond that, returning metrics on service quality across the network as well as traffic volume, which are made accessible to clients.

The most remarkable Centreon benefits, from the point of view of CELESTE’s teams, relate to the ergonomics and automation capabilities, for which they have high praise. “In terms of ergonomics, we went from a 2000s feel to a state-of-the-art interface. And then there are the IT monitoring connectors (Plugin Packs) as well as the Auto-Discovery engine which we leverage on the central structure so that IT monitoring deployments are standardized. These core Centreon strengths are what produced results for us.”

The Centreon platform has also become an asset for managing client relationships. Clients may be sensitive to the cost of IT services, but they also look for robust support, which CELESTE is able to provide, thanks in particular to the new IT monitoring platform, as Philippe Jung is pleased to note:

Outlook: towards business-oriented monitoring and green IT

Philippe’s team intends to continue their journey. They’re devising new ways to extend client services. As a start, Philippe plans to interface Centreon with the new ITSM tool to automatically generate tickets. The goal is to make IT monitoring even more proactive by opening tickets in real time in a queue that’s dedicated to ensure contractual commitments are met. Other plans involve making IT monitoring more business aware.

Another project is underway: using IT monitoring data to help measure the company’s IT system’s carbon footprint. This aligns to CELESTE’s sustainability efforts, including two sustainable data centers powered by green electricity and ventilation systems, and a limited energy consumption footprint.