Baltimore County Government is responsible for the safety and services affecting more than 800,000 residents. Their Office of Information Technology maintains a robust network infrastructure consisting of more than 600 servers, 1,500 network devices spanning two data centers and hundreds of municipal buildings.

The Baltimore County network is the lifeblood of its communications and data systems, connecting all software systems that manage the County's business processes and public safety systems in locations including police stations, fire departments, schools, administrative offices and 911 centers. Baltimore County systems operate 24x7x365 to serve the public and the county's 7,000 employees.

Effectiveness of the network literally can save lives, which is a charge that Rob O'Connor and his team take very seriously.

Like other state and local governments over the decade, Baltimore County has seen exponential growth in the network infrastructure they support, as well as staffing budget pressures. They have met both demands by increasing effectiveness through investment in the right technologies.

Baltimore County's earlier network monitoring software was limited to simple up/down statuses with no information about outage causes. Determining causes was akin to 'finding a needle in a haystack' and typically took engineers hours of manual troubleshooting across multiple servers and variables, before problems could be solved.

Baltimore County sought a product that could satisfy their extensive matrix of technical requirements. SolarWinds' Orion Network Performance Monitor was selected after a due diligence analysis of dozens of products. Chief Technology Officer Rob O'Connor and his team recognized the importance of making wise investment of Baltimore County tax dollars and wanted to ensure that the solution was the best at the most reasonable purchase price, and would incur the lowest possible ongoing maintenance costs.

Because the skills necessary for such an implementation are outside the skillsets of most organizations, a decision was made to outsource the implementation to ensure the most effective use of the Baltimore County budget dollars. Outsourcing with experienced vendors has been shown to significantly reduce the total investment required to implement systems...Read on to learn about major benefits and key technical approach.