Each day, more than 300,000 customers walk into an Axstores store in Sweden, Finland, or Norway. The group consists of department store chain Åhléns, beauty retailers Kicks and Esthetique, and the home furnishing chain Lagerhaus.
Axstores operates a shared IT services model to gain efficiencies and more effectively integrate acquired companies. As the group grows in size, the Axstores IT team needs to find ways to deliver better services at lower cost.
“One of the goals of our centralized IT model is to give our companies an edge in IT innovation,” says Stefan Pörn, Operations Manager at Axstores. “At the same time, we continually look for ways to do more with less. We must deliver more IT for every dollar spent.
”These goals drove Axstores to replace some custom-developed business systems with new off-the-shelf solutions. During the testing phase of these projects, Axstores found that its legacy server-monitoring infrastructure did not readily accommodate the new systems.
“When architecting our new solutions, we needed to test different assumptions and see how they affected performance,” says Pörn. “SNMP polling monitored the health of the components but not the application in a holistic manner.”