Agnes Intelligence ensures scalability of its AI platform
Who is Agnes Intelligence?
Agnes Intelligence builds industry-leading artificial intelligence (AI) software tools that enable searching and reviewing massive volumes of data. To provide their customers with a smooth user experience, Agnes Intelligence runs a secure cloud environment and must ensure the highest performance at any time.
At Agnes Intelligence we have to focus on the growth of our software. Checkmk helps us to bring our organization forward.
Agnes Intelligence needed a flexible monitoring tool for its growing IT infrastructure. The IT team chose Checkmk, because it allows them to adjust their monitoring within a few minutes and supports almost any kind of system.
Because the start-up is prospecting with large potential customers, the IT environment has to be scaled for tests and proofs-of-concept, sometimes with assets the IT team had no prior experience before.
The software is mostly used by government institutions, attorneys, and law firms. Due to the secure by design architecture of Checkmk, Agens Intelligence can make sure that their monitoring does not become a security issue for such organizations.
Scaling IT in a fast growing company
Agnes Intelligence provides artificial intelligence (AI) software that allows attorneys, investigators and government institutions to rapidly scan and search millions of documents to find things they simply couldn’t before. The platform supports emails, documents, SMS, PDF, DOC, audio/video files, which users upload to the Agnes Intelligence cloud environment. In return, the software provides unknown-unknowns and insights into large data sets. The technology is sourced from IBM’s Watson tool kit and has gained a lot of attention since its foundation five years ago. It offers a solution to the floods of data that plaintiff’s firms, defense firms, corporate counsel, law firms, judges, and other professionals are facing.
The IT operation has to make sure that the IT environment always runs stable and reaches the highest performance targets at any time. Because the company is growing rapidly, the IT team has to scale the IT environment, while also ensuring a high level of security. The capability to scale within minutes without disruption of the user experience is mission-critical, especially when running tests with new potential customers. The IT team was looking for a highly scalable monitoring tool that provides several features out-of-the-box and that also supports dynamic IT assets. Agnes Intelligence is in an early start-up stage, the personal resources to manage the monitoring are very limited, too.
Checkmk was implemented at a very early stage in 2018, a few months after the company was initially founded. Since then, it has been essential for ensuring the performance of IT.
The challenge
Agnes Intelligence needed a scalable IT monitoring solution that is suitable to monitor their infrastructure. Because their software platform processes large amounts of data, the number of IT assets is growing rapidly. Especially for proofs-of-concept with prospects, the IT team has to scale resources in a very short time. Thus, they needed monitoring that can adjust quickly and with minimal effort.
Looking for a modern open source approach
Because the members of the IT department had experience with Nagios, the IT architects were looking for a modern open-source tool. They chose Checkmk, because it met all expectations. On top of that Checkmk comes with a rich graphical user interface, great metrics and supports distributed monitoring.
After a few test runs with the Checkmk Raw Edition, the IT team agreed to use the Checkmk Enterprise Edition as the main monitoring tool for Agnes Intelligence. Checkmk was implemented at a very early stage in 2018, a few months after the company was initially founded. Since then, it has been essential for ensuring the performance of IT.
Thanks to Checkmk Agnes Intelligence does not need a dedicated monitoring professional. The alerts are precise and reliable, so the IT operation team gets informed, when they have to take action, and otherwise they can focus on other tasks.
The solution
In 2018 Agnes Intelligence implemented the Checkmk Enterprise Edition to monitor its IT infrasctructure. Since then, it has not just been used for monitoring IT assets in operation, but also for testing new infrastructure scenarios. Checkmk became a central tool for planing the IT architecture of the company.
Monitoring the infrastructure of tomorrow
Agnes Intelligence runs two Checkmk instances with around 3,000 services in total. Both instances are deployed as virtual appliances. The IT team mostly relies on the official Checkmk plug-ins, but also has written a few custom checks. A big benefit are the lightweight Checkmk agents that allow very resource-efficient monitoring. The first Checkmk instance monitors the complete IT operations infrastructure. Here, the IT team ensures the performance of Windows and Linux servers, network devices and business applications. The second instance is of special importance for Agnes Intelligence and used for testing and developing their software platform.
Many prospects ask Agnes Intelligence to show their software handling extreme workloads. For these cases, the IT team runs demonstrations and monitors the resource consumption of its software with Checkmk. The monitoring data provides Agnes Intelligence with better insights on how to adjust their infrastructure to meet customer expectations.
At the moment, Agnes Intelligence is still building up its infrastructure and is currently switching to using Kubernetes in production. Already now Checkmk provides many metrics out-of-the-box, but a next step would be to build a full application monitoring. Agnes Intelligence is still in the planning phase but sees some great potential to use a combination of Checkmk and other tools. Checkmk can monitor Kubernetes and also integrates seamlessly with monitoring tools like Prometheus.
Checkmk 2.0 has some great improvements that add a lot of value. I like that Checkmk integrates with so many other tools.
The advantages
Checkmk provides Agnes Intelligence with a scalable monitoring tool that can monitor all their assets. The IT team gains insights thanks to the detailed data and the metrics provided by the monitoring. Because Checkmk is easy to manage, it takes Agnes only minimal efforts to adjust it to its growing infrastructure.