Reducing False Positives A Case Study

Overview
A world leader in sustainable technology solutions approached Prosperon to optimise their SolarWinds environment and align IT monitoring more closely with business priorities. The goal was to reduce alert noise, improve visibility, and provide actionable insights for better decision-making.

The Challenge
The organisation faced several IT monitoring challenges:

• Overwhelming volumes of alerts, including duplicates and inconsistent notifications.
• Limited visibility into server changes, databases, and storage infrastructure.
• Previous monitoring initiatives had progressed slowly, without strong business alignment.
• IT monitoring was not fully integrated with team responsibilities or business services.

Our Approach
Prosperon implemented a comprehensive optimisation programme, covering key areas:

• Server Configuration Monitoring: Standardised monitoring profiles across the server estate and built custom profiles for critical applications, supported by intuitive dashboards.
• Alerting Optimisation: Reduced thousands of unnecessary alerts, tuned thresholds, and created team-specific notifications integrated with IT service management tools.
• Trend Analysis & Forecasting: Developed dashboards for CPU, memory, storage, and bandwidth trends, plus virtual machine sprawl analysis.
• Database Monitoring: Upgraded performance monitoring tools, onboarded clusters, and implemented dashboards for performance, backups, and integrity checks.
• CMDB Integration: Automated mapping of business applications to monitoring dashboards for real-time insights.
• User Device Tracking: Cleaned device inventories, implemented whitelisting, and added dashboards for port utilisation and rogue device detection.
• Network & Storage Monitoring: Delivered site-level network maps and storage alerts, fully integrated with management tools.
• Dashboards & Reporting: Consolidated reporting across infrastructure, cloud, databases, and virtual environments, with team-specific filters for actionable insights.

The Results

• Reduced False Positive Rates of over 95%: Thousands of alerts eliminated, improving relevance and focus.
• Faster Incident Response: Team-specific alerts and ITSM integration enabled quicker resolution.
• Enhanced Visibility: Real-time insights across servers, applications, and storage.
• Proactive Capacity Planning: Forecasting dashboards support strategic decision-making.
• Aligned Monitoring: IT monitoring now fully supports business services and team responsibilities.

Conclusion
By partnering with Prosperon, this organisation transformed their SolarWinds monitoring from a reactive system into a proactive, business-aligned solution—streamlining operations, reducing noise, and enabling smarter IT management.