Case Study: Purdue University achieves unified hybrid-cloud IT monitoring and improved application performance with Microsoft Azure

Leading university transforms IT management with holistic monitoring and reporting solution

Purdue University’s IT Infrastructure Services (ITIS) faced a common higher-education challenge: a large, complex environment (thousands of Windows and Linux servers, virtualized hosts, databases and specialized research systems) managed by siloed teams using disparate monitoring tools. The lack of correlated data made cross-platform reporting, capacity planning and fault ownership difficult, so ITIS needed “one tool to rule them all” to provide a holistic view across more than 7,000 servers on a limited budget and timeline.

ITIS implemented Microsoft System Center Operations Manager together with Operations Management Suite as a hybrid‑cloud monitoring and analytics platform, initially deploying management packs on 800 Windows and 500 Linux servers and adopting log analytics, Docker support and dashboards. Using synthetic transactions (for example on Blackboard Learn), centralized dashboards and network/log analytics, the university improved resource allocation, application performance and proactive alerting, gained end‑to‑end service‑level visibility, and positioned itself to extend monitoring to research clusters and user-facing health portals.

Purdue University

Dan Schumacher

Interim Executive Director, IT Infrastructure Services