European Bank Selects NiCE VMware vSphere Monitoring
The Customer
A globally operating European bank with a large, distributed IT infrastructure operates around 3,500 virtual servers based on VMware vSphere. These virtual machines form the foundation for numerous business-critical applications, including systems used by the legal department to process documents daily.
If a virtual machine or the underlying hypervisor fails, affected employees can immediately lose access to these systems. Ensuring the continuous availability of the VMware environment is therefore essential to the bank’s daily operations.
Voice of the Customer
“The response time is outstanding. We experience consistent commitment — NiCE helped us with every request. We also greatly appreciate the personal on-site visits.
What impressed us just as much was the professional software development and deep VMware expertise of our partner, who always considers monitoring in a broader context.”
Starting Situation
The bank was already using SCOM 2025 with a wide range of Management Packs to monitor a mixed Windows/Linux environment. In parallel, Icinga2 was used as an additional monitoring and ticketing system.
Hyperscaler environments such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud played no role in this setup. The infrastructure is fully on-premises and operated as a sovereign environment.
The customer relies on VMware vSphere as its hypervisor platform. Until now, monitoring of the virtualization environment had been handled by a Veeam solution.
Why the Bank Acted Now
The trigger was a change to Veeam’s licensing and contract terms. This was compounded by growing frustration with long product update cycles and a desire to reduce costs.
The bank therefore actively looked for an alternative that could replace its existing virtualization monitoring while continuing to meet its operational requirements.
Why NiCE
The bank chose NiCE because the solution could be implemented quickly and cost-effectively. Equally important was direct access to German- and English-speaking experts.
Personal contact and direct accessibility played an important role, as did the trust built through existing customer references. Rather than opting for a single-purpose solution, the bank valued one trusted point of contact with broad, deep expertise.
Project Timeline
The Proof of Concept ran for six months. The deliberately thorough approach was intended to establish a solid foundation for the bank’s long-term monitoring strategy.
The main focus areas were:
- Replacing the existing Veeam solution
- Building full-featured VMware monitoring
- Fast, direct responses to change requests, including expert-level support when required
The implementation had to comply with the bank’s strict internal security processes, which increased the implementation effort. This included additional hardware requirements and setting up supplementary server infrastructure.
On the customer side, the Chief Virtualization Manager and Chief Monitoring Manager managed the project. The VMware team in particular benefited from the implementation.
The key success criterion for the PoC was hypervisor monitoring that ensures virtual machine availability at least as reliably as the previous Veeam solution.
Technical Benefits
- Significantly reduced effort for manual troubleshooting
- Elimination of manual event correlation
- Faster error detection
- Rapid implementation of new requirements
- Short release cycles to keep monitoring up to date
- Precise alerting combined with mature, continuously updated Product Knowledge providing best-practice guidance for specific use cases
Result
With the NiCE Management Packs, the bank achieved around 90% of the functionality previously provided by Veeam — at significantly lower cost. At the same time, it gained new capabilities, including integrated security checks that go beyond the previous feature set.
The solution went live after six months.
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