Challenge

UNESP (Cambridge Estadual Paulista) has 34 units spread over 24 cities in the State of São Paulo, Brazil. It has 3,000 teachers and 6,000 administrative employees who perform tasks supported by academic applications, purchasing systems, payroll, etc. The mission of these professionals is to support the learning processes of more than 50 thousand undergraduate and graduate students. The digital basis of these processes are 80 platforms developed internally and running in the institution’s local data centers. 4 databases are the repositories of these applications.

Unesp immense and distributed layer of applications is critical to the functioning of the institution, but there is one platform that acts as a showcase for users: the enrollment system. The semester student enrollment period is a peak period when 5,000 new students and 30,000 former students must simultaneously register at the institution.

 

Solution

UNESP is using Datadog’s security features to track vulnerabilities and monitor whether fixes have been made effectively. The journey we made with Delfia and the Datadog tool within UNESP in Delfia we are professionals in the implementation of the DataDog tool, together with Unesp we worked side by side to configure hundreds of alerts and dozens of panels.

Delfia invested in a different contract model, as a Delfia MSPV (Managed Service Provider) offering. This is a different type of licensing than the traditional one: Unesp pays per license consumption, with the possibility that over time, it can change the Datadog resource that the university needs to overcome its management challenges, this alternative made it possible to contract the Datadog solution for the observability challenge.

“The platform documents this process by keeping everything recorded in a database, additionally I was able to check the posture of users, identifying, for example, if someone tried to perform operations on the database outside the appropriate profile, this sheds light on variations that are still at an early stage, giving us time to act.” Details Carlos Coletti, IT infrastructure coordinator at Fundunesp.

“Datadog is also used to analyze the network and telecommunications links we use.”

The university also has dozens of Datadog dashboards and a macro dashboard that serves as an overview.

“The main dashboard focuses on the data most relevant to our operation, while the peripheral dashboards are used to go into detail.” Explains the IT coordinator.

 

Results

The sum of the technology together with the services managed by Delfia and the MSP offer implemented by Delfia is helping UNESP to gain predictability and visibility over its mission-critical applications and its infrastructure network. The arrival of Datadog contributed to UNESP’s applications maintaining an availability of 99.7% throughout the year.

Another great benefit was the time optimization of the IT and security team, which had more autonomy and freedom to think about innovations. The sum of Datadog’s technology tool, Delfia’s managed services and MSP’s offering is helping UNESP gain predictability and visibility over its mission-critical applications and network infrastructure.