When it’s time for millions of students to apply to community college each year, they use an online gateway for both regular and international admissions. Regardless of which college they apply to, prospective students rely on the system to be available and responsive when they need it—especially during important application deadlines in the spring and fall.   

Ensuring that such critical applications run at peak performance is the job of the Infiniti Consulting Group, a Sacramento, Calif.-based cloud services and IT consulting company. Infiniti serves nearly 100 public-sector clients, including some of the largest state public-sector contracts in the United States, including California Department of Transportation, California Department of Health Care Services, California Department of Technology, California Housing and Finance Authority, and many more.  

Gaining the benefits of cloud computing

One of the nation’s most innovative technology centers for state higher education decided to move its applications and infrastructure to the cloud for greater availability, scalability, and security as well as improved cost efficiencies. This meant converging multiple data centers and applications into a single cloud environment to support one of the largest higher education systems in the world, enrolling nearly four million students each year.

Following a rigorous request-for-proposal process, the client chose Infiniti with Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its cloud services partner. Infiniti is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner and AWS Channel Reseller Partner. It’s also one of Amazon’s largest dedicated public-sector partners in the western United States.

Migrating production to AWS

Infiniti migrated its client’s multiple production environments (from on-premises and hosted environments) to a new AWS cloud architecture and assumed day-to-day operational support responsibilities for the cloud environment and applications. In addition to migration and daily operations, the company’s services also include DevOps, DevSecOps, SysOPs Docker container deployment, online and help desk support, application and infrastructure performance management, cloud strategy, data lake development, disaster recovery, and machine learning and predictive analytics.      

Early in the cloud strategy and migration project, Infiniti evaluated all the leading application and infrastructure monitoring tools and determined that the New Relic platform would provide the greatest visibility and insight needed to maintain the service levels that its client expected. “We needed a monitoring and diagnostic solution to help us deliver the highest levels of service,” says Scott Drossos, president of Infiniti. “After extensive research, we recommended New Relic to our client because it was clearly the most comprehensive, cloud-centric platform available in the market.”  

“After extensive research, we recommended New Relic to our client because it was clearly the most comprehensive, cloud-centric platform available in the market.”

Scott Drossos President of Infiniti Consulting Group

Delivering end-to-end visibility into performance and user experience

Infiniti deployed the New Relic platform across multiple AWS accounts for several different applications. With New Relic deployed in both test and production environments, Infiniti uses the platform to:         

  • Proactively monitor the entire cloud environment, using New Relic Alerts and application thresholds to escalate and address performance problems before they impact users
  • Monitor multiple application suites and multiple time zones using New Relic Synthetics to identify any issues such as network problems that may impact application performance or the user experience
  • Monitor the health of dozens of different websites using New Relic Browser to make sure they are running and accessible to users at all times
  • Provide a holistic view of performance for both Infiniti and its client using a New Relic Insights dashboard that shows key performance indicators (KPIs) in real time

Creating transparency for everyone 

Drossos confirms that New Relic enhances his firm’s ability to deliver and maintain the highest levels of availability and performance for its client’s suite of applications. “New Relic helps us see how an application is performing after every new release or update,” says Drossos. “If there is an issue, New Relic gives us visibility down to the line of problem code so we can fix problems quickly.”    

He also credits the single, shared view of health and operations that New Relic provides with creating transparency that the client very much appreciates. “New Relic provides a rich set of metrics that make performance and user experience transparent for all of the companies we work with,” he says. “The New Relic KPI dashboard is a bridge between our team and our clients.”            

Expanding to other clients

Today, Infiniti is a New Relic Public Sector Consulting Partner with New Relic deployed across several of its clients. “We plan to use New Relic as a standard component of our cloud-hosted service offering to help Infiniti provide its clients with the highest levels of system performances,” says Drossos. “We’re committed to being highly effective in using the New Relic platform to support all of our clients. It’s truly become integral to our business.”

Drossos is enthusiastic about the future of the partnership and the two companies’ ability to help other public-sector organizations be successful. “In the public sector, we’ve only scratched the surface of the need for clients to migrate complex, legacy workloads to AWS and develop new capabilities in the cloud that take advantage of unprecedented scalability, flexibility, security, and cost savings,” he says. “Together, Infiniti and New Relic can help public-sector organizations migrate faster and achieve success in the cloud.”

“We’re committed to highly effective use of the New Relic platform to support our clients. It’s truly become integral to our business.”

Scott Drossos President of Infiniti Consulting Group