The University of Notre Dame Enriches Student Services with IDERA

Overview

The University of Notre Dame is one of the top higher education institutions in the United States. With more than 12,000 students and 5,000 employees, Notre Dame includes the main campus adjacent to South Bend, Indiana and remote campuses in London, Rome, Jerusalem, and Dublin.

Notre Dame’s Office of Information Technologies (OIT) comprises more than 250 employees, approximately one-third of which are developers and database administrators. The team supports more than 2,200 unique user IDs, including many system users who authenticate at the application level, such as students using the print system.

The database services department manages the following database platforms: SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL and PostgreSQL. Regarding SQL Servers specifically, they have 41 instances containing more than 575 databases. The team provides database support for enterprise-class applications such as Ellucian Banner ERP, CRM systems, document management systems and SharePoint, and small, department-level applications, such as classroom equipment control, student printing management and e-discovery, among others.

Challenge

Given its wide variety of servers, databases and applications across multiple datacenters, Notre Dame’s database services department needed to be able to monitor its complex SQL Server infrastructure in a detailed but cost-effective manner. The team also wanted to be proactive in responding to potential database problems such as storage space, memory and slow performance.