Josefs-Gesellschaft gAG

Image caption: Josefs-Gesellschaft gAG/David Ertl

About

The Josefs-Gesellschaft gAG (JG Group) is one of Germany’s largest Catholic social enterprises, employing over 10,000 people across 38 affiliated companies nationwide. Its institutions include facilities for people with disabilities, hospitals and senior centers. At the heart of its mission is working with and for people - providing the support, care and assistance needed to enable a self-determined, healthy and active life.

Challenge

To ensure the secure operation of its high-performance IT infrastructure, the JG Group needed a tool that was not only powerful but also intuitive to use. In case of issues, analyses had to be immediately consumable, with data offering deep and complex insights. A key goal was to reduce the existing MTTR (Mean Time To Repair).

Another requirement was the automatic identification and evaluation of dependencies and interactions between systems - a crucial capability in complex environments to enable fast and efficient responses in critical situations.

Performance alone was not the deciding factor in selecting the right software. The customer also emphasized the need for transparent monitoring of the entire system landscape, including capacities, provisioning, system limits, transmission and configuration. The focus was on detecting and reporting abnormal system statuses through automated and custom analyses.

Solution

The JG Group chose BVQ° as its central monitoring and analysis tool for its existing IT infrastructure. BVQ° provides in-depth monitoring of IBM SVC and FS7200 storage systems, Brocade SAN switches and the VMware vSphere environment, along with numerous predefined analysis capabilities. A key feature implemented was the BVQ° Health Map, offering a visual representation of the current system status across all infrastructure components. This map was customized to clearly display critical dependencies between storage, SAN and hypervisors.

To enable proactive error detection, automated alerts were configured to respond to defined thresholds for latency, throughput, IOPS and capacity utilization, as well as to monitor best-practice configurations. BVQ°’s analysis functions are especially valuable for root cause analysis, allowing bottlenecks and misconfigurations to be quickly identified through deep system-wide correlation.

Additionally, BVQ° provides expert-defined dashboards (e.g., Grafana) to visualize historical trends and real-time data in a unified interface. The combination of technical depth, intuitive usability, expert knowledge and high adaptability makes BVQ° a vital part of the JG Group’s daily IT operations.

A Long-Term Partnership

BVQ° has been a central component of the JG Group’s daily IT routine for over ten years. “BVQ° is how I start my day. Before logging into vCenter, I check the system health map. If virtualization, storage, and SAN are all green, my world is in order,” says Achim Kaufmann, Senior System Engineer at the JG Group. “If the system status is orange, I immediately check what’s causing the issue. If it’s red, I switch to the Grafana dashboard, analyze curves and trends and usually find the problem quickly.”

Beyond usability, BVQ° impresses with deep technical insights and comprehensive expert knowledge across all infrastructure areas. Since its implementation, the JG Group has benefited across the board: systems run stably, resources are optimally utilized and costs are reduced. BVQ° also provides planning security for future investments, supported by automated reporting as a decision-making foundation - forming the basis of a trusted and continuously evolving partnership.

“Next, we’re planning to integrate LAN monitoring into BVQ°. This will give us a seamless view of our entire environment, ensuring even greater security and efficiency in our daily operations,” adds Kaufmann.