“It is a fundamental tool for anyone working with integration platforms.”

Multiple IT Challenges Related to Integrations

Karlstad Municipality has around 70 staff working in the central IT department. The department manages all structural IT requirements for a region covering 96,000+ inhabitants and multiple municipally affiliated organizations.

When it comes to Nodinite and integration platforms, between 3 to 6 people work full-time with integrations (called the ICC). There is some elasticity to this number depending on workload and demand.

One of the ICC’s challenges is to make IT systems come together and work as one. Such as ensuring that all organizations affiliated with Karlstad Municipality have an IT infrastructure capable of coping with current and future challenges.

Another challenge is that as the rate of digitalization is increasing, there is a need to be able to speed up the number of integrations developed per year. Karlstad Municipality has over 100 API’s and integrations that need monitoring at present. This number will increase in the future. The expectation is that the ICC should be able to increase, and deliver, 30 additional integrations each year.

The Importance of Setting Nodinite up Correctly

When using a tool such as Nodinite for monitoring, it is important to install it correctly. One of the issues that affected Karlstad Municipality in the early days were alerts caused by misconfigured settings.

At one point the ICC team received well over 100+ support tickets in a very short time span based on one root cause from a misconfiguration. These issues ate up valuable resources and time. Fortunately, the root cause was found and promptly fixed.

This issue emphasizes why Nodinite recommends that customers use certified partners to help with the setup and the benefits of following established best practices.

Swedish Municipalities have Fiduciary Obligations

Another challenge for Karlstad Municipality is fiduciary obligations. There are specific rules and regulations that the municipality must follow to ensure the safety and security of citizens data and laws governing IT processes and procedures.

An example of this is storing sensitive data. This poses a challenge for all Swedish municipalities that favor cloud-based products. BizTalk is on-premises but as an integration platform it will no longer be supported by Microsoft after the year 2030.

Karlstad Plans to Gradually Expand the use of Nodinite

Today it is only the ICC and the first line of support that are actively using Nodinite. There is a goal to expand the number of users. The aim is for other internal departments and teams to be capable of using Nodinite to solve basic issues. Such as being able to investigate basic alerts and re-send messages.

The overall impression of Nodinite at the ICC is that the sum is greater than the parts. That the tool can be applied in many more areas than it is being used today. It is becoming increasingly important to try to utilize Nodinite to the full extent.

Today the ICC team working with integrations spends roughly 15-20% on trouble tickets or support tickets. This is a relatively manageable figure.

The ICC unit at Karlstad Municipality does not have any solid statistics to back this up but a rough estimate is that Nodinite has helped increase efficiency of time spent on incident management by up to 75%. IT staff can spend more time on development today than they do on incident management. This is a significant change to how it was just six months ago.

Karlstad Municipality uses the repository and monitoring features. They are happy with its performance and have a good relationship with key contacts as well as the Nodinite support team.

Nodinite is considered good value for money and the municipality would gladly recommend it to other public sector organizations.

In the future Karlstad, all Swedish municipalities and public sector enterprises will need to take a holistic approach to IT decision making. The NIS2 directive, initiated by the EU, requires vital public service organizations to strengthen cybersecurity measures. It is likely that municipalities and government agencies will need to take a coordinated approach to IT decision-making.

The need to protect regions and government bodies from cybersecurity threats combined with the requirement to be able to expand IT infrastructure and services, is challenging. Yet this is where Nodinite is an asset. Not only can it help increase platform integration security. It can also provide more advanced monitoring and logging capabilities.

Nodinite is today helping Karlstad Municipality solve more complex problems. For instance, lost messages on BizTalk can be found and remedied faster. The municipality has realized that as integrations become more complex, that Nodinite is a key asset. Since it can quickly pinpoint where and why and integration has failed.

The non-events functionality is particularly appreciated by the ICC team. If something should have happened, such as a message being sent, but it didn’t, then Nodinite will alert stakeholders that there is an issue. Few competing tools have anything as consistent and easy to use as Nodinite’s non-events feature.

Another of the big advantages for Karlstad Municipality with Nodinite is that it is a more “generic” tool compared to other tools that just work on one integration platform. In this instance generic is a positive description because customers are not locked into using it with just one integration platform technology.

Because Nodinite works with the main integration platform brands on the market. If Karlstad Municipality ever decides to switch to another integration platform in the future, they can keep Nodinite and use it in the same capacity as before.

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