EMC Uses Twilio SMS For IT Alerts, VM Monitoring and Builds An Internal API

EMC Uses Twilio SMS For IT Alerts, VM Monitoring and Builds An Internal API

What if someone gave you back all the time you’ve spent writing unnecessary emails? How much time would you get back? How much would you get done in that time? EMC asking themselves these questions after sending 1.2 million IT alert emails to their 68,000 employees in one month. The project’s success has lead them to develop the same monitoring service for their own 14,000 virtual machines that power many Fortune 500 companies.

EMC Corporation, an industry leader in cloud computing, data storage, and data virtualization, wanted to find a less labor intensive and more immediate way to alert their employees of IT system updates. Traditionally, if a service was down, they’d draft an email, proof it, get several stakeholders to sign off on it, and then finally send it. By that time, service had been restored, making that email about downtime, largely irrelevant. To save themselves time and resources, EMC chose Twilio SMS to power their IT alerts. But they didn’t stop there. They built an internal API so any one of EMC’s 68,000 employees can leverage the Twilio API.

Picking The Right Medium:EMC Chooses SMS Over Email For IT Outage Alerts

Thousands of EMC employees rely on a critical set of IT tools to do their jobs at EMC HQ and all around the world. If one of those tools, like email or VPN, goes down, employees need to know immediately. Traditionally, EMC used email to update their team about IT changes. But, the messages weren’t getting to employees fast enough. “A lot of times the users would hear the outage through other employees before they got the email,” says Tameem Hourani, Global NOC/SOC Manager at EMC.

Tameem recognized the problem and saw SMS as the answer to his email woes. He just had to figure how to build an SMS platform that could scale to EMC’s needs.

Tameem looked at on-premise SMS solutions, and other SMS vendors. Both options were too expensive and too brittle. EMC has 68,000 people that rely on IT services. Their needs are incredibly diverse and rapidly changing. Using an inflexible on-premise vendor, there’s was no way that Tameem could meet all their needs. He started looking for SaaS solutions that could provide him with the leeway he needed to build a SMS solution tailored for EMC, and quickly found Twilio.

Building An Internal API For The EMC Team To Send Texts

The EMC IT team quickly built their own internal API that integrates with Twilio, empowering all employees to send texts and monitor any IT services they want to. Now, all EMC can go to a IT services dashboard and pick what tools they want to monitor. In the unlikely event that service goes down, they’ll get a text immediately.

The EMC team also built an SMS monitoring service for their sales architects and developers to monitor their virtual machines on the road. If their virtual machine stops responding to pings, they’ll get a text alert. EMC actually built the same SMS monitoring service for their own 14,000 virtual machines that power many Fortune 500 companies.

From SMS IT Alerts, To Internal APIs, to VM Monitoring: EMC Rolls Out Twilio SMS-Powered Solutions

Six months into using Twilio, Tameem predicts their monthly outbound SMS volume will hit 900,000. And the EMC employees are happy about that. Tameem received “tons” of positive emails immediately after they announced their new SMS monitoring services. It’s clear to Tameem that they’re not going back to an email based alert system.

“The goal for us was to get off of email and on to Twilio. The more users that get on Twilio, the better it is for us because it’s less emails that we have to put together. The Twilio infrastructure is all automated so we won’t have to deal with any of the manual alerts, or sending anything manually. It just gets generated as soon as our monitoring tool detects any issue.”

As EMC scales with Twilio, they’re able to segment which departments are using Twilio through their internal API. This not only helps EMC’s finance department by taking segmentation work off their plate, it helps IT launch a flywheel service. When EMC’s employees use Twilio, they’re charged for each message they send. Now Tameem and his team can prove the worth of the tools they’re providing. Best of all, Tameem hasn’t even had to contact support.

“Our rep asked me the other day if we’d been using Twilio Support. Funny enough, we haven’t made a single call yet because the documentation’s been great.”