Southeast Networks deployed fivenines on 90+ servers in 40 minutes
How a US-based MSP, ISP, and VoIP provider unified monitoring across servers, voice systems, and ISP backbone with FiveNines.
The context
Southeast Networks is a US-based MSP, ISP, and VoIP provider. The team runs a mixed production fleet hosting PBX systems and websites for its clients, built on KVM virtualization with its own ISP backbone equipment. Monitoring was fragmented across three native tools, one for the virtualization layer, one for the voice systems, and one for the network. None of them gave a unified picture.
The challenge
The native monitoring offered limited visibility into VMs, and the voice platform added its own blind spots. When VoIP incidents hit, root cause analysis was painful, the team often couldn't tell whether the problem was the VM, the host, the network, or the PBX itself. Daniel evaluated Zabbix and CheckMK but came to the same conclusion on both: powerful, but built for teams with someone running them full-time. As Daniel puts it, he's also cautious by default about installing unknown agents on production servers.
The solution
Daniel tested fivenines in a lab environment first. The result was immediate: simple deployment, fast configuration, straightforward alerting. He then rolled it out across the production fleet: account created in 5 minutes, fivenines deployed on 90+ instances in 40 minutes.
The results
- 5 min to create the account, 40 min to deploy across 90+ production instances
- 300+ instances now supervised on fivenines, including SBC infrastructure
- Significantly lower cost than the cloud offerings of CheckMK and Zabbix
- Faster root cause detection during the last major outage: a core router was dropping traffic intermittently, the voice platform still showed systems online, but fivenines agents flapping up and down pointed straight to the actual cause
- fivenines now integrated into the onboarding and sales process with new customers
Zabbix and CheckMK are powerful, but they're built for teams with someone running them full-time. fivenines was up on 90+ of our servers in 40 minutes, and during our last major outage it was the only platform that actually pointed us to the root cause.
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