About CommonSpirit Health
Industry
- Healthcare
Size
- 155,000 employees
- $37 billion annual revenue
CommonSpirit Health is one of the nation’s largest nonprofit Catholic health systems, dedicated to advancing health for all people. With a commitment to serving diverse communities, CommonSpirit operates more than 2,300 care sites and 137 hospitals across 24 states, delivering comprehensive care through a diverse team of over 155,000 employees, including 45,000 nurses and 25,000 physicians and advanced practice providers. The organization contributes more than $4 billion annually in charity care, community benefits, and unreimbursed government programs, striving to create a more just, equitable, and innovative healthcare delivery system.
The Challenge: Complex, Costly, and Outdated Network Monitoring
CommonSpirit Health’s network operations teams faced growing challenges in managing their rapidly growing infrastructure. The organization relied on a multi-tier monitoring system from CA Technologies, which was complicated to manage and difficult to update.
Because of the CA system, the team faced a number of challenges, including spending significant resources troubleshooting the network and growing concerns from running outdated software versions.
The CommonSpirit team needed a more elegant, cost-effective solution that could scale with their growing network, simplify operations, and provide granular visibility into network performance.
The Goal: Simplify, Secure, and Scale Network Monitoring
Their vision was clear: implement a scalable, cost-effective, and highly granular network monitoring solution to drive efficiency and improve data-driven decision-making.
The CommonSpirit Health network team set out to find a solution that could:
- Update quickly and securely without incurring additional security risks.
- Eliminate reliance on outdated, multi-tiered architectures for easier management.
- Gain better visibility into network capacity trends to secure funding for future expansion.
- Minimize operational overhead by deploying a solution that was intuitive and easy to maintain.
- Strengthen cybersecurity posture with a solution that incorporated OS-level security updates.
The Choice: AKIPS Delivers Unmatched Visibility & Scalability
After merging with another healthcare system in 2019, CommonSpirit immediately deployed AKIPS across the newly acquired infrastructure. The transition from SolarWinds to AKIPS was nearly frictionless, as engineers quickly saw the benefits in visibility and ease of use.
CommonSpirit Health selected AKIPS as its network monitoring solution because it provided:
- Granular, real-time monitoring – 1-minute polling with 3 year data retention for faster troubleshooting, deeper insights, and better capacity planning.
- Simplified upgrades – Easy deployment of new versions without complex multi-tier configurations.
- Security-first approach – Regular pushes of OS-level security updates, ensuring compliance.
- Seamless adoption – Quick deployment across all three networks after CommonSpirit’s 2019 merger.
- Automated insights – Regex-based filtering and auto-grouping enabled easier troubleshooting and monitoring.
- Extensibility with site scripting – Reliable integration with existing tools and tailored network documentation.
What makes AKIPS special is how easy it is to update and how much depth it provides in network insights. Other tools struggle to handle the 1-minute polling we need, but AKIPS does it seamlessly. We built our entire network monitoring around it.
– Ryan Mahoney, Manager of WAN Engineering, CommonSpirit Health
Outcomes: Proactive Network Management & Strategic Growth
After deploying AKIPS, CommonSpirit Health saw transformational improvements in network management:
• Significant reduction in Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) – engineers could isolate and resolve issues faster.
• Stronger security posture – OS-level updates ensured that the security team had the confidence that the AKIPS was the secure choice.
• Network capacity planning became data-driven – AKIPS enabled the team to prove YoY network growth, securing budget approvals for infrastructure scaling from the company’s leadership team.
• Cross-organizational adoption – Engineers across CommonSpirit’s three healthcare chains standardized on AKIPS, simplifying operations.
• Training became seamless – New engineers could onboard and effectively use AKIPS within 30 minutes.
• Enterprise-wide visibility – AKIPS became the single pane of glass for network performance and troubleshooting.
Additionally, AKIPS proved invaluable during the SolarWinds vulnerability incident. CommonSpirit had just acquired another healthcare network when the vulnerability was disclosed, making AKIPS’ security-first approach a critical differentiator.
I know I can go to AKIPS to get the information I need. It’s the first tool I think of when I need network insights. That says everything.
– Ryan Mahoney, Manager of WAN Engineering, CommonSpirit Health
AKIPS develops the world’s most scalable network and infrastructure monitoring software, delivered as a turn-key software appliance. AKIPS Network Monitoring Software provides unmatched features, scale, and visibility of critical real-time and historical performance metrics and logs—from the heart of the data center all the way to the end user. AKIPS allows network engineers to be proactive instead of firefighting: to detect, analyze, and rectify issues and faults before user complaints, significantly reducing business impact and disruption.
