For an organisation responsible for keeping the systems of dozens of healthcare and education clients running, blind spots are not an option. Vancis, a cloud provider primarily active in these sectors, had relied on Nagios as its monitoring tool for many years. What once started as a useful extension of a legacy management system had gradually evolved into a complex and unwieldy setup.

 

“Eventually, you end up with a system that no longer fits today’s monitoring requirements,” says Danny Teffer, Senior Project Manager at Vancis. “We did explore whether we could redesign Nagios, but that option was ruled out as well. At that point, we decided as an organisation to move to Checkmk.”

 

The decision was not made lightly. A Vancis committee evaluated multiple vendors, conducted a proof of concept (PoC) with two customers, and concluded that Checkmk was the best fit. One thing, however, was immediately clear: implementation could not be done alone.

“Checkmk is a product built by engineers, for engineers,” Danny explains. “You can see that in everything. Without experience, implementation is simply not feasible. We knew we needed external expertise.”

Support for the implementation of Checkmk as a replacement for Nagios came from Conclusion Xforce, in particular through Monitoring Consultant Antoine Beerens. Conclusion Xforce was already a familiar partner to Vancis, providing licences for their previous monitoring setup and offering occasional support, but this project significantly deepened the collaboration.

 

“From the moment we came on board, we started from the ground up,” Antoine explains. “We began with a thorough analysis, mapping out Vancis’ requirements and objectives. Only then did we move into the build phase. In my view, that’s exactly how it should be done, although not always how it happens in practice.”

 

The PoC with two clients—one in healthcare and one in education, played a key role. “Even at that stage, we were already thinking ahead,” says Wesley Heijnen, Network Engineer at Vancis. “One of our requirements was to give customers direct access to the monitoring environment.”

 

This proved achievable. Danny explains:
“We now have a hierarchical setup in place. A master runs in the data centres where our infrastructure is hosted, while separate proxies are deployed for customer-specific environments. This allows customers to monitor their own systems through a web portal, without us having to expose anything externally. From a security perspective, that’s a significant advantage.”

The implementation demanded a lot from Vancis’s teams.
“Checkmk comes with a steep learning curve,” Antoine explains. “An important part of my role was to train Vancis engineers, not just technically, but also in the underlying philosophy: how do you design it in a way that keeps it manageable and reproducible?”

 

Engineers at Vancis were heavily involved, often without immediately seeing tangible results. This occasionally led to impatience.
“We developed a template together that captured all our requirements,” Danny says. “But it took quite some time before we saw actual results. At one point, most of the outcome only existed in Antoine’s head. That sometimes led to frustration, you invest a lot of effort without yet seeing the return. In hindsight, that’s an important lesson: make results visible earlier to maintain momentum.”

 

That tension was also felt within the team.
“Colleagues would ask: what exactly are you working on?” Wesley adds. “You’re investing in fine-tuning, but you don’t see much yet. Now that the templates are ready, you can deploy configurations in just five minutes. That’s the moment when everyone recognises the true value of the work.”

A number of Vancis customers have now been fully onboarded, immediately highlighting the differences compared to Nagios. “We can now clearly see the impact of a clean onboarding,” Danny says. “We’re picking up far more signals, including false positives that we still need to fine-tune. It’s clear that with the new monitoring, we have significantly greater visibility.”

 

The transition to Checkmk proved to go beyond monitoring alone.
“Because we had to think at the process level, broader questions started to surface,” Danny explains. “What is each customer actually allowed to do? Who is responsible for what? That brought a lot of clarity, not just in monitoring, but in related processes as well.”

Wesley recognises this impact:
“It triggered a lot internally. We have customers who have been with us for over ten years. Through the onboarding, we had to take a fresh, critical look at what had been set up for them and what was defined in the SLAs. It gave us valuable insights and helped us regain full control.”