About
West Midlands Ambulance Service is one of the largest Ambulance Services in the UK with over 19 regional sites and servicing a population of over 5 million people and covering an area of more than 5,000 square miles, re–sponding to 4,000 (999) calls every day, and 1 million pa–tient journeys a year. The IT infrastructure is critical and the network is a key component.

Requirements
The network team, led by Carl Evans, is responsible for the existing network of 100s of devices. They were in the process of upgrading the core of the network
adding new Cisco devices and next-generation fire–walls. They had existing tools in place such as So–larWinds but needed a solution to monitor, alert and troubleshoot that was scalable, easy to deploy and use. They started a formal process of looking at various vendors such as Splunk, LogRhythm and Sumo Logic.

Solution
After evaluation of the options they selected Sumo Logic for 3 key reasons:
1. It was very easy to deploy and then use within a few hours.2. Data could be forwarded into a central server and then encrypted to Sumo Logic. This made it secure and easy to install.3. It was also commercially advantageous. Xiaa Solutions were able to meet the budget.

Future
The network team has since used Sumo Logic whenever they need to get to the root cause of an issue fast. They
find Live Tail a valuable feature being able to track events
and logs over 30 days and Log Reduce when searching
data to help them find what they are looking for quickly
and easily.Since selecting Sumo Logic, Carl has upgraded the ser–vice to take more data from more devices and they are now considering it for other use cases such as SIEM and Security monitoring.

Carl Evans Network Architect –“Sumo Logic has proved to be an essential tool to help us ensure that our critical infra–structure is available. When things do happen
we can quickly find the root cause before we
lose service.”