Campus-wide monitoring
Every wireless access point on campus, more than 200 in total, reports its connected client count every five minutes, and an automated daily sync keeps switches and access points in step with the vendor's inventory.
Santa Maria College: monitoring, automation and a modern deployment platform
Santa Maria College is a K-12 school in Western Australia. Umbrella Tech works with the college's IT team on monitoring and reporting, service desk automation and the platform its internal applications run on.
At a glance
- Client
- Santa Maria CollegeK-12 school, Western Australia
- Technology
- Zabbix
- Grafana
- Microsoft Graph API
- Microsoft Entra ID
- Microsoft Teams
- Freshservice
- Docker
- GitHub Actions
- Portainer
- Python
- Relationship
- Ongoing, alongside the college's IT team
The problem
The challenge
A school campus depends on a large wireless network, switching, printers, virtual servers, websites and Microsoft 365 all working at once. The IT team needed one place to see the health of all of it, with enough history to spot patterns and enough detail to find the device behind a problem. The college also wanted staff offboarding run as a structured, automated process, and a consistent, controlled way to deploy its internal applications.
The outcome
What changed
The IT team now has an operations overview that rolls up wireless, switching, printers, virtual servers, certificates and the internet connection, with links from each figure down to the device behind it. Microsoft Teams call quality sits on the same overview. Offboarding requests now gather the leaver's account details automatically before anything is changed, and internal applications deploy through a repeatable pipeline instead of manual steps.
What we delivered
Linked dashboards
A set of 18 dashboards in three levels, from an operations overview to a fleet view and a single-device view, with a plain-English note on each panel explaining what it shows, why it matters and what to check next.
Teams call quality reporting
Call records collected through the Microsoft Graph API and graded against Microsoft's own call quality thresholds, so poor calls can be traced to a person and a time. We assessed a commercial plugin first and chose Microsoft's API, which avoided a new vendor and per-seat cost.
Certificate monitoring
Expiry and validity checks on the college's web certificates, with warnings well before a certificate lapses.
Offboarding automation
A structured offboarding request in Freshservice that looks up the leaver in Microsoft Entra ID and records their account details and group memberships on the ticket before any change is made.
Container platform
Internal container hosting with automatically issued and renewed certificates, and application deployment through a self-hosted GitHub Actions runner rather than remote logins to servers.
Technology
- Zabbix and Grafana
- Microsoft Graph API and Microsoft Entra ID
- Microsoft Teams call records
- Freshservice Workflow Automator
- Docker, Portainer and GitHub Actions
- Python collectors scheduled on the monitoring server
Working together
This is an ongoing relationship. We work alongside the college's IT team, document each change as we go and keep a single source for every figure on the dashboards, so numbers agree from one view to the next. Further monitoring coverage and the next stages of offboarding automation are ongoing work.
Planning something similar?
If your team needs clearer visibility of its network and services, or wants to automate routine IT processes, we can help scope a practical first stage.