Industry: Nonprofit
Location: Dalmally, Scotland
Mary’s Meals provides critical meals to more than 1 million children each day through school feeding programs in some of the world’s most under-resourced communities. Through the nonprofit, a donation of only $21 can feed one child for an entire year. The organization manages employees and services in 19 countries across the world to feed nearly 1.7 million children daily.
Traditionally, Mary’s Meals has provided one meal a day directly to schools in under-resourced communities, however, when COVID-19 forced school closures around the world, the organization had to adjust its approach and start delivering meals directly to communities. With this change, Mary’s Meals faced new challenges like maintaining communication in areas with minimal internet access, alerting team members when connectivity fails, and aggregating alerts from multiple monitoring systems.
After implementing PagerDuty, the organization’s IT Infrastructure Lead, Stephen Neil quickly saw that there were numerous use cases where PagerDuty could benefit Mary’s Meals. For example, after visiting an on-site location in Liberia, Neil realized that the organization’s vehicle tracking software could be integrated with PagerDuty so that when a vehicle gets stranded somewhere, employees can press a panic button to alert rescue responders immediately via SMS notifications. “We can couple PagerDuty with an existing solution that we had already implemented on the ground to provide a higher degree of alerting on system events locally,” explained Neil. This enabled Mary’s Meals to protect organizational assets and provide more reliable security in remote locations, saving valuable resources that could be used to feed as many children as possible.
Going forward, Mary’s Meals plans to scale PagerDuty across other departments and implement new use cases. This includes using GPS tracker information from satellite phones to alert on potential personnel safety issues when traveling, and to alert security officers to important field safety reports. Mary’s Meals is beginning to manage services in AWS and Azure and will be adding integrations with AWS CloudWatch and Azure Alerting to get application insight, log events, and autoscale notifications.