Challenge
A multibillion-dollar oil and gas producer needed a more effective way to monitor its data center, provide effective alerts and respond rapidly to incidents. The company’s challenges were three-fold:
- Low visibility: The company had minimal visibility into its data center’s virtualized infrastructure. This undermined the IT staff’s ability to provide 24×7 system monitoring and alerting.
- Multiple IT monitoring systems: The company’s virtualized environment lacked a single viewpoint and monitoring solution, which made it challenging for the various technology groups to accurately track, report and alert.
- Critical delays: Low visibility and multiple IT monitoring solutions often stalled the diagnosis of critical issues and increased the length of outages, exacerbating even the smallest of incidents.
Solution
OnX’s Professional Services team conducted an onsite assessment to help the client understand its current data center environment. OnX used specialized best-of-breed technologies to map out the company’s entire environment including applications, and infrastructure (physical and virtual).
OnX recommended a two-pronged approach:
- Validation: Onx’s certified professionals used VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) Manager to create a validated design and consistent operations specifications.
- Integration: OnX combined the vROps solution with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, to bring system monitoring of the physical and applications areas together in one centralized tool set.
Once these initiatives were fully mapped, the Professional Services Team developed tailored reporting dashboards for each group based on its specific requirements. They consolidated the most relevant information for each group and at the same time provided one holistic overview.
Results
The system monitoring project empowered IT decision makers to monitor and report their current capacity usage, enabling better-informed capacity purchasing decisions – for example, if and when it was time to add capacity, could the company avoid a capital deployment by tapping into previously unknown capacity?
Working with OnX helped the company reduce their overall costs while improving its ability to see the health and risk points in its mission-critical infrastructure and applications.
This initiative significantly reduced times to notify, respond to and resolve any incident, regardless of priority level.