Healthcare Industry
A multinational financial services company was experiencing issues and lengthy repair and recovery times in their most critical lines of business.
Overview
One organization has multiple critical applications utilizing a vast assortment of underlying technologies. Existing tools were providing some of the required functionality but there were gaps in their abilities and the maintenance costs were extremely high. In addition, a merger with another healthcare organization was just beginning and they needed their tools to scale without knowing exactly what the future requirements would be.
To implement a new solution
The Challenge
The existing toolset covered network monitoring and some of the server and application monitoring. However, as new technologies were being deployed, there were gaps in the monitoring that could not be fulfilled with the existing tools.
An existing installation of IBM Tivoli Monitoring (ITM) that was used solely for AIX server monitoring also needed to be merged with the new solution.
Three critical applications were part of the initial scope and required monitoring to be put in place for specific technologies, including Citrix, SQL Server and VMware. In addition, synthetic transactions needed to be run against the three applications. Beyond server and application monitoring, network device discovery and monitoring was required, along with a root cause analysis engine that could correlate network and server availability alerts.
All new monitoring put in place also needed to integrate with their existing incident management system, HEAT. However, a new incident management system, ServiceNow, was in the early stages of replacing the existing system so the integration had to account for this transition.
The Solution
SCAPM
The SmartCloud Application Performance Management (SCAPM) suite, comprised of the monitoring infrastructure and server and application agent technologies, was deployed to replace the existing monitoring and fill the monitoring gaps.
Within SCAPM, various agents were utilized to perform the required monitoring:
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Windows/Linux/UNIX operating system agents
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Citrix agent
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VMware agent
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SQL Server agent.
As the monitoring is rolled out to other areas, additional agents will be utilized, including:
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Active Directory
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Microsoft Exchange
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Internet Information Server
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.NET WebSphere
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WebLogic
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Tomcat
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JBoss.
Conclusion
By implementing the SCAPM suite of tools, the monitoring needs of this healthcare company were met: existing monitoring was replaced and the monitoring gaps were filled. Utilizing ITNM to discover and monitor te network and provide root cause diagnostics between network devices and between network and server, fulfilled yet another monitoring requirement. OMNIbus and Impact were deployed to manage and correlate the events from the new monitoring tools and integrate with the incident management system.
TCR was implemented to provide the required reporting capabilities for all of the metrics collected by SCAPM and ITNM in the TDW and the archived events. By implementing the JazzSM infrastructure along with TCR, the capability exists for future integrations with other Tivoli products, as well as providing deeper functionality with existing products.
As the merger between the two healthcare companies moves forward, the new Tivoli infrastructure can easily be scaled to accommodate additional networks, servers and applications. In addition, the new implementation is positioned to be made highly available when this becomes a requirement.