The continuity of the IT environment largely depends on the selection of the best solutions as early as the architecture design phase and the quality of the implementation itself. However, it is only the operation stage that is the true test for IT departments to effectively and, importantly, measurably ensure the availability and performance of IT systems. Success in this area consists of both the knowledge and commitment of a team of administrators, as well as organizational aspects and tools that increase the quality and efficiency of work.
Operational activities related to maintenance of the IT environment are divided into proactive and reactive. The former are preventive actions, minimizing the risk of unavailability (e.g., increasing disk space for a steadily growing database); while the latter are corrective actions, taken after a failure has already occurred (e.g., replacing a damaged device). The effectiveness of these tasks is determined by providing admin teams with the most complete real-time knowledge of the state of the infrastructure and applications. In turn, the goal is to get as many nines as possible in percentage availability statistics.
IT essential
As a large organization with a geographically dispersed structure, Kompania Piwowarska makes extensive use of IT tools to support business processes. Starting with the office IT environment in each branch office (wired and wireless local area network, time registration system, printers, scanners), through an extensive topology of inter-branch teletransmission links, tele- and videoconferencing systems, systems optimizing the organization of group work and project management, to systems necessary to ensure the continuity of beer production and distribution and to support the management of the organization.
Such a heterogeneous and technologically advanced environment enforces a high specialization of internal IT teams responsible for individual areas of maintenance, and for some tasks also outsourcing to external entities. With such a model of operation, it is very important to centrally verify availability and clearly demarcate responsibilities between different teams of administrators.
IT defined
Considering the critical role of IT systems in maintaining business continuity, Kompania Piwowarska decided to modify and expand its monitoring system. BCC accomplished this goal using open-source applications and its own proprietary solutions.
The first stage of the project was to analyze the IT environment used at Kompania Piwowarska. Every active element, co-creating KP’s “IT organism," was inventoried. It was also unequivocally confirmed which teams are responsible for the availability and performance of each of these elements, and it was agreed with administrators which measurable factors determine whether a particular system is working properly or requires corrective action.
The list of sites to be monitored included a very wide range of infrastructure, network devices, physical and virtual servers, databases, applications, and even such specific elements as time registration readers. This provided full and consistent knowledge of all elements of the IT environment, installed in some 30 locations across the country.
Proactive IT monitoring strategy
IT at Kompania Piwowarska provides the business with advanced IT solutions. Due to the company’s scale, it is very important that IT technologies contribute to the optimization of internal processes. At the same time, with each new IT tool implemented, the responsibility of the entire department for ensuring business continuity increases, which translates into continuity of business processes across the organization. Aware of this responsibility, there is an increasing emphasis on avoiding unavailability or performance degradation of IT systems, instead of reacting to problems that have already occurred, as reported by users.
A proactive strategy brings tangible benefits, and its basis is effective – well designed and implemented – monitoring of the IT environment. Of course, such a wide area cannot be directly supervised by administrators and engineers. An automated system is necessary, acting – as much as possible – as the “first line of support", reporting on possible infrastructure bottlenecks, performance degradation or possibly unplanned unavailability. On the basis of precise data from the monitoring system, administrators take necessary actions, eliminating the risk of unavailability or proceeding to remove it immediately after its occurrence, without having to wait for a notification from users and without having to search for the cause manually.
Choosing BCC (currently All for One Poland) to carry out the project of implementing an IT monitoring system in Kompania Piwowarska gave us access to the knowledge and proven tools used by BCC for monitoring All for One Data Centers. The combination of several open-source solutions and BCC’s proprietary extensions allowed us to achieve an effect that – among other things, due to the heterogeneity of the environment – could not be achieved with commercial tools available on the market, often oriented towards monitoring hardware or applications of only one specific manufacturer.
Tomasz Puchalski, IT Infrastructure Manager, Kompania Piwowarska
IT available
The functionality of the monitoring system was primarily intended to translate into an increase in the availability of the entire IT environment by automatically providing administrators with the information necessary to properly plan system development and respond to emerging incidents. Guided by this assumption, among the most important required functionalities of the new monitoring system were identified:
- Ensure monitoring of all layers of infrastructure (from device availability to application availability),
- Implement proactive monitoring tools,
- Qualitative monitoring of accessibility,
- guaranteeing the security of monitoring (confidentiality of data and stability of monitored systems),
- The ergonomics of operating the monitoring system,
- The ability to report and track trends,
- Use of various alerting methods,
- Implement tools to support the work of administrators.
IT monitored
Based on the results of the infrastructure review and Kompania Piwowarska’s requirements for monitoring operation, BCC proposed several open-source tools, installed on a single server. Properly developed and integrated with each other, they will optimally meet the defined needs.
The Nagios Core application, running under the Linux operating system, was implemented as the central component of the monitoring system.
Monitoring of the availability of all infrastructure components and business-critical applications was configured. Verification of quality of service by monitoring response times was implemented. Periodic checking of performance parameters and resource utilization (disk space, processor power, memory, etc.) has also been implemented. All alerts are available through a web interface and e-mails sent to the appropriate administrator groups. Autonomous alerting via GSM network (SMS and/or phone), independent of IP network availability, has also been prepared for future use.
In order to expand functionality, several complementary applications have been implemented to specifically address:
- Collection and graphical imaging of response time and packet loss data from network devices and servers,
- Collection and imaging in the form of graphs of bandwidth saturation data on individual interfaces of network devices,
- A presentation in the form of a map containing the quantitative and percentage use of inter-branch transmission links,
- Archiving network device configurations,
- Central collection and archiving of network device logs.
Michal Strzyzewski, IT Area Manager, All for One Poland
Proprietary monitoring from BCC
BCC Outsourcing Center provides high availability and performance of systems for its clients as part of hosting, administration or administrator support services. It would not be possible to carry out these tasks effectively without a “tailor-made" monitoring system. Our years of experience show that with a very diverse environment, the best solution is a systematic, proprietary extension of the functionality of available open-source tools.
Thanks to such an approach, we have the ability to monitor in a single system such diverse parameters as the correctness of the backup of systems, the number of emails in the mail server queue, the time of generating a web page, the correctness of importing exchange rates for the settlement of business trips, the humidity of the air in the data center or the amount of fuel in the generator.
Our experience is unique in the market and allows us to offer proprietary solutions in the area of monitoring any elements of the IT environment. We provide such services both in the version of implementation at the client’s site, as well as remote monitoring of the client’s services and availability reporting through the system physically located at All for One Data Centers.
Michal Strzyzewski, IT Area Manager, All for One Poland
IT better managed
In order to expand the implemented functionality of the monitoring tools, an IP addressing management application was also installed and data was migrated from the legacy system. The new solution gives Kompania Piwowarska extensive capabilities in managing several thousand addresses, divided into more than 200 subnets. In particular, these include the history of changes to each address, mapping to VLANs, different types of IP reservations and verification of actual address usage. Each administrator has been given independently built permissions to view and modify specific groups of IP addresses in the database.
Transparent reports in the form of charts, tabular summaries and percentage availability of individual systems centralize information on IT operations at Kompania Piwowarska. They make it easier to supervise the availability and efficiency of systems, plan the expansion of the environment more effectively and verify SLAs for services provided by external partners, thus delivering higher quality IT services to the business.
IT aware
The implementation of the monitoring system was summarized with a training session for administrators and system engineers. The benefits of implementation, the principles of system operation and possible further development directions were presented. The need for ongoing modification of the scope of monitoring, in parallel with changes in production systems, was emphasized, so as to maintain full control over the operating parameters of the constantly expanding environment.
Built for Kompania Piwowarska, the complete monitoring system, which meets the needs of both administrators and managers, is characterized by high efficiency and, thanks to its open architecture, allows the parameters and scope of operation to be modified in accordance with changes in the IT environment.