Transcript
Case study
Agentless monitoring boosts ROI Reducing complexity of monitoring technology lowers costs; self-service portal empowers server, application owners to manage monitoring themselves Industry Financial services Objective Reduce the administrative overhead associated with infrastructure monitoring Approach Replace agented with agentless monitoring—and offer server and applications owners the ability to deploy and manage their systems’ monitors IT matters • Manageability and ease-of-use drive IT process efficiencies • Self-service functionality allows server, applications owners to deploy and manage monitoring themselves • Built-in, automated remediation supports improved system uptime Business matters • Costs associated with managing IT systems reduced significantly • IT organization able to focus on tasks that drive more business value over time
“We’ve found HP SiteScope to be a very cost-effective monitoring solution. We’re pleased at the functionality and with the way it supports the self-serve monitoring framework we wanted within our IT organization.” – William Gillen, Director of Systems Engineering, global financial services corporation
A global financial services company that was using an agented event monitoring solution from HP wanted to switch to agentless monitoring. So it implemented HP SiteScope technology, a decision that allowed it to maintain its relationship with HP while achieving a number of other strategic objectives, including lower costs and self-service functionality around the deployment and management of monitors.
Case study | Global Financial Services Company
No enterprise today can function unless it monitors the health of its infrastructure devices and systems. That’s a given. The challenge corporations face, therefore, is not whether to monitor—but how. Consider the situation faced by one multinational financial services corporation. For many years, the U.S.-based corporation used HP Operations Manager as its monitoring solution. And although the company was satisfied with the performance of the solution, it wondered if it might achieve some additional value if it moved to different monitoring technology—one that supports agentless monitoring. The company therefore took a careful look at another solution within the HP Software portfolio: HP SiteScope software. And in HP SiteScope, the company discovered a monitoring solution that proved to be an even better fit for its needs.
Required functionality— without the agents When the company began reconsidering its monitoring technology, it identified a number of objectives. One was cost. “We wanted to reduce the amount of money we were spending on agent maintenance and support,” notes William Gillen, Director of Systems Engineering, global financial services corporation. “At the time, I was helping to support an environment with about 12,000 servers, and we recognized that managing our monitoring agents was increasing our support costs by 40%.” The company also wanted to move toward a self-service model for event monitoring. “We wanted to enable a framework that would allow our internal customers to deploy and manage monitoring technology themselves,” Gillen explains. And regardless of what monitoring solution the company implemented, it needed to work. A highly visible financial institution, the company relies on its IT systems for both internal business processes and customer-facing applications. Should performance issues or outages affect these mission-critical systems, the company could suffer both immediate and long-term consequences, including damage to
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its reputation and legal action from industry regulators. “We were open to the idea of switching to a new monitoring technology,” Gillen explains, “with one caveat: we couldn’t take a step backwards in functionality. No matter what we did, our event monitoring solution had to enhance the stability and availability of our IT systems.” As the company reviewed its options, another factor also figured into the decision: it owned an enterprise license for HP SiteScope software, an agentless monitoring solution from the HP Software portfolio. “We reevaluated HP SiteScope and realized that it supported the functionality we wanted,” says Gillen, adding that he personally had used HP SiteScope and was familiar with its capabilities. “So we decided to switch to HP SiteScope, which let us stay with an HP solution while also meeting our new requirements for an event monitoring architecture.”
Fast to install, manageable to use After deciding to implement HP SiteScope, the company analyzed its environment to gather monitoring requirements. When the installing itself began, the IT team found it “easy,” Gillen says. “It took us less than an hour to install the base software.” Now over forty SiteScope servers are supporting more than 12,000 production servers plus several thousand additional servers from a separate business unit. “Our goal is to reduce the number of SiteScope servers because we needed an inhouse solution to manage them. We continue to have a close working relationship with HP to develop enhancements that will help better manage the scale of our environment. We are hoping HP agrees that this would have a tremendous increase in business benefits so we can move to an out-of-the-box solution,” Gillen says. HP SiteScope’s ease-of-use was enhanced by built-in manageability features, such as the solution’s templates. “HP SiteScope’s templates allow us to replicate monitoring processes across hundreds or thousands of servers,” Gillen notes. “The ‘search and replace’ functionality is huge, too. If the name of an application changes, or the name of an escalation group changes, we can quickly update the software. We don’t have to key in the change hundreds of times.”
Case study | Global Financial Services Company
Agented or agentless? Monitoring choices drive optimal results.
Self-service puts power in system owners’ hands
uses to generate support tickets, and HP Operations Orchestration, which the company uses to automate alert remediation.
One of the primary reasons HP SiteScope fits the company’s needs is that it supports a self-service approach to event monitoring; to this end, the company’s IT team built a frontend portal to allow server and applications owners to set up, modify, and delete monitors. Server owners can also disable and re-enable existing monitors if they like, for example to accommodate scheduled events affecting their systems.
“Features like automated remediation ensure that we maintain or even improve our existing levels of system uptime.”
To help users come up to speed on the new monitoring framework, the company also launched a communications and training initiative. The program, which is still ongoing today, has proven a success. “Once people understand what we’re giving them, it was a natural selling point of the HP SiteScope solution,” says Gillen. “If something breaks within an application, they can go in and change the monitor if they need to. If they miss an event because it didn’t generate an alert or ticket, they can change how the monitor is configured. It’s convenient, and it gives them more control. “People also like the idea of removing agents from their systems,” Gillen adds, “so that makes them happy, too.” HP SiteScope is also better integrated with other IT tools deployed within the company’s environment, including a homegrown event management console as well as other HP business process optimization solutions such as HP Service Manager, which the company
– William Gillen, Director of Systems Engineering, global financial services corporation
The company also uses HP SiteScope’s built-in remediation automation. “In some cases, an alert will trigger a script,” Gillen explains. For example, if a particular database process goes down, HP SiteScope might run a script to restart the process automatically. “Our monitoring capabilities were already good, before we converted to HP SiteScope,” Gillen says. “Features like automated remediation ensure that we maintain or even improve our existing levels of system uptime.”
Reduced costs Another important benefit the company achieved by switching to HP SiteScope is reduction in overhead costs. “As soon as we made the switch, our yearly support maintenance costs began trending downwards,” says Gillen. “We’ve decreased the number of cycles we spend on support and administration.”
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Case study | Global Financial Services Company
Customer at a glance Software • HP SiteScope software • HP Service Manager software • HP Operations Orchestration software
With HP SiteScope, the IT organization isn’t spending as much time managing monitoring agents. “It’s made our IT environment less complex. Since we don’t have agents deployed on our servers, we’ve reduced the time spent on maintaining and patching them.”
“HP SiteScope allowed us to move to a self-service model for event monitoring—and helped us reduce our administrative and support costs.” – William Gillen, Director of Systems Engineering, global financial services corporation
Spending less time managing agents has delivered other benefits beside costs: it has freed the IT organization to focus on other IT
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services. “We’re able to devote more attention to anomaly detection,” Gillen explains. “This helps us potentially catch issues before they affect the business. We’re becoming more predictive. And we’re also shifting our priorities to take a more end-to-end approach to managing applications.” Over time, these changes will drive improvements in application performance and uptime. The company also plans to further enhance its HP SiteScope deployment by adding new enhancements and features to its self-service portal, and further automating event detection and remediation. “We’ve found HP SiteScope to be a very cost-effective monitoring solution,” Gillen says. “We’re pleased at the functionality and with the way it supports the self-serve monitoring framework we wanted within our IT organization.”
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© Copyright 2014 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein. 4AA5-1319ENW, February 2014
