Making Downtime Obsolete – Fortune 500 manufacturer

The Challenge

The client had a fragmented environment for application, server, network, and storage monitoring. Each division had non-standard processes and different tools to monitor its own applications and servers. These disparate monitoring systems meant there was little visibility into what was being monitored. Often critical issues were missed, and the need to monitor a certain system or parameter was identified only when the issue had already occurred. The resulting downtime, of course, had an adverse impact on the user experience. Inefficient monitoring also led to a high volume of false alarms requiring cost and effort to close those tickets. This strained the client’s bandwidth, and they did not have enough resources to monitor the environment 24×7.

The client wanted to streamline and standardize monitoring across the data center for 400+ servers and create a central monitoring hub for all apps and servers around the clock. They wanted a partner who could take over complete governance of the monitoring environment and ensure performance and uptime.

The Solution

The client had a long-standing two-decade relationship with SLK, and so they turned to us to help solve this problem. The SLK team analyzed the situation and created a business case for the proposed solution. We deployed Microsoft System Center Operation Manager, Splunk, ManageEngine OpManager, and site 24×7 tools to implement monitoring best practices.

All servers under monitoring coverage were transitioned to normalized agents/script-based custom monitoring solutions. Under a flexible offshore model, we took complete ownership of the environment to manage and maintain the monitoring environment. We enabled a secure ODC environment and set up a dedicated offshore team for monitoring and 24×7 support. The support process was also streamlined, and we created checks and balances with regular status updates and periodic reviews.