Reduce the risk of poor network performance or outages by creating reliable monitoring across a hybrid IT environment
Micro Focus PSDC works closely with all Micro Focus product groups and customer support. Acting as an internal service provider, PSDC aims to accelerate and streamline R&D efforts. It also has the opportunity to be a change agent within the organization, identifying services to be deployed at scale and introducing new delivery models.
PSDC delivers its services to the wider Micro Focus R&D community so that they can focus on their core competency of delivering superior software for their customers. The organization operates in a hybrid IT environment, managing four public-cloud hosted datacenters, two private-cloud hosted datacenters, and 17 on-premises datacenters. Richa Kumari, Service Delivery Manager within PSDC, explains the challenge: “Whenever there was a service disruption we received a generic incident and escalation notification. Although we provide business-critical services, there was no reliable and automated monitoring in place to really help us understand the business impact of the issues we encountered. There was always a risk for R&D and production systems to suffer degraded performance, or experience an outage, with no notice. We felt it was necessary to minimize this risk, and thankfully our own portfolio provided us a solution for this.”
Micro Focus Operations Bridge provides automated event and performance monitoring for multi-cloud and on-premises environments. SiteScope is a part of the Operations Bridge autonomous monitoring solution for hybrid IT. It monitors the availability and performance of distributed IT infrastructures, including servers, network devices and services, and applications. In the complex PSDC-managed environment with a large volume of incoming metrics, it was determined this combination could ensure the health and performance across the entire Micro Focus software factory.
Richa Kumari – SERVICE DELIVERY MANAGER
Micro Focus Product Services Delivery Center
for Fast Resolution As part of the Operations Bridge implementation, the PSDC team leverages many of the out-of-the-box integration capabilities. Operations Bridge natively integrates with Micro Focus SMAX, which is used as the PSDC ticketing and IT service management solution, and it provides integration with Micro Focus Network Operations Management (NOM). The team also works with open source solutions Zabbix and Graphana, and were pleased to discover that Operations Bridge provides full integration to these platforms too, so that events and alerts from all different platforms can be consolidated in a single dashboard.
“It used to be very difficult and time-consuming to find the root cause of any incidents,” says Kumari. “Having successfully deployed Operations Bridge the operation center team can now manage events with ease. We automatically monitor and analyze the health and performance across more than 15,000 devices, operating systems, databases, applications, or services that support our infrastructure. We respond successfully to over 30,000 events every month.”
She continues: “The Operations Bridge integration with SMAX enables us to automatically open tickets for critical events and automatically assign incidents to relevant groups. This creates a time saving of 10 minutes for each ticket. With upwards of 20 tickets every day, this soon adds up to a productivity improvement of over 30 percent. NOM forwards events to Operations Bridge and covers the global lab and production networks, creating a single view for the operations team to manage network alerts.”
Richa Kumari – SERVICE DELIVERY MANAGER
Micro Focus Product Services Delivery Center
As a large enterprise itself, with over 12,000 employees, Micro Focus is in the unique position of being able to road-test its own technology. A continuous feedback loop between PSDC and the Micro Focus IT Operations Management R&D teams validates the enterprise readiness of the Micro Focus solutions. By pushing the product capabilities to the next level, this experience delivers greater monitoring coverage for Micro Focus customers. Kumari concludes: “Deploying Operations Bridge with its fantastic integration capabilities ensures our service continuity. With monitoring in place for our most critical devices, we reduce our risk through immediate alerts, resulting in faster issue identification. We have reduced our mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) and our costs. We have improved our productivity and now have full visibility across our business-critical IT environment.”
