Vancity

About Vancity

Vancity is Canada’s largest community credit union, with $18.6 billion in assets, 501,000 member-owners, and 58 branches in greater Vancouver. Vancity uses an integrated software suite from Micro Focus, including Operations Manager i (OMi) providing “single pane of glass” visibility – to streamline IT management while ensuring “five nines” uptime.

OMi Delivers Event Correlation, Unified Dashboards

Vancity has used Micro Focus Operations Manager (OM) since 1999 for fault and performance monitoring. They evolved to OMi which sits on top of OM to act as a manager of managers, federating data from Micro Focus and third-party tools and applying analytics to deliver consolidated business service management. “It lets us bring in our multitude of monitoring tools – SCOM, SiteScope, OM, NNMi, and others – and give operators end-to-end dashboard visibility,” Rooney says. Event correlation has slashed the number of daily events by 93%, leaving just those items more likely to be actionable, which in turn lets operators avoid dead-end troubleshooting. “Say a website is down; there’s no point in troubleshooting the web server if the actual network is down,” Rooney explains. “Now we can see it all in one spot, whereas before, each tool represented its own reporting silo; we might know the website was down but not why.” He estimates that the number of tickets is down 50% and finding root causes is 70% faster – all contributing to lower Mean Time to Resolution. The IT staff time saved adds up to approximately $50,000 a year.

Write Once, Deploy Anywhere – Much Better

As Vancity doubles its server count in the transition to Windows-based systems, OMi management templates. “Rather than end up with 700 versions of the same policy, changed slightly for each host, you write one policy and when you deploy it, just change your parameter value,” Rooney says. “I’m not doing useless copy/copy/copy, deploy/deploy/deploy. Write once, deploy anywhere. Much better.”

The ability to push default monitoring and system policies is part of a larger picture of easier change management. Using Micro Focus software, Vancity discovers assets as they come online, shares change requests with the monitoring system, uncovers legacy system interconnections, and prevents unexpected downstream consequences. Security and high availability create a satisfying customer experience and reduce risk while freeing IT staff to focus on providing value to the business – such as the current infrastructure transformation. “The takeaway from all of this,” Rooney says, “is that we’re bringing our legacy environment up to date and also simplifying management.”