Provide full visibility and flexibility for managed services customers so that they can plan for necessary downtime.
NXO France is a French service provider which provides Cloud, Data Center, Collaboration, Con tact centers, Network infrastructure, WAN & IT Security services and supports its customers in their digital transformation initiatives ensuring the operation, performance, security, and evolutions of digital infrastructures. Its managed services offering includes consulting on infrastructure choices, supporting migration projects, designing architectures, and ensuring an efficient digital process flow.
NXO manages nearly 300 customers, monitoring over 5,000 devices in a hosted, managed services environment. With ever-increasing infrastructure complexity, the aim is to provide customers with a global view, irrespective of data sources. This requires complex data reconciliation and consolidation, as Thibaud Annota, Technical Manager at NXO, explains: “With so many customers we face the challenge of ensuring that the data they view is available only to them. To manage this efficiently we need sophisticated data ingestion and partitioning while managing a wide variety of technology and devices. Our managed services model depends on an easy path to integrate new customers into our infrastructure. Finally, sometimes downtime is inevitable, but we want to make this process more transparent and predictable for our customers so that they can plan for this.”
Automation is key to achieving this and the NXO team built and deployed an innovative automated monitoring solution: Digital View. Thibaud had previous experience with Micro Focus IT Operations Management solutions and realized that Micro Focus Operations Bridge and Network Operations Management (NOM) would be a great fit to gain a complete and accurate view of the dynamic and complex networks NXO customers work with. Operations Bridge automates remedial action tasks with thousands of out-of-the-box operations, while NOM is designed for unparalleled network control.
Leveraging Micro Focus OPTIC Data Lake, the team can use a single data lake to consolidate data from any source, including external applications such as Cisco Webex, or Alcatel Rainbow. Thibaud comments: “The OPTIC Data Lake simplifies the data collection, normalization, and storage from Operations Bridge, NOM, and a massive number of third-party vendors thanks to the open API. It enables common data analysis and data visualization for important operations tasks such as automated event correlation.”
By using the service model created by Operations Bridge, NXO built data segregation and multi-tenancy. In this multi-tenancy aware data source environment, when you run a query or a job, only the CIs and attributes of those tenants that have permissions to view are included. The NOM and Operations Bridge suites offer a wide technology coverage and there is always the opportunity to develop custom scripts for special cases, such as VM backup and replication, by using the built-in REST API capabilities.
The NXO team particularly appreciates the Micro Focus BVD (Business Value Dashboard) capability. This gives full real-time visibility into any activity in a customer’s environment, consolidating data from multiple sources. NXO uses Micro Focus SiteScope, included in Operations Bridge, as an agentless monitoring solution. It monitors the availability and performance of distributed IT infrastructure and applications, including servers, operating systems, network services, virtualization software, and application components. It feeds relevant statistics into the BVD. Custom data ingestion stores all data in the OPTIC Data Lake for easy analysis.
Thibaud Annota – TECHNICAL MANAGER
NXO
Thibaud Annota – TECHNICAL MANAGER
NXO
He concludes: “Easy device selection is provided by the service model API and we are currently managing approximately 20 planned downtimes per month, necessary for support, maintenance, and upgrade purposes. This really demonstrates the power of Operations Bridge and the OPTIC Data Lake.”
