“With our monitoring solution from Microsoft, we’ve gone from having no insight into our most mission-critical.NET application to getting metrics that we can use to improve its performance and value.”
Hendrik Weyher, Monitoring Specialist, Bundesagentur für Arbeit
IT staff at Bundesagentur für Arbeit (BA), the Federal Employment Agency of Germany, relied on a central console application to quickly report datacenter incidents. Yet staff had no insight into how it was performing. BA solved this problem with an application performance monitoring solution in Microsoft System Center 2012 R2, which improved the console’s reporting from seconds to near realtime so that it can adhere better to service level agreements.
This case study is for informational purposes only.MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published February 2014
Business Needs
Bundesagentur für Arbeit (BA) provides job and training placement, career counseling and unemployment benefits, insolvency payments, and child benefits. BA also operates a popular online service, JOBBÖRSE, the Job Board. Listing approximately 800,000 jobs and 3 million applicant profiles, and with 800,000 visitors a day, the JOBBÖRSE is Germany’s largest online job portal.
BA has 10,000 servers, 160,000 desktops, and 16,500 network components across its three datacenters in Nürnberg and its 156 local agencies. The majority of servers run the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system, with approximately 30 percent running the Linux and Solaris operating systems. Approximately 140 critical Java-based applications work alongside a handful of applications written on the Microsoft .NET Framework development platform.
One of the .NET applications takes advantage of Microsoft System Center 2012 datacenter technologies. It consolidates all events in BA datacenters into one console.
“Microsoft Services Consulting built a very nice solution for us called the Central Event Console,” says Hendrik Weyher, Monitoring Specialist at Bundesagentur für Arbeit. “It provides complete visibility into our entire server farm, so we can see events as they arise and take immediate steps to solve issues before they impact the business. Every month, the Central Event Console reports approximately 16,000 events.”
BA outsources the monitoring of the Central Event Console to a team from the telecommunications company, T-Systems. Technicians continuously monitor the Central Event Console and take steps to remediate or escalate incidents according to a service level agreement (SLA) that defines how technicians should respond to incidents as they arise. However, BA had a problem enforcing the SLA.
“We had absolutely no way to monitor the performance of the Central Event Console,” says Weyher. “It has been live for four months. As with any new application, we are watching for bugs and assessing performance. We weren’t sure how quickly the console was reporting incidents, so we had no way of proving that the T-Systems team was adhering to our SLAs.”
BA wanted to monitor the Central Event Console’s performance for another reason. “The purpose of the console is to help us ensure business continuity,” says Weyher. “If we don’t know that it’s not working, we risk delayed response to events that could impact our customer services.”
Solution
Bundesagentur für Arbeit took advantage of enhancements in application monitoring in Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 to solve these issues. The solution was readily adopted by members of the monitoring team who already use System Center datacenter products. BA IT staffers will use the Operations Manager component of System Center 2012 R2 for comprehensive health and performance monitoring, line-of-code level traceability, and deep application insight into its .NET applications, beginning with the Central Event Console. They can also use the solution to monitor Java application performance.
“System Center 2012 R2 application monitoring capabilities fit our needs exactly,” says Weyher. “We had a mission-critical .NET application with absolutely no insight into its performance, and we were already well-versed in System Center technologies.”
BA deployed a beta version of System Center 2012 R2 in a specially built test environment with three servers: one each for the Operations Manager and Service Manager components of System Center 2012 R2 and one for the Central Event Console and its database.
“Everything worked perfectly,” says Weyher. “Operations Manager immediately discovered the application. We defined performance thresholds and built a script to send events to Service Manager so that they will show up in the console.”
BA deployed the monitoring solution for the Central Event Console into production in January 2014.
Benefits
With System Center 2012 R2, IT staffers at Bundesagentur für Arbeit have gained a whole new level of insight into the Central Event Console. “With our monitoring solution from Microsoft, we’ve gone from having no insight into our most mission-critical .NET application to getting metrics that we can use to improve its performance and value,” says Weyher.
Expedites Error Detection
During testing, BA noticed slower than expected error reporting. By taking advantage of line-of-code level traceability in System Center 2012 R2, BA was able to identify the issue and improve performance.
“The monitoring solution revealed problems with error detection that we were able to fix,” says Weyher. “Now, instead of waiting seconds, events are showing up in the console in near real time. The value of our monitoring application has significantly improved.”
Improves Business Continuity
With a tool that provides rich health metrics and that alerts IT staff to server issues, BA expects to improve business continuity.
“The more information we have on the Central Events Console, the more control we have over expediting error reporting,” says Weyher. “The faster we see an issue on the screen, the faster we can take steps to fix the problem to ensure that the organization’s services stay up.”
Solidifies SLAs
Now that System Center 2012 R2 delivers incontrovertible performance and application health metrics to IT staff at BA, the organization can more accurately assess how well the team from T-Systems adheres to its SLA.
“It is our responsibility to give the T-Systems team a reliable monitoring solution so that they can work to the SLA,” says Weyher. “Now we can fulfill our part of the bargain with confidence, because we’ll know when slow incident remediation is attributable to the application.”
Enables Cross-Platform Monitoring
BA is eager to promote the cross-platform application monitoring capabilities of System Center 2012 R2.
“With one tool that can take care of our Java and our .NET applications, we can save licensing costs and reduce IT labor,” says Weyher.
This case study is for informational purposes only.MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published February 2014