Challenges
Like many large, distributed enterprises, this global media and entertainment giant offers centralized IT (CIT) services to its business units so they can benefit from economies of scale while freeing divisional IT staff to focus on more strategic initiatives.
One of CIT’s core services is monitoring applications to make sure they’re healthy and available, and troubleshooting when they’re not. To avoid having to do this separately for every application requested by each business unit, CIT uses Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) whenever possible.
SCOM provides a central console for monitoring applications’ state, health and performance.
In 2015, when several business units asked CIT to monitor their Citrix infrastructure, CIT insisted it do so using SCOM and began looking for a solution. According to CIT’s IT Solution Manager, “It would have been impossible to manage such a huge influx of Citrix infrastructure without SCOM.”
Solution
After evaluating alternatives, CIT chose HYCU. “Unlike other products that essentially did data dumps and would have made our infrastructure more complex, HYCU’s was the only Citrix management pack with true native integration into SCOM. We just snapped it into SCOM and immediately started monitoring Citrix the same way we monitor other applications and systems. It couldn’t have been easier,” said CIT’s IT Solution Manager. In fact, HYCU’s SCOM MP for Citrix was so effective that Citrix ended up acquiring the technology.
In 2016, when CIT started getting requests to take over business units’ F5 BIG-IP monitoring, they again turned to HYCU. “We were adamant about using SCOM to monitor our eight F5 BIG-IP appliances. Based on success we had with HYCU’s Citrix SCOM product, we knew we’d get a very strong F5 SCOM solution that was simple to use, with great HYCU support to back it up,” said the Senior Systems Engineer.
HYCU SCOM Management Pack (MP) for F5 BIG-IP provides instant, hassle free visibility into all aspects of BIG-IP. It extracts the right information from BIG-IP LMT (Local Traffic Manager) and ASM (Application Security Manager), aggregates it with the application and infrastructure, and displays results on SCOM.
Benefits
Enhances Service Levels
CIT’s SCOM team is able to be much more responsive to application owners. Leveraging their existing infrastructure and processes, they quickly provide new insights into network and configuration issues that help keep applications up and running properly.
Proactively Plans for Capacity
In the past, the business units’ F5 administrators would configure and release their application, only to be alerted that it wasn’t performing properly. In guessing how to resolve the problem, the admin might, for instance, increase the server pool, only to have the problem persist. However, now with HYCU SCOM Management Pack, CIT can easily view potential resource allocation problems before they result in slow downs, and then contact the application admins, conveying how to correct pending issues in advance.
Accelerates Root Cause Analysis
HYCU MP for F5 BIG-IP makes it easy for CIT’s SCOM administrators to connect the dots between the network and the application. Now they can quickly pinpoint or rule out F5 BIG-IP configuration as the source of root causes and speed resolution.
Improves Security Certificate Management
Before using HYCU SCOM packs, the company’s application owners often wouldn’t know their security certificates had expired until there was an outage and, during troubleshooting, found the SSL connection to the web server had dropped. HYCU minimizes these outages by proactively alerting CIT’s SCOM administrator about upcoming expirations so actions can be taken in advance. If application owners don’t renew even after CIT notifies them and traffic gets blocked, they’ll be immediately alerted that certificate expiration was the cause.
About the customer
This leading media and entertainment company has more than 25,000 global employees involved in creating, distributing and promoting TV programming and film.
To learn how HYCU can help your Nutanix, Azure or Google Cloud Platform backup strategy, visit www.hycu.com or email info@hycu.com.
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