How a global energy player saved money by switching to light-weight, agent-less monitoring

IT challenges

The company's Information Systems division provides computing services such as project management, application maintenance and operation, and IT infrastructure management for the group. It also defines the group’s IT strategy and oversees the IT function and IT vendor management. The One IT department is charged with adding next-generation computing services to the Information Systems division's portfolio.

The One IT department operates under the following principles:

• Offer a broad range of services, meeting highest possible SLAs by leveraging the best available technology.
• Manage services flexibility requirements.

Alan, technical analyst for One IT, lists the following as the key challenges that currently face his department and the key factors that could drive a major IT transformation within the group:

• Distributed IT setup coupled with decentralized governance that led to a fractured IT budget,impeding any planned investments in a dedicated monitoring solution.
• With impending EU regulations on the utilities sector, there could be further carve-out of businesses from within the group.
• A large portion of the group's IT infrastructure services are outsourced to vendors who are not open to deploying agent-based monitoring solutions in their environments. "Usage of a remote, agent-less monitoring solution is more acceptable to our providers," says Alan.
• Many applications used at the group were developed in-house, and most Application Performance Management (APM) solutions on the market do not support monitoring of such custom applications.
• Incorporating monitoring needs into the development life cycle of these custom applications: "Standardization (of the development process and application architecture) is the key here," says Alan.
• Cost – i.e., the total cost of ownership (the licensing cost of a monitoring solution and the cost of hiring high-skilled resources to maintain the monitoring solution – was a major challenge.
• Other monitoring solutions on the market (the 'Big 4') are not as easy to scale because adding monitoring support for a new enterprise application or technology platform requires the purchase of additional modules, escalating monitoring costs.
• Monitoring solutions currently in use require higher levels of technical expertise to use, and hiring such skilled manpower was expensive.
• "[There was a] pressing need to deploy a lightweight monitoring solution, and replace the agent-based monitoring solutions [such as those of vendors] like SCOM, Tivoli, BMC, etc., " says Alan.