ACME Case Study

End-to-end implementation with AppDynamics, Micro Focus Ops Bridge and ServiceNow

Story:

Many companies use a wide variety of tools for different purposes involving hundreds of people who stare day and night at enormous LCD screens, monitoring each tool for new alerts. Problems occur, but the only correlation between them comes from the operator. The same operator who always prefers to be on the safe side by creating tickets for each and every problem causing some panic around, priority one calls, and different silo teams looking for the needle in the haystack. Then it takes ages to the SMEs to spot the root cause and fix the problem.

It used to work in the past when SLAs were not so aggressive, customer satisfaction was not the greatest priority and the cost reduction was considered more important than the return of investment.

But times change, the machines become smarter and more useful. Then it is up to the people with power to utilize them better.

Use Case:

The ACME company has multiple tools and each one of them has a purpose:

AppDynamics monitors the applications availability and performance
Micro Focus Ops Bridge monitors the infrastructure
ServiceNow is their ITSM tool where all problems are reported
And the only thing in common between these 3 is they all have a web-based UI. The tools differ a lot which results in expensive training programs for the operators to get familiar with them.

But this is not the only thing affecting the cost. Since the support is outsourced, the ACME company is charged per created (resolved) ticket.

Now imagine the following scenario  high CPU on one of the VMs is causing a database crash and application being unresponsive. These are 3 problems, which means 3 events in the monitoring tools and 3 incidents created in ServiceNow for the outsourced support. And the root cause is only 1  the high CPU. Instead of creating just a single incident, there will be 3 which triples the cost. Not to mention this might extend the MTTR causing more financial damage.

Solution:

The management of ACME knows they needed to improve their services and reduce the costs even more in order to stay ahead of the competition. It was time for big decisions. They did a research in various directions when they found out about the existence of the Do IT Wise Integration Hub.

As we can observe from its name, it does integrations. But which integrations? With AppDynamics, Micro Focus Ops Bridge, ServiceNow and more A perfect match for their situation.

The first step, of course, was a Proof of Concept. Both integrations were in place and operational. The ACME management were impressed how well the Do IT Wise Integration Hub copes with their complex use case.

But what actually happened? A few things:

• AppDynamics topology, metrics and alerts got in the Micro Focus Ops Bridge
• The events from AppDynamics got correlated with the rest of the events which are already present in the
• Micro Focus Ops Bridge
• Implemented automated incident creation