Applied Materials - Case study

Applied Materials is the leader in materials engineering solutions used to produce virtually every new chip and advanced display in the world. The organization owns and uses more than 8000 servers and other devices.

Their biggest problem was the lack of automation in key areas such as APM, ITOM & ITSM.

The company had too many tools from different vendors and most of the data exchange between them was done manually involving massive human effort. A decision was made to automate as many internal processes to be automated through an existing software solution that doesnt require any in-house development.

Use Case:

Applied Materials has various tools by multiple vendors:

• Micro Focus Ops Bridge  ITOM console
• Micro Focus SiteScope  infrastructure monitoring
• SolarWinds  infrastructure & network monitoring
• ServiceNow  ITSM console

Their process included the NOC team to monitor multiple dashboards  Dynatrace, Ops Bridge, Solarwinds & some other custom ones.

The whole asset & configuration item synchronization between the different tools was done manually through file imports. Together with that, when there was a problem, they were manually creating incidents in ServiceNow.

Customer problem:

Too many different dashboards and tools, most of the monitoring, ITOM & ITSM processes were manual.

Solution:

After a long process of selection based on several POCs, Applied Materials selected the ZigiWave Integration Hub from the list of all tools because of the depth and maturity of the integrations, the guidance during the POC phase and the general advices and best practices provided.

The ZigiWave implementation team managed to set up all the integrations and go live in just 2 business weeks.

After the successful implementation, all the configuration items from Solarwinds and Dynatrace AppMon enrich the RTSM model where they are reconciled with the discovered data from Universal Discovery, SiteScope, etc. and this provides an End-to-end overview of the whole Applied Materials environment.

In addition, all the metrics and events from these tools are delivered to the Ops Bridge making them available for event correlation and metric analysis or anomaly detection.

The last piece of the puzzle is the connection between Ops Bridge and ServiceNow  this automates of the incident creation and resolution processes at the same time as well as adds incident duplication prevention. The whole integration is based on a dynamic attribute mapping that is responsible for handling the different internal use cases and helps for the reduced problem resolution time.

The end result was simplified day-to-day working process for the NOC operators, less human errors and better application availability due to the improved time for problem detection and resolution.

Extension:

As a result of the success of the Integration Hub project, Applied Materials asked to have a new custom feature developed  synchronization from ServiceNow to SAP Solution Manager for incidents that were created by events coming from Solution Manager.

The ZigiWave team researched and developed this feature which is now used in Production as part of the Integration Hub product.