Delta Dental - Case Study

Integration Success Story

ZigiOps managed to integrate Delta Dental of California's IT systems to provide full visibility of their operations in real-time. Our integration platform automated our clients processes to provide enhanced cross-team collaboration, greater operational efficiency, and faster issue resolution.

• Increased cross-team collaboration
• Faster issue resolution
• Real-time monitoring of key events and metrics

The Client:

Delta Dental of California is the largest dental insurance provider in the United States, providing coverage to over 80 million people. Members of the Delta Dental network are present in all 50 states and Puerto Rico.

Challenge overview:

Micro Focus OpsBridge is the central IT Operations Management (ITOM) solution at Delta Dental. At Delta Dental Technology teams are using additional tools, such as AppDynamics, SolarWinds or Splunk to monitor Delta Dentals IT infrastructure and Jira Service Desk to track incidents. To have full visibility of their operations and systems, Infrastructure & Operations teams needed to collect all data in a single system.

The I&O teams considered a few possibilities:

• Minimize and streamline software tools
• Develop an internal solution
• Look for an integration solution to connect all monitoring tools to OpsBridge applications

After weighing all the pros and cons of the different options, the ITOM team decided to go with ZigiWave's no-code integration platform, ZigiOps.

The Solution:

ZigiOps solved Delta Dental of California's business challenge by connecting SolarWinds, Splunk and AppDynamics to OpsBridge via one-way integrations which collect data from each tool and submit it to OBM.

Going a step further, Delta Dental of California decided to also align ITOM and ITSM by integrating OpsBridge with Jira Service Desk, bi-directionally with ZigiOps.

Data types integrated:

SolarWinds - OBM

• Topology: Nodes, IP Addresses, Interfaces
• Alerts, Events: NPM
• Metrics: NPM

AppDynamics - OBM

• Topology: Applications, Tiers, Hosts, Business Transactions, IP Addresses, Services
• Health Rule Violations, Events
• Metrics

Splunk - OBM

• Alerts, Events

OBM - Jira Service Desk

• Events to Issues: transfer and bi-directional synchronization.

As most companies, Delta Dental of California is facing a challenge in terms of visibility on our IT operations. Being monitoring agnostic, different teams are using various systems (AppDynamics, SolarWinds, Splunk, Jira Service Desk etc.) to monitor events and issues, whereas Operations Bridge Manager is our centralized tool to consolidate all the information; data, events & metrics to deliver informed decisions. We were looking at a lot of integration platform providers and considered developing an in-house solution ourselves when we found our answer – ZigiOps. With ZigiWave’s integration solution we not only managed to automate some of our critical processes, but significantly decreased man time to resolve incidents. Our teams are now working in full synchronization and we are very happy with our partnership with ZigiWave.

Stephen Rodgers, Delta Dental of California

Outcomes and Results:

The four integrations give Delta Dental of California the possibility to:

• Have all monitoring data instantly available in Operations Bridge
• Consolidate and align IT Operations Management (ITOM), and IT Service Management (ITSM) capabilities
• Sync AppDynamics, Splunk and SolarWinds with OBM
• Connect OBM to Jira Service Desk and log OBM events as issues in Jira
• Have a complete overview of their operations and of each element of their IT infrastructure

ZigiOps extracts information from SolarWinds, AppDynamics and Splunk and forwards it to OpsBridge (OBM) which is Delta Dentals central operations console and provides IT teams with all necessary information. Each source enriches OBM and helps Delta Dental benefit from an added layer of transparency into their operations combined with a comprehensive overview of their infrastructure. All correlation then takes place in OBM and whenever necessary, OBM communicates to Jira ServiceDesk.

This process is fully automated whereas all tools are synchronized, meaning that anyone can instantly check the status of each event and react quickly. As a result of Delta Dentals implementations of the ZigiOps connectors the number of incidents are now comparatively lower, helping Delta Dental get rid of noise and unnecessary information. At the same time, key events and metrics are closely monitored and reported.

This led to an increase in efficiency and lowered response times.

SolarWinds, AppDynamics and Splunk monitor similar environments, but from a different perspective by virtue of tracking unique elements. Combining data from all these data sources into OBM allows for centralized and easy access to data and for instant correlation of the affected entities. This includes correlated/enriched topology, event synchronization from multiple sources, and different metric feeds. The events from these integrations can be centrally processed in OBM and sent to Jira as issues/tasks.

Thanks to the platforms advanced integration capabilities, ZigiOps is the right solution to Delta Dental of California's business challenge by providing a complete overview of their operations and synchronizing their software tools.