Digital Administration
Madrid Digital is the Agency for the Digital Administration of the Community of Madrid, whose objective is to ensure the needs of computer material, applications and security of the different departments and organizations of the public entity, as well as to manage and maintain the physical and logical equipment for information processing.
STARTING POINT
The Agency is in charge of carrying out the digital transformation in the Community of Madrid and providing the best service, information and quality to citizens through different platforms and applications.
From our initial point of view, we needed to have a monitoring system that could bring together all our required technological information and reliably manage the events produced.
Any IT governance with a large scale and varied dimension, can have a very changing life cycle in its technologies, which requires a continuous adjustment and/or evolution in the quality of the metrics.
All this for a large number of metrics that vary from the most common or basic in any monitoring system, to others more complex or particular to our organization, and that shape a very varied technological environment: communications electronics, information systems, devices, business processes, synthetic transactions, specific or commercial software, sensors of different types, etc.
PROJECT’S CHALLENGE
We were aware that the perception of success in a large organization (putting the focus on monitoring) sometimes generates frustrations or an uneven perception depending on each department, so we have tried to go step by step in covering specific requirements from less to more, this in its final set, has provided a strategic vision of the problems very adjusted to reality, and has prepared us to evolve our technology lifecycle when required, “feeding Pandora FMS” with the changing needs of our organization.
We have managed to integrate Pandora FMS event management with our particular incident lifecycle. Pandora FMS is part, as an automatic main actor, of the strategic incident log in our usual workflow platform.
Therefore, our agents do not need to know Pandora FMS, since the event that brings value to a certain department, can be viewed and managed in their usual incident console and even trigger phone calls in case of high availability service.
The professional and human cost comes first and is necessary in any monitoring solution, but the flexibility, support and economic cost offered by Pandora FMS has met our expectations compared to other competitors.
“With the implementation of Pandora FMS we have been able to automate our knowledge, reduce diagnostic times to a minimum and work with certainty, without assumptions or unfounded theories.”
Lorenzo Canales, Head of the Services and Infrastructure Monitoring and Support Unit at Madrid Digital
WHY PANDORA FMS?
We conducted several proofs of concept on different platforms to finally opt for Pandora FMS, its main advantages over other products are: its flexibility to measure what is precise and necessary, the professional support without intermediaries and its lower cost compared to other commercial alternatives -a lower cost does not imply a worse service at all-.
In addition to everything we needed, Pandora FMS has an evolutionary vision of its platform very aligned with customers, which means that initiatives and proposals that arise from our needs are very well received to provide us with continuous feedback.
In our particular case, improvements have been included or are under development: specific features for synthetic transactions, improvements in executive reports and viewing with regular expressions for a large amount of information (logs), etc.
Pandora FMS has the level of depth and maintenance that we expected, it has managed to integrate with the different technological platforms that support our services in the Community of Madrid.
SERVERS / DEVICES
METRICS
“Pandora FMS’s motto is 100% true, they are flexible without a high cost. Our diagnostic times for incidents or problems have been reduced by 200%, we have consolidated our knowledge of the platform and automated reactive actions for different key events (without the need for human intervention throughout the service recovery cycle).”
Lorenzo Canales, Head of the Services and Infrastructure Monitoring and Support Unit at Madrid Digital
PANDORA FMS BENEFITS
With Pandora FMS we currently monitor more than 500 servers/devices and approximately 120,000 individual metrics.
We have a large number of specific collections that are particular to these entities: Tomcat, Weblogic, Jboss application servers; Apache, IIS web servers; cache servers; SQLSERVER, ORACLE, INFORMIX DBs; commercial products; network electronics, switches, loadBalancing, firewalls; UPS; various sensors; business processes; transactions and use cases; etc.
Although we have used functionalities and plugins from the Enterprise version or specific proposals from Pandora FMS, we have also developed our own solutions, metrics collections, scripts for various integrations.
In this sense and given the adaptability of the tool, practically 75% of our measurements are born from plugins and integrations made by us.
In addition, we complement the entire technology monitoring environment with periodic User Experience monitoring through the integration of Pandora FMS with Selenium.
With this, we can integrate our entire incident lifecycle for early detection of relevant events, so that in a single tool (Pandora FMS) we are able to monitor all our strategic applications and services, on a large scale and with a significant level of automation.
The cross-referencing of service event information, added to the technological one, means that diagnosis and service recovery times have been considerably reduced.
Indirectly we have all benefited, and with special attention, all the people who come to the Community of Madrid or reside in it, and who use our services on a daily basis.
We can say with confidence that we are better prepared to offer a higher quality and availability of service, and that we have a monitoring platform that allows us to evolve according to the needs of our customers.
In addition, we have managed to improve our decision-making capacity, based on measures obtained with the implementation of Pandora FMS; decisions based on arguments and evidence.
We are especially satisfied with the level of support offered by Pandora FMS: they are agile in resolving issues, incidents or bugs, and are fully aligned with the customer’s needs, which makes them constantly prepared and fed back to the ongoing needs of any IT organization.
“We have managed to get the most out of Pandora FMS thanks to the set of plugins and functionalities. Enterprise and scripts developed by us.”
Lorenzo Canales, Head of the Services and Infrastructure Monitoring and Support Unit at Madrid Digital
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