Telefónica Group
Tuenti is a social network, and its main purpose is to improve communication and the exchange of information between people. In less than three years, Tuenti has become the most visited website in Spain, and one of the most active social networks in the world. Tuenti is headquartered in Madrid, and its workforce is made up of people of more than 15 different nationalities.
STARTING POINT
Our previous monitoring and alerting programs were based on groups of scripts that ran specific checks on very specific sections of our production infrastructure.
These checks were difficult to maintain, and required periodic modifications when our production servers and/or services changed.
They also did not provide redundancy, using a very basic alerting system that did not provide the means to collect historical data.
We needed a system with escalated alerting mechanisms, automatic monitoring of new targets, and a larger number of people on staff dedicated to new checks.
PROJECT’S CHALLENGE
Without monitoring, the company will remain in the dark about how the production environment is performing.
With our new monitoring solution, we needed a platform that not only provided us with detailed, real-time information on our production systems, but also enabled us to view historical data and run basic trend analysis and planning capabilities.
“We needed a platform that not only provided us with detailed, real-time information from our production systems, but also enabled us to view data history and run basic trend analysis and planning capability.”
James Chivers, CIO, tuenti.com
WHY PANDORA FMS?
Pandora FMS software was deployed on a test monitoring host, with default checks and basic alerts. The checks that were already there were reviewed and migrated in phases to Pandora, running in parallel for a while, to make sure that Pandora was still responsive with a higher load and monitoring scope.
The main beneficiaries are the systems teams working on the maintenance of Tuenti’s production platform.
Other teams, such as Backend and Architecture, will also benefit from Pandora FMS, as they are able to create and maintain their own test criteria, which are very specific and not usually subject to the systems team’s observation and monitoring.
The strategy is to increase our implementation of Pandora FMS in an effort to make it the central tool in Tuenti Systems.
“We have successfully scaled Pandora FMS so that it now forms the core of our production infrastructure in monitoring and alert management. It has been able to maintain the number of elements and frequency of monitoring by adding new servers.”
James Chivers, CIO, tuenti.com
PANDORA FMS BENEFITS
Fast deployment of checks and new servers. Unified interface for check maintenance. Historical run data used for problem source analysis and capacity management. Tiered user permissions to enable different classes of users to benefit from the platform.
To make sure that the monitoring objectives have been achieved there were no specific central objectives.
The main concern was whether Pandora FMS could scale and be able to maintain the level of checks with such a large number of objectives.
The answer was yes: Pandora FMS has been able to run that number of checks and maintain the frequency of execution by adding new monitoring servers.
We have been able to scale Pandora FMS horizontally with success, and it is now the core of our production, monitoring and alerting infrastructure.
Doubts, suggestions or comments?
Does our proposal sound appealing?