The Office of Post and Telecommunications of New Caledonia has implemented a real-time centralized monitoring with Centreon.
Challenges
- Implement a centralized monitoring for the company (dedicated team and software platform)
- Provide an overall view in real time of the business activity
- Deploy the project successfully in an initial scope that includes the Telecoms Division, IT Division and technical buildings
Solution: Centreon
Customer Benefits
- Significant time and efficiency gains
- Harmonized practices and repositories
- Enhanced management of alerts and on-call support
- Improved monitoring data, thanks to the open source nature of the solution using BI and big data tools
The Full Story
The Office of Post and Telecommunications of New Caledonia (OPT-NC) has a development role in providing services to inhabitants, companies and local authorities. The public body operates in the fields of telecommunications, financial services and letters/parcels in the Caledonian territory. In 2013, it committed to a corporate project aimed at implementing 360° monitoring of its networks, services and systems. Deployed on an initial scope, the MONITOR project has enabled the company to build a dedicated team and a interdisciplinary, centralized monitoring platform. To get a unique, real time view of its infrastructure, the IT Division turned to Centreon’s IT monitoring solution.
Result: more efficient teams, standardized practices, an improved organization and given these benefits, no hesitation in extending the project to all business
units.
“With Centreon, we have centralized all equipment monitoring of the Telecom Division and the IT Division as well as the technical environment, access and energy of our 250 technical sites.”
OPT-NC operates across a wide range of sectors deployed across the entire territory of New Caledonia. With many different types of infrastructure, equipment and
applications – and given that the service level delivered needs to be constantly high – it is crucial to implement a centralized IT monitoring solution. “The MONITOR project was driven by management’s desire to have a 360° monitoring of all our equipment and services,” remembers Philippe Roy, Project
Director. “MONITOR is a real corporate project which aims to deploy a centralized IT monitoring platform and a dedicated team in order to have relevant indicators and a consolidated view of our activities.”
The monitoring system was local and specific to the equipment and applications. The team then began searching for a solution capable of monitoring the entire IT system centrally. “We wanted to be quickly operational. That was why we opted for an initial deployment over a limited scope comprising the Telecommunications Division, IT Division and the Logistics and Building Department,” explained Emmanuel Chanson, manager for the brand-new Monitoring Cell.
“We were looking for a solution that is flexible, easy to install, and of course competitive. We naturally turned to open source.”
In 2010, Emmanuel Chanson tested the open source solution published by Centreon and was won over by the product’s philosophy: open, scalable and robust enough to be deployed over a large scope and control all the company’s technical equipment, systems and applications. The team then chose Centreon Business Edition in July 2013 and deployed the solution across all the infrastructure of the IT and Telecommunications Divisions.
“We implemented a centralized solution in order to monitor our telecom solutions, data centers, applications and technical buildings using the same tool and the same console, some 5,000 pieces of equipment and 40,000 Centreon services (indicators), for around 100,000 metrics checked on average every 5 minutes,” stated Philippe Roy. “In our technical buildings, for example, we have a real time overall view of our telecom equipment, building access, humidity, temperature, but also
electrical power.”
“Centreon’s high interoperability makes it easier to use and add value to the monitoring data, and will also enable us to be more effective in managing support calls.”
The solution interoperability is also appreciated by the monitoring team, as Emmanuel Chanson confirms: “Centreon gives us plenty of flexibility to develop new features. Therefore, for example, we have connected Centreon’s monitoring system to our SMS platform, in order to send messages to staff on call. This gives us a unique repository for our technicians who also get very relevant analysis for incidents before they are dealt with.” Another interesting integration: the solution’s ability to interface with a big data tool which generates a dynamic report sent to operational teams and central management. In time, the monitoring data will also feed into a company BI (Business Intelligence) with the aim of improving communication with the operational divisions.
Philippe Roy quickly found that the project improved the effectiveness and proactivity of teams: “We have noticed ‘additional benefits’ since implementing the project. We have gone from ‘repairing’ to ‘preventing’ incidents. Currently, we identify the problems before they occur, we have strong indicators to monitor and maintain the SLA and have standardized our practices.”
Other benefits have been noticed, such as an increase in the number of indicators – almost 100,000 metrics checked every 5 minutes – and the ability to monitor them easily. In this way, different dedicated indicators have been created and are monitored for FM radio broadcasts over several sites using Centreon service mapping, in order to have precise data on the service availability per radio and per site.
The organization has also been optimized: operational teams and experts provide the first level of monitoring. A Monitoring Cell was created with 7 collaborators. These employees monitor the indicators and take the strain off the operational teams who only have a general view of their IT systems.
Management, operational and sales divisions are also occasional users of the monitoring data via a report. Centreon provided support to OPT-NC teams when migrating to the latest version. This major evolution was also the opportunity to train the teams on the solution and for them to appreciate “the skills and efficiency of Centreon’s experts,” as Philippe Roy stressed. “Since January 2017, we have been using the 24/7 TechSupport option for major incidents, to the considerable relief of teams given the critical nature of the equipment monitored and the 10-hour time difference with mainland France.”
After navigating this first step successfully, the Monitoring team now plans to expand the project to all the company’s business activities, using Centreon custom views and dashboards and even in time, making the monitoring console available to some clients and partners.
“Our monitoring system is getting richer every day and enables us to standardize our practices through a single point of contact. We now benefit from 24/7 support via the Centreon technical support and are planning to extend centralized monitoring to all our business fields.”
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