“As an innovation-focused company, we wanted our monitoring platform to support future growth and transformation to cloud systems, enable automation and offer a central access point for a complete overview of our complex IT environment,” – Frank Nagel, Head of IT Service Management Platforms, ZF IT.
The project in a nutshell
Business objectives
- Get a reliable overview of the availability of a heavily distributed hybrid IT landscape that meets company growth.
- Ensuring worldwide 24×7 monitoring with constantly changing and growing landscape around the globe with a focus on the hybrid cloud technologies implementation (IAAS, PAAS, ect.).
- Provision of an intuitive, high performing and reliable monitoring system.
- Integration and support of new technologies and cloud services in hybrid environments.
- Monitoring of networked cloud components such as Microsoft Azure Services and their APIs
- Integration into the existing ZF IT service management processes.
IT Operations Management (ITOM) objectives
- Increase monitoring quality while keeping costs stable.
- Integrate cloud environments into monitoring.
- Implement uniform monitoring by using monitoring templates.
- Enable seamless integration of individual monitoring processes.
- Display complex relationships in simplified visualizations.
The solution: Migration from Centreon Open Source to Centreon Business Edition
Main benefits of the project
- A highly stable solution that offers a constant, holistic overview of the availability and performance of ZF internal IT services and external cloud services.
- Increased reliability through a single platform and common monitoring practices across the organization.
- Simple and uniform KPIs and common use of dashboards and reports.
The story
As a leader of automotive digital transformation, ZF Group wanted to build an innovative, future-proof, centralized, and scalable IT monitoring platform encompassing the full length of its geographically distributed IT estate. The company, which is headquartered in Friedrichshafen (Germany), has approximately 360 locations in 41 countries and employs about 160,000 people. “In order to do justice to this diversity, ZF IT continued to rely on Centreon, transitioning from Centreon Open Source to the Centreon Business Edition, which guarantees the highest requirements with regard to cloud monitoring, monitoring scope, automation, reporting and future readiness,” said Frank Nagel, Head of IT Service Management Platforms.
Needing a centralized monitoring solution, ZF Group decided to use Centreon as the basis for the monitoring of their on-premise infrastructure. By shifting many systems to the cloud, monitoring had to be adapted and expanded. It was and is of particular importance to the ZF Group, in addition to Centreon itself, to have a permanent contact who is available with advice, support and can help seamlessly with any problems. ZF chose the S&L group of companies as a certified German Centreon partner.
Cloud Monitoring
The focus was on implementing cloud monitoring solutions that support the Cloud Transformation Strategy of ZF Group. The implementation can now react very dynamically to changes. The plugins developed by ZF were supplemented by the extensive Cloud Connector library from Centreon (Plugin Packs). The platform is also enriched by the Centreon Business Edition’s advanced service mapping, analytics, and reporting capabilities, as well as extensive monitoring templates.
Connecting the ticket system and creating dashboards
ZF Group has integrated the Centreon Monitoring solution into its existing ticketing system right from the start. In addition, simplified and expanded information, depending on the teams, is provided by individually created dashboards. “Administrators can also create their individual dashboards and share them with colleagues if they want or have to,” said Frank Nagel.
Outlook for the future
ZF Group understands its monitoring platform as a tool that’s constantly evolving, with the flexibility to adapt to changing needs and requirements. The company permanently optimizes this platform to ensure transparency across the entire range of services.
Takeaway
Monitoring a constantly developing hybrid cloud environment in a large, innovation-oriented company requires an agile procedure and seamless scalability. “With the Centreon solution, the ZF Group has an agile, scalable and future-proof software, which can be adapted and expanded individually, independently, easily and efficiently to the changing monitoring requirements of the company,” concludes Frank Nagel.
To go further
- SaaS or Self-Hosted Monitoring? If you’d like to conduct a careful TCO assessment, don’t go it alone — read our latest expert content “IT monitoring and TCO: SaaS or self-hosted?” You’ll find some insights as well as a complete list of potential hidden costs to consider, so you can choose a monitoring solution which meets both your expectation and budget.
- Looking to run a deeper analysis to decide between open source or paid IT monitoring? Download the first Expert Insight volume, “IT Monitoring & TCO: Open source or off-the-shelf software? Finding the best option for your organization,” which looks at an IT monitoring solution type’s impact on the TCO, helping you opt for one that is perfectly adapted to your organization.
- Learn How to leverage IT monitoring as a gateway to business observability with this ebook : Enabling Business Observability: A Top-Down Strategy
- Read our Customer experience-focused ebook.
- Visit our resource center: ebooks, guides, reports, success stories, tutorials, and more to help you in your IT monitoring journey 🙂
- Join the Centreon community on The Watch.
- Contact us for a personalized demo and ask our monitoring experts any questions you may have.
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