Ecosystem Monitoring

Geneos Gateway Migration

Ecosystem Monitoring – Geneos Gateway Migration
14/08/2018 MHC
MHC Geneos SME (Subject Matter Expert)
Gateways migrated
Project completed 3 months ahead of schedule

Client Problem

Monitoring refers to monitoring the performance of servers, infrastructure, connectivity, applications and data that flows through it. Monitoring the performance of these interconnected components is critical for the success of any Financial Institution.

The current monitoring solution for MHC’s client, a Tier 1 Global Bank, was set up in a similar way via the ITRS Geneos monitoring tool, which is a real-time application performance monitoring tool used to monitor business critical systems and to catch issues early to avoid outages.

The Bank’s monitoring solutions set up via ITRS Geneos were running on legacy infrastructure (Solaris servers) which was due for decommission. The Bank’s requirement was for their monitoring to be moved to new, more efficient and reliable infrastructure (Linux servers) without breaking critical monitoring for the application teams.

The Bank approached MHC to provide them a Subject Matter Expert (SME) in Geneos. The SME would test the new platform and co-ordinate with the Bank’s engineering team to get the new platform ready for migration. The Bank’s stakeholders were also to be educated and convinced of the reliability of the new platform and to be given a demo of how the new platform works.

MHC Approach

There were several dependencies, which were to be taken into consideration before the migration. The project included 900+ gateway migrations, which carried challenges, such as taking care of common files used by multiple gateways, dashboard issues, new infrastructure issues such as fixing firewall issues and file permission issues.

01. Creating a migration tool

The migration of the gateways was to be done via a migration tool. The tool would enable the copying of necessary configuration files of the monitoring setup from the old servers onto the new servers. The migration tool would also reduce manual effort and help in migration of the gateways in just a few clicks.

02. New platform

The new platform was the interface where users could perform multiple actions on the gateways they created for monitoring. For instance, they could promote the monitoring set up from their UAT (User Acceptance Testing) environment to the production environment.

Result

The highly critical project was successfully completed within 9 months, which was well within the 12-month time frame initially planned for the migration. Project related dependencies and issues were successfully resolved by the MHC team co-ordinating with the Client’s internal application and engineering teams.

The stakeholders were educated on the new platform and given an opportunity to test selected gateways in the new platform and once they were convinced of its reliability, the more important gateways were migrated. The application team now is convinced of the usability and the reliability of the new platform.