Case study
Agentless monitoring boosts ROI
Reducing complexity of monitoring technology lowers costs; self-service
portal empowers server, application owners to manage monitoring
themselves
Industry
Financial services
Objective
Reduce the administrative overhead associated with
infrastructure monitoring
Approach
Replace agented with agentless monitoring—and
offer server and applications owners the ability to
deploy and manage their systems’ monitors
IT matters
•Manageability and ease-of-use drive IT process
efficiencies
•Self-service functionality allows server,
applications owners to deploy and manage
monitoring themselves
•Built-in, automated remediation supports
improved system uptime
Business matters
•Costs associated with managing IT systems
reduced significantly
•IT organization able to focus on tasks that drive
more business value over time
“We’ve found HP SiteScope to be a very cost-effective
monitoring solution. We’re pleased at the functionality
and with the way it supports the self-serve monitoring
framework we wanted within our IT organization.”
– William Gillen, Director of Systems Engineering, global financial services corporation
A global financial services company that was using an
agented event monitoring solution from HP wanted to switch
to agentless monitoring. So it implemented HP SiteScope
technology, a decision that allowed it to maintain its
relationship with HP while achieving a number of other strategic
objectives, including lower costs and self-service functionality
around the deployment and management of monitors.
Case study | Global Financial Services Company
No enterprise today can function unless
it monitors the health of its infrastructure
devices and systems.
That’s a given.
The challenge corporations face, therefore, is
not whether to monitor—but how.
Consider the situation faced by one
multinational financial services corporation.
For many years, the U.S.-based corporation
used HP Operations Manager as its monitoring
solution. And although the company was
satisfied with the performance of the solution,
it wondered if it might achieve some additional
value if it moved to different monitoring
technology—one that supports agentless
monitoring.
The company therefore took a careful look
at another solution within the HP Software
portfolio: HP SiteScope software. And in
HP SiteScope, the company discovered a
monitoring solution that proved to be an even
better fit for its needs.
Required functionality—
without the agents
When the company began reconsidering
its monitoring technology, it identified a
number of objectives. One was cost. “We
wanted to reduce the amount of money we
were spending on agent maintenance and
support,” notes William Gillen, Director of
Systems Engineering, global financial services
corporation. “At the time, I was helping to
support an environment with about 12,000
servers, and we recognized that managing our
monitoring agents was increasing our support
costs by 40%.”
The company also wanted to move toward a
self-service model for event monitoring. “We
wanted to enable a framework that would
allow our internal customers to deploy and
manage monitoring technology themselves,”
Gillen explains.
And regardless of what monitoring solution the
company implemented, it needed to work. A
highly visible financial institution, the company
relies on its IT systems for both internal
business processes and customer-facing
applications. Should performance issues or
outages affect these mission-critical systems,
the company could suffer both immediate and
long-term consequences, including damage to
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its reputation and legal action from industry
regulators.
“We were open to the idea of switching to a
new monitoring technology,” Gillen explains,
“with one caveat: we couldn’t take a step
backwards in functionality. No matter what
we did, our event monitoring solution had to
enhance the stability and availability of our IT
systems.”
As the company reviewed its options, another
factor also figured into the decision: it owned
an enterprise license for HP SiteScope
software, an agentless monitoring solution
from the HP Software portfolio. “We reevaluated HP SiteScope and realized that it
supported the functionality we wanted,” says
Gillen, adding that he personally had used HP
SiteScope and was familiar with its capabilities.
“So we decided to switch to HP SiteScope,
which let us stay with an HP solution while also
meeting our new requirements for an event
monitoring architecture.”
Fast to install, manageable
to use
After deciding to implement HP SiteScope, the
company analyzed its environment to gather
monitoring requirements. When the installing
itself began, the IT team found it “easy,” Gillen
says. “It took us less than an hour to install
the base software.” Now over forty SiteScope
servers are supporting more than 12,000
production servers plus several thousand
additional servers from a separate business
unit. “Our goal is to reduce the number of
SiteScope servers because we needed an inhouse solution to manage them. We continue
to have a close working relationship with HP
to develop enhancements that will help better
manage the scale of our environment. We
are hoping HP agrees that this would have a
tremendous increase in business benefits so
we can move to an out-of-the-box solution,”
Gillen says.
HP SiteScope’s ease-of-use was enhanced
by built-in manageability features, such as
the solution’s templates. “HP SiteScope’s
templates allow us to replicate monitoring
processes across hundreds or thousands
of servers,” Gillen notes. “The ‘search and
replace’ functionality is huge, too. If the name
of an application changes, or the name of
an escalation group changes, we can quickly
update the software. We don’t have to key in
the change hundreds of times.”
Case study | Global Financial Services Company
Agented or agentless?
Monitoring choices
drive optimal results.
Self-service puts power in
system owners’ hands
uses to generate support tickets, and HP
Operations Orchestration, which the company
uses to automate alert remediation.
One of the primary reasons HP SiteScope
fits the company’s needs is that it supports a
self-service approach to event monitoring; to
this end, the company’s IT team built a frontend portal to allow server and applications
owners to set up, modify, and delete monitors.
Server owners can also disable and re-enable
existing monitors if they like, for example to
accommodate scheduled events affecting their
systems.
“Features like automated
remediation ensure that we
maintain or even improve our
existing levels of system
uptime.”
To help users come up to speed on the new
monitoring framework, the company also
launched a communications and training
initiative. The program, which is still ongoing
today, has proven a success. “Once people
understand what we’re giving them, it was
a natural selling point of the HP SiteScope
solution,” says Gillen. “If something breaks
within an application, they can go in and
change the monitor if they need to. If they miss
an event because it didn’t generate an alert
or ticket, they can change how the monitor is
configured. It’s convenient, and it gives them
more control.
“People also like the idea of removing agents
from their systems,” Gillen adds, “so that
makes them happy, too.”
HP SiteScope is also better integrated with
other IT tools deployed within the company’s
environment, including a homegrown event
management console as well as other HP
business process optimization solutions such
as HP Service Manager, which the company
– William Gillen, Director of Systems Engineering,
global financial services corporation
The company also uses HP SiteScope’s built-in
remediation automation. “In some cases, an
alert will trigger a script,” Gillen explains. For
example, if a particular database process
goes down, HP SiteScope might run a script to
restart the process automatically.
“Our monitoring capabilities were already
good, before we converted to HP SiteScope,”
Gillen says. “Features like automated
remediation ensure that we maintain or even
improve our existing levels of system uptime.”
Reduced costs
Another important benefit the company
achieved by switching to HP SiteScope is
reduction in overhead costs. “As soon as
we made the switch, our yearly support
maintenance costs began trending
downwards,” says Gillen. “We’ve decreased
the number of cycles we spend on support and
administration.”
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Case study | Global Financial Services Company
Customer at a glance
Software
•HP SiteScope software
•HP Service Manager software
•HP Operations Orchestration software
With HP SiteScope, the IT organization isn’t
spending as much time managing monitoring
agents. “It’s made our IT environment less
complex. Since we don’t have agents deployed
on our servers, we’ve reduced the time spent
on maintaining and patching them.”
“HP SiteScope allowed us to
move to a self-service model
for event monitoring—and
helped us reduce our
administrative and support
costs.”
– William Gillen, Director of Systems Engineering,
global financial services corporation
Spending less time managing agents has
delivered other benefits beside costs: it has
freed the IT organization to focus on other IT
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services. “We’re able to devote more attention
to anomaly detection,” Gillen explains. “This
helps us potentially catch issues before they
affect the business. We’re becoming more
predictive. And we’re also shifting our priorities
to take a more end-to-end approach to
managing applications.”
Over time, these changes will drive
improvements in application performance and
uptime.
The company also plans to further enhance
its HP SiteScope deployment by adding new
enhancements and features to its self-service
portal, and further automating event detection
and remediation. “We’ve found HP SiteScope to
be a very cost-effective monitoring solution,”
Gillen says. “We’re pleased at the functionality
and with the way it supports the self-serve
monitoring framework we wanted within our IT
organization.”
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4AA5-1319ENW, February 2014