What the firm needs to monitor goes far beyond the typical SNMP-based data that most companies rely on. To establish and maintain reliable connectivity with corporate and government assets in the world’s most remote locations, its satellite-based network utilizes a range of protocols and data types that are beyond the capabilities of traditional network monitoring systems.
In recent years, the firm’s Network Operations team had made several upgrades to its operational support systems (OSS) to both broaden and improve services available to customers and their challenging operations, such as cargo ships at sea, airliners in mid-flight and activities at the remotest of locations.
Despite these improvements, the team was still experiencing difficulties with gathering, normalizing and analyzing performance data. With its unusual operating environment and its array of disparate and non-standard data types, the team too often had to manually cobble together data from different subsystems in order to correlate it to a particular device or other network resource.
Simply put, the firm wanted a more efficient and effective way to collect and analyze all of its performance data so performance issues could be diagnosed and remediated quickly, before growing into customer-impacting events.
That’s when the team turned to IBM® SevOne® Network Performance Management (NPM).
The team had made earlier upgrades to its network performance and event management capabilities, including significant investments in the IBM Cloud Pak® for Watson AIOps solution. With IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps, IT and the NetOps team get cross-domain correlation, enrichment and consolidation of high volumes of alerts and alarms and other operational data in a single dashboard.
The problem for the team wasn’t the analysis and subsequent remediation actions based on incoming alerts, alarms and other performance event data. Its fundamental challenge was getting all of its data into a single place and cohesive format so that it could then take advantage of IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps’ strong capabilities. It was a problem that was familiar to the team, which faced real complexities when it tried to process and utilize all of its data, including its many non-standard data types in a unified manner.
SevOne NPM’s unmatched flexibility and scalability gave the team an effective way to get past its roadblock. Using a Kafka-based resource as a middle ground, SevOne NPM was able to take in a range of Kafka streams containing data in non-standard forms, including satellite-specific formats and IoT data. Once all the performance data was gathered via the Kafka/SevOne NPM tie-in, it could be ported it into IBM Netcool® Operations Insight software (now the Event Manager component of IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps) seamlessly for rapid advances analysis and action.
Thanks to SevOne NPM's flexibility and scalability, the team had all of its performance data in one place and in a single, IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps-friendly format.
