Financial services

Case Study:

MOM-based monitoring at Alexander Forbes

15 May 2008

International financial and risk services provider Alexander Forbes needed a better monitoring solution to improve capacity planning and fault reporting. Dimension Data implemented a Microsoft-based solution in its offices throughout Africa.

Alexander Forbes is a leading provider of financial and risk services internationally, with primary operations based in South Africa and the United Kingdom. A network of subsidiaries and partners ensures that the company provides superior service to customers including small, medium and large organisations, specialist groups and individuals internationally.

However, the company needed to resolve a number of challenges. Its existing monitoring solution was not providing it with the required level of information, with particular concerns centring on capacity planning as well as detailed fault and error reporting. No real knowledge base existed, and the company’s existing solution was extremely expensive. Furthermore, there was no insight into recurring problems in the environment.

With Microsoft partner Dimension Data at its side, Alexander Forbes investigated the Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 management solution as a monitoring tool in a three-month pilot project commissioned in January 2006. The project met with great success, and after extensive planning around operations and architecture, full production deployment began in December 2006 and was completed. The solution was then handed over to operations in February 2007.

Alexander Forbes chose MOM 2005 because it runs mainly Microsoft servers and solutions. This advanced management tool now enables the company to proactively manage 420 servers, including Microsoft Windows servers and applications such as Active Directory, Exchange, SQL, Systems Management Server, and File & Print. “Having a Microsoft management solution made perfect sense, particularly when integrating other products into it to make MOM a ‘manager of managers’ type of solution,” says Andrew Geere, group IT operations manager at Alexander Forbes.

With an extensive number of third-party products and other vendor technologies, out-of-the-box management packs available for MOM 2005 provided best-practice standard compliancy based on years of extensive research from Microsoft and its partners. “MOM 2005 was selected based on its functionality and interoperability with other systems,” says Geere.

The predefined rule sets that were readily available with automatic role-based discovery made it possible to dynamically monitor the environment. A user-friendly interface and customisable monitoring enabled rapid rule-based monitoring expansion, while the broad product base support and community resources were also important.

“MOM 2005 provided alert statistics on all recurring issues,” says Geere. “Capacity base lining was introduced to ensure server health and availability, resulting in maximum server uptime. Incorrectly configured environmental settings were identified. MOM 2005 addressed all shortcomings and provided far richer functionality to monitor Microsoft systems and applications.”

A current outsourcing agreement between the two companies means that Dimension Data has detailed knowledge of the Alexander Forbes environment. The Microsoft solutions line of business had the required skills to plan and complete the initial implementation and successfully hand over to operations and Dimension Data.

“The implementation of the product to monitor the Alexander Forbes core server base went reasonably quickly with no disruption to business process,” says Geere. “The monitoring solution has been proactively customised to suite the IT environment through various script automation and workflow notification procedures and models. A two-level threshold-type monitoring scenario has been created to identify potential problems and to alert on failed issues. Alert numbers have decreased by 80 per cent from implementation.”

MOM 2005 has significantly decreased the administration tasks conducted on a daily, weekly and monthly schedule by the Dimension Data Centres of Excellence (CoE) teams. About 90 per cent of all tasks have been automated and the results are available via the MOM reporting facility. “The spare time is now used to fine-tune the environment and provide more innovation,” says Geere.

The operator console has become the single reference point for the CoE teams for error correction and root cause analysis. MOM 2005 has also refined the ITIL and Microsoft operations framework. Problem management has been centralised.

“MOM 2005 has laid down a solid foundation for the proceeding preparation geared towards the next generation of system centre operations manager based on object-oriented monitoring as defined by the service-orientated architecture model,” says Geere. Alexander Forbes plans to develop distributed application monitoring and configuration management based on the distributed model. The service level agreement structure is to change from response-based to performance-based.

“Financial value can now be attached to IT objects,” says Geere. “This translates into business revenue versus operational costs. Business will have a better understanding of the services provided by IT, thus exposing what proactive measures are in place to guarantee stability in the environment.”