2 page Case Study - Posted 3/27/2007

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Skyguide

Swiss Air Controller Cuts Monitoring Time While Boosting Service-Level Availability

Skyguide, which monitors all air traffic in Swiss airspace, needed a better way to monitor its management information systems. That’s why it adopted Microsoft® System Center Operations Manager 2007. IT staff save one hour per person per day in faster and more effective monitoring, and availability is up because problems that occur are identified and resolved more quickly.

Business Needs

Nothing moves in Switzerland’s airspace without the approval of Skyguide, the country’s air traffic services provider.

We catch problems before our users see them. That’s a significant way to contribute to our mission. Xavier Coppin Systems Engineer, Skyguide

Among Skyguide’s mission-critical applications are Microsoft® Exchange Server 2007, the SYMA (System Manager) desks, which manage mission-critical systems, and the electronic air traffic management system, which confirms that air traffic controllers have read and signed all relevant briefing materials before each day’s shift.

To monitor this environment, Skyguide has relied in part on Mercury Sitescope—and found it lacking, according to Marcel Graf, Systems Engineer at Skyguide.

“With Sitescope we have to configure all the monitoring points manually,” says Marcel Graf, Systems Engineer, Skyguide. “And once that’s done, we see a lot of false alarms. Each false alarm is time away from something productive we could be doing. Nor do we get end-to-end monitoring, which would allow us to see how our applications and services are performing overall.”
Skyguide executives wanted to increase system availability, to improve the stability of the system, and reduce downtime. For business users, this enhancement would enable them to do their jobs better—including ensuring the safety of the flying public. For Skyguide’s IT staff, greater system stability would mean more time to devote to cost-saving projects, such as server consolidation, and to strategic initiatives such as increasing system availability.

Solution

Skyguide is used to being an aviation pioneer. Now, it’s a pioneer of another type—one of the first organizations to go live with a deployment of Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007, the best-of-breed end-to-end service management solution for Windows-based infrastructures. The company began evaluating a prerelease version of the solution in November 2006 and began production deployment with the software’s release in March 2007.

Skyguide manages System Center Operations Manager 2007 from a single computer, which hosts the database, root management server, and audit collection service. That installation of Operations Manager monitors 30 servers, primarily for Exchange Server, Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005, Windows Server 2003 Active Directory® service, file-and-print servers, and some line-of-business applications.

System Center Operations Manager 2007 monitors more than servers, and Skyguide is taking advantage of that. It is using agentless exception monitoring to monitor all of its desktops. Agentless exception monitoring uses the Windows Error Reporting Watson client to capture and forward errors without having to deploy an agent.

Skyguide is taking advantage of management packs for Exchange Server, SQL Server, Active Directory, and third-party management packs from Hewlett-Packard and Symantec for their best practice knowledge to discover, monitor, troubleshoot, report on, and resolve problems for those specific technologies. The company also is using the management pack authoring tool to create management packs for one of its line-of-business applications.

Benefits

Thanks to System Center Operations Manager 2007, monitoring of Skyguide’s infrastructure is both faster and more effective—and that translates into the higher availability that Skyguide executives wanted, as well as into more time for the IT staff to pursue more productive and strategic objectives, such as a planned server consolidation. The company is able to refine the service-level agreements it provides to internal customers—and even to provide self-service intranet sites so those customers can monitor the SLAs and service-level performance themselves.

The higher availability comes both because the infrastructure experiences fewer problems and because IT staff can solve the problems that do occur more quickly. The Skyguide infrastructure has fewer problems that affect stability because System Center Operations Manager tips off the IT staff before those problems can affect users.

For example, soon after deploying System Center Operations Manager, IT managers used it to analyze their environment and discovered permission issues in Active Directory and misapplied security updates for Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 software—both problems that could have led to operating irregularities or crashes if they were allowed to fester.

Skyguide’s IT professionals are able to solve problems that do occur more quickly because System Center Operations Manager pinpoints their source, eliminating the need to hunt through consoles and event logs, and because the solution’s management packs provide the best practices knowledge needed for quick resolutions.

Skyguide is also seeing higher availability at the desktop thanks to agentless exception monitoring. That benefits users who can work with fewer problems and helpdesk personnel who have fewer problems to resolve.

“We catch problems before our users see them,” says Xavier Coppin, Systems Engineer, Skyguide. “That’s a significant way to contribute to our mission.”

Another benefit of this more productive environment is that Skyguide’s four IT professionals each save one hour per day thanks to System Center Operations Manager. That’s the equivalent of a half-time employee, available to advance proactive projects.

“I’m very happy to see my entire monitoring environment from a single Operations Manager console,” says Graf. “If it’s green, I just go on with my work. I don’t have to go through the series of monitoring tools, event logs, and check lists that consumed so much of my time.”

Nor do Graf and his colleagues have to contend with as many false alarms as they used to—false alarms are down 67 percent with System Center Operations Manager, compared to Sitescope.