Banverket

Swedish Railway Authority Improves IT Operations with End-to-End Service Monitoring

Banverket’s IT infrastructure helps keep Sweden’s train services in operation, and thus requires uncompromised service availability. Upgrading to Microsoft® System Center Operations Manager 2007 gave the company the ability to model and monitor IT services that rely on distributed systems as an end-to-end service, centralized collection of security log events on servers, and a consolidated management console. Banverket has combined System Center Operations Manager 2007 with Microsoft partner solutions from AVIcode, Citrix, HP, and SecureVantage to increase the reach and usefulness of its monitoring environment. Used together, Operations Manager 2007 and the partner solutions are improving IT productivity and service management, giving Banverket a better understanding of application performance and quality, and helping it build comprehensive security auditing and reporting solutions.

 

Situation

Banverket, the Swedish Rail Administration, is the authority responsible for operating and managing the country’s railways; coordinating local, regional, and inter-regional railway traffic; and railway-related research and development. Banverket supports not only conventional railways but also underground railways and light rail systems—altogether more than 10,000 kilometers of track that must be properly managed to keep trains running smoothly and safely.

Most of Banverket’s administrative IT network runs on some 400 HP servers running the Windows® 2000 Server and Windows Server® 2003 operating systems, which support everything from financial and human resources systems to custom-developed applications that monitor the location of trains or warn if rails have been exposed to risk of damage. With so many mission-critical systems and applications, the demands for uncompromised IT service availability are high.
 
“Railway operations are a matter of community service and safety, and must function virtually around the clock,” says Pontus Blomkvist, IT Architect at Banverket. “If the supporting systems aren’t working properly, there is a risk that train services will have to be suspended. Because of that, we continuously strive for more efficient operational monitoring and shorter fault-detection times.”

In 2005, as a step toward that goal, Banverket moved from the multiple standalone monitoring tools it had been using—namely, software from Computer Associates and HP—to an enterprisewide IT monitoring solution based on Microsoft® Operations Manager 2005. Although Operations Manager 2005 gave Banverket a single view of the health of its servers and the applications running on them, the company knew it could benefit from additional capabilities.

Solution

Banverket is upgrading from Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 to Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 and taking advantage of its new and improved features to improve service-level management, collect and consolidate security data, and improve IT staff efficiency. Furthermore, Banverket is extending its use of System Center Operations Manager 2007 through the use of third-party partner solutions, which enable the company to just as easily monitor non-Microsoft software, keep a continual watch on server and storage hardware health, and efficiently collect and archive large volumes of security data.

“Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 was a very useful solution, but System Center Operations Manager 2007 is even better,” says Blomqvist. “Not only has the functionality and usability in Operations Manager improved significantly, but the range and usefulness of third-party solutions have also increased dramatically. Add in the ease of upgrading, and it’s pretty obvious why we’re getting an early start at deploying Operations Manager 2007.”

New and Improved Capabilities

Some ways in which Banverket is taking advantage of new or enhanced features in System Center Operations Manager 2007 include:

• Improved focus on service management. In previous versions of Operations Manager, monitoring was focused on individual server health and did not take into account the distributed nature of many of today’s enterprise applications and services. Banverket will use the new service management–based features in System Center Operations Manager 2007 to graphically model distributed applications that rely on many servers as end-to-end services, and to monitor those applications and services with the same ease as it monitors a single server.
• Centralized security logging. Banverket will use the new Audit Collection Service (ACS) in System Center Operations Manager 2007 to gather security log entries from all Windows-based servers in real time and consolidate them in a centralized database for easy access and reporting—as a way to investigate potential security incidents or meet security audit requirements.
• Consolidated management console. System administrators and others involved in the configuration and use of System Center Operations Manager 2007 will all use the same management console, which replaces the separate administrator, operator, and reporting consoles in Operations Manager 2005. The new consolidated console has a look and feel similar to Microsoft Office Outlook® messaging and collaboration client for ease of use, and uses role-based security to help make sure that each type of user has access to only the functionality and data for which they have clearance.

Banverket is using System Center Operations Manager 2007 together with several Operations Manager management packs from Microsoft, including those for Windows 2000 Server, Windows Server 2003, Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, SQL Server™ 2000, SQL Server 2005, Internet Information Services 6.0, Active Directory® directory service, Core Networking Services, Internet Security and Acceleration Server, and Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003. Based on expertise from the same Microsoft teams that developed those products, each management pack provides a set of monitoring rules with predefined event trigger thresholds, a built-in knowledge base with troubleshooting and resolution information, and scripts that can be used to quickly and efficiently resolve issues.

Extended Operations Manager 2007 Core Capabilities with Partner Solutions

Banverket is augmenting the functionality provided by Microsoft software with third-party partner solutions, four of which include:

• AVIcode .NET Management Pack, which enables real-time monitoring of applications based on the Microsoft .NET Framework, including visibility into code failures and faulty application components, performance issues, and security and connectivity issues. Through those capabilities, Banverket is able to gain a comprehensive view of application behavior and more easily diagnose application problems in production environments.
• HP Server and HP StorageWorks Management Packs, which Banverket uses to detect hardware issues, monitor performance, and improve hardware life-cycle management for its hundreds of ProLiant servers and five Enterprise Virtual Array SANs.
• Citrix Presentation Server Management Pack, which supports System Center Operations Manager 2007 features for service-oriented state monitoring and automatic topology discovery. Banverket is using it to monitor the five servers that Banverket uses to provide external vendors—such as those who run the trains and maintain the tracks—with remote access to internal applications.
• SecureVantage ACS Archival Loader, which provides historical archiving and reporting capabilities for security log data collected through the System Center Operations Manager 2007 Audit Collection Service. Banverket will use the solution as a long-term data store and reporting framework, as required to help meet its internal security policies and audit requirements.

“The management packs for Operations Manager 2007 are significantly improved over earlier versions, offering more and better information on the health of applications and potential causes of any problems,” says Blomqvist. “In addition, the troubleshooting guidance provided in most management packs has also improved a good deal.”

In addition, because System Center Operations Manager 2007 supports the entire Simple Network Management Protocol version 2 (SNMPv2), which provides a means to monitor and control network devices, Banverket is also able to easily monitor and manage systems such as its BorderWare MXtreme firewall.

Deployment and Timeline

Banverket’s upgrade to System Center Operations Manager 2007 is made easy by taking advantage of its flexible side-by-side migration model, in which the company is able to run it alongside Operations Manager 2005 on the same physical servers. Similarly, Banverket is running dual monitoring agents on some 260 servers. The company plans to fully transition to System Center Operations Manager 2007 in August 2007, at which time it will decommission the Operations Manager 2005 components on the servers and leave Operations Manager 2007 components in place.

Not only has the functionality and usability in Operations Manager improved significantly, but the range and usefulness of third-party solutions have also increased dramatically. Pontus Blomqvist, IT Architect, Banverket

Banverket is running the HP Server management pack and the ACS agent on some 250 servers, with plans to increase that number to all 320 servers now monitored with Operations Manager 2005. The company is running the Citrix management pack on all five servers in its Citrix server farm, and is running the AVIcode .NET management pack on 20 servers—primarily Web servers that host Microsoft ASP.NET applications. In addition, Banverket set up six client PCs in remote locations around the country and is using the synthetic transaction features of System Center Operations Manager 2007 to monitor end-user service levels from those locations. (Synthetic transactions refer to the ability to have a remote client simulate an actual end user request, capture the response, and report back on it, thereby providing a way to monitor the service level provided to a typical end user.)

Benefits

Banverket is taking advantage of the new features and capabilities provided by System Center Operations Manager 2007 to improve its focus on—and ability to meet—IT service levels and increase IT productivity. Furthermore, by combining the capabilities provided by Operations Manager 2007 with partner solutions that enable the monitoring of hardware and non-Microsoft software, Banverket can extend the reach of Operations Manager 2007 to cover essentially all of its IT infrastructure and mission-critical systems.

Increased Reach and Usefulness of Monitoring Environment

Banverket’s use of third-party management packs enables the company to easily monitor third-party software and hardware. For example, the HP management packs provide real-time visibility into the health of the servers and storage units upon which the company’s mission-critical systems rely, to help ensure that a failing hard disk drive can be detected and addressed with the same tools and processes as a backed-up e-mail message queue. Similarly, the AVIcode and Citrix management packs help ensure that internal applications are running smoothly, and that external users can access them remotely. The SNMPv2 support in System Center Operations Manager 2007 helps to extend that same reach and visibility to systems such as its BorderWare MXtreme firewall.

“Third-party software companies are seeing the same thing that we are, that Operations Manager provides great value, and the smart ones are making sure that they have a management pack available,” says Blomqvist. “In fact, they probably view it much as I do—as a key selling point for their solutions. It was very easy to work with multiple software partners to develop an end-to-end solution, which shows that Microsoft and its partners are working very closely together to deliver a consistent message and make sure that Operations Manager is easily extensible.”

Enhanced Focus on Service Levels

By combining service-management features in System Center Operations Manager 2007 with the broad reach provided by various Microsoft and third-party management packs and SNMPv2-based monitoring, Banverket can model the distributed systems and applications within its IT infrastructure as end-to-end services that it delivers to the rest of the business. “Our user base shouldn’t have to care about the internal workings of our IT infrastructure—that’s our responsibility,” says Blomqvist. “Instead, they care about their ability to do their own jobs, whether that’s accessing their e-mail or remotely connecting to an application. We can now get a single view of distributed applications and monitor them in a way that more closely reflects user needs. Through that capability, we’ll be able to refine our service-level agreements and better deliver on them.”

Continues Blomqvist, “For example, I can create a monitoring model for the entire e-mail pipeline by using the SNMPv2 monitoring capabilities to monitor our e-mail firewall, the Exchange Server and Active Directory management packs to monitor Exchange Server itself (and the directory service upon which it relies), HP management packs to monitor server and storage hardware supporting all those different pipeline components, and synthetic transactions deployed to remote ‘watcher’ nodes to monitor the end-user perspective. Even though Operations Manager is individually monitoring more than a dozen distributed components, it still gives me a holistic, end-to-end view of overall service availability—a single answer to the question ‘Can users get their e-mail?,’ which is what they really care about. And if there is an issue, I can just as easily identify where the specific problem lies and how to fix it.”

Improved Application Performance and Quality

In addition to helping monitor Microsoft .NET applications for problems, both individually and as part of end-to-end services, Blomqvist and his team use the AVIcode management pack to better understand the behavior of those applications. For example, IT personnel can use it to see actual run-time values for function parameters, local variables, and  member variables, or to view the actual queries submitted by an application to a Microsoft SQL Server database.

“The AVIcode management pack not only enables us to see if an application is running poorly, but also enables us to identify the responsible code,” says Blomqvist. “With that capability, operations personnel can identify problems with an application and feed that data back directly to developers.”

Comprehensive Security Auditing and Reporting Solutions

Another reason for Banverket’s upgrade to System Center Operations Manager 2007 was to increase its ability to collect, consolidate, and report on security log events from individual servers. The ACS capability provided by Operations Manager 2007 is turned into a complete solution through the use of third-party software such as the SecureVantage ACS Archival Loader, which makes it easy to archive the data collected by the service and report on it.

Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 was a very useful solution, but System Center Operations Manager 2007 is even better. Pontus Blomqvist, IT Architect, Banverket

“With Operations Manager 2007 and SecureVantage software, we’ll be able to easily collect and archive two years worth of security log data from all servers for easy access and reporting,” says Blomqvist. “We haven’t decided specifically how to take advantage of that capability yet, but I can think of lots of things we can build to help improve security and satisfy internal and external audit requirements.”

Enhanced IT Productivity

Banverket is taking advantage of System Center Operations Manager 2007 to improve IT productivity. Its service-level management features will help IT personnel to more efficiently monitor service levels and prioritize actions if something goes wrong, and a single console to monitor hardware, Microsoft software, and non-Microsoft applications will save time when interacting with the system. Instead of having to use separate administrator, operator, and reporting consoles, all users will have a single place to go for all tasks, with built-in role-based security to help ensure that each user is limited to only the features and data that he or she is authorized to access.

“Everything is made accessible on the same console, which saves a considerable amount of time in terms of fault detection and reaction,” says Blomqvist. “If people need to switch between monitoring the systems and building a report, they’ll no longer need to switch between consoles. As we switch over to Operations Manager 2007, we’ll be able to easily delegate tasks and control access to the system accordingly.”

Improved Railway Safety and Operations

By using System Center Operations Manager 2007 and third-party partner solutions to monitor its distributed applications, which include both Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies, Banverket is able to deliver higher levels of service to the rest of the business—in turn helping users of those distributed applications to keep Sweden’s railways running smoothly and safely.

“We’re a service provider to the rest of the business,” says Blomqvist. “Operations Manager 2007 and its many partner solutions give us a single view across the Microsoft and non-Microsoft software we use to run our business, as well as the ability to monitor the IT services based on that software from an end-user perspective. Not only does that help save us time, but it enables us to solve problems faster and keep our resources focused on where they’re needed most.”

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