ETSA keeps a closer eye on IT

South Australian energy utility ETSA has a new lease on its own IT environment after deploying better management software for the monitoring of its operations that also gives it the ability to take a proactive approach to solving and troubleshooting issues.

Speaking to ZDNet Australia at the Tech.Ed conference on the Gold Coast today, ETSA server support Michael Pell described how the organisation had gone from not knowing what its IT environment looked like to having proactive monitoring control.

About 18 months ago, the organisation started to look at what it could do to better understand and monitor its various systems, since none of them were working as well as they could have.

"We had lots of disparate monitoring solutions. The network team had their own, the Windows team theirs, the [database analysts] theirs, and none of those were talking to each other," he said, adding that the lack of consistency and central monitoring made the jobs of the organisation's service desk department difficult.

"Really, they were working in the dark," he said.

Under ETSA's Microsoft enterprise agreement, the organisation began to use System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) to begin to monitor the organisation's environment. Pell said that it made sense to use SCOM, as it enabled the organisation to continue to make use of its investments in its existing monitoring systems.

However, Pell said that what was missing was the ability to understand what was happening in the virtual environment, saying that while SCOM agents could be placed on virtual machines, there was no understanding of what was happening to the VMWare ESX servers hosting them.

"We didn't know what the ESX hosts were doing, and we didn't know what the data store behind was doing," he said.

Initially, the organisation tried to write its own management pack using a combination of information available over the Simple Network Management Protocol and Windows Management Instrumentation extensions, but Pell said that their efforts were "fruitless", and moved toward searching for a third-party product.

However, Pell said that most of the products that ETSA looked at also had their own databases, servers to run them and additional hardware, which would place extra overheads on the organisation in terms of additional training and extra implementation effort.

In the end, ETSA settled on Veeam nworks, which acts as a bridge between VMWare's server virtualisation management product, vCentre, and the SCOM database. Pell said that it provided seamless integration between the two, and didn't unnecessarily replicate any of the work that other products might.

Pell said that the installation process took 30 minutes and within an hour, he had a whole view of ETSA's environment.

"It's not only managing the virtual machines, it's looking at the whole infrastructure that the virtualisation sits on."

Pell used the example of a configuration error on a host bus adapter card, responsible for connecting a host computer to storage.

"Straight away, support teams get emails and SMS messages that say there's an issue. The big display screens in the operation centre — they've got the topology view from nworks, which gives you a graphical view of the environment — those turns red, and clicking on problem path shows you exactly where the issue lies," he said.

"It just means that we can now troubleshoot issues much more quickly and efficiently, and that's leading now to increased stability within the environment, less downtime and therefore more availability."

Pell also said that the organisation had changed its perception of IT as a business cost due to its ability to find and solve problems more effectively.

"It's made us much more proactive, and rather than just being seen as a cost, we're now seen as a strategic asset within the organisation."

Pell said that while he was happy with the current monitoring setup, he was interested in seeing what SCOM 2012 could offer, with the possibility for it to be rolled out next year.

Michael Lee travelled to Tech.Ed as a guest of Microsoft Australia.