The government of New Caledonia used a single solution to monitor 5,000 pieces of equipment with 100,000 metrics checked every 5 minutes.
Name of Organization: The Office of Post and Telecommunications of New Caledonia
Industry: Postal and telecommunications
Location: Nouméa, New Caledonia
Opportunity or Challenge Encountered:
While telecommunications, mobile computing, financial services and package and parcel delivery are distinct lines of business, each with their own market leaders, some smaller nations rely on a single organization to provide the entire range of services. Such is the case in the French territory of New Caledonia, which has a single agency that oversees a variety of services for its 262,000 citizens.
Thus, the territory’s Office of Post and Telecommunications of New Caledonia (OPT-NC) cannot afford to have downtime, or be blind to events across its networks. The agency needed away to be able to monitor its wide diversity of operations — extending from telecommunications to financial services to mail services — across New Caledonia, a territory of France on a large island nation east of Australia.
OPT-NC operates across a wide range of sectors deployed across the entire territory. With many different types of infrastructure, equipment and applications — and given that the service level delivered needs to be constantly high –- the agency needed a centralized IT monitoring solution with which it could monitor equipment and processes in real time. Using analytics, this would enable service teams to address any potential network or equipment problems before they happen.
How This Opportunity or Challenge Was Met:
For real time monitoring of infrastructure, OPT-NC’s IT division turned to French company Centreon’s EMS IT monitoring solution. The implementation was part of a project aimed at attaining a 360° view of its networks, services and systems.
The solution was designed to “monitor our telecom solutions, data centers, applications and technical buildings using the same tool and the same console, some 5,000 pieces of equipment and 40,000 Centreon services (indicators), for around 100,000 metrics checked on average every 5 minutes,” according to Philippe Roy, project director with OPT-NC, quoted in the case study. “In our technical buildings, for example, we have a real time overall view of our telecom equipment, building access, humidity, temperature, but also electrical power.”
Operational teams and experts provide the first level of monitoring, comprising a monitoring cell of seven employees. These employees monitor the indicators and take the strain off the operational teams who only have a general view of their IT systems. Management, operational and sales divisions are also occasional users of the monitoring data.
The 24×7 monitoring infrastructure has been in place since January 2017. In the near future, the team plans to expand the effort to all the agency’s business activities, and eventually make the monitoring console available to some clients and partners.
Benefits From This Initiative:
The monitoring solution has resulted in more efficient teams and standardized practices, OPT-NC managers report. The monitoring system is also now linked to its SMS platform, which enables it to send messages to staff on call. “This gives us a unique repository for our technicians who also get very relevant analysis for incidents before they are dealt with,” says Roy. Another interesting integration: the solution’s ability to interface with a big data tool which generates a dynamic report sent to operational teams and central management. In time, the monitoring data will also feed into a company business intelligence with the aim of improving communication with the operational divisions.”
The project also improved the effectiveness and proactivity of teams. “We have gone from ‘repairing’ to ‘preventing’ incidents,” says Roy. “We are able to identify the problems before they occur, with strong indicators to monitor and maintain the service level agreements and have standardized our practices.”
Another benefit is an increase in the number of indicators — almost 100,000 metrics are now checked every five minutes — and the ability to monitor them. In this way, different dedicated indicators have been created and are monitored via FM radio broadcasts over several sites, providing precise data on the service availability per radio and per site.
(Source: Centreon)
