T-Systems is one of the world's largest SAP managed services provider headquartered in Europe with operations and staff over 35,000 people in 20 countries. In the second half of 2018, T-Systems Singapore migrated Zuellig Pharma to the world's largest SAP HANA on public cloud infrastructure running on Microsoft Azure. T-Systems partnered with IT-Conductor for this journey to provide a cloud-first solution to Application Performance Management (APM) due to IT-Conductor's unique Monitoring as a Service platform and automated agentless technology.
T-Systems architecture team first approached IT-Conductor with the challenge to provide continuous monitoring of over 40 applications and complete infrastructure stack for SAP ABAP and JAVA. These applications included ECC, CRM, SCM/APO, BW, EWM, PO/PI, GRC, SLT, BPC, SLD, TREX, Livecache and Webdispatcher based on HANA and SUSE Linux with Pacemaker HA clustering on Azure platform. At that point Zuellig Pharma has been managed on-prem by T-Systems for several years using a combination of monitoring and ITSM tools such as a suite of BMC Software products, IBM Netcool, HP Service Manager, SAP CCMS, and home-grown software/scripts. There were significant difficulties for T-Systems to re-implement those tools in the target environment on Azure including:
IT-Conductor promptly rose to the challenge and within a couple quick online live demos it was able to demonstrate the full-featured monitoring capabilities of applications, databases, OS and virtualization infrastructure. IT-Conductor highlighted the unique features and benefits of its platform using "10 Ways to Smart Automation"
To prove IT-Conductor's speed and agility, a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) plan was formalized in conjunction with T-Systems' ongoing migration project, to monitor the newly migrated development systems which represented variety of different application architecture. T-Systems provided a list of system connection information, along with a custom list of monitoring thresholds and alert requirements. Within 2 weeks, IT-Conductor's remote service team configured the following:
The PoC acceptance period and knowledge transfer for usage and administration tasks took an additional 2 weeks with minimal support work from IT-Conductor. The minimal cost for the PoC would be fully credited to the deployment when the decision was made by T-Systems and Zuellig Pharma to proceed with IT-Conductor as the APM-as-a-Service (APMaaS) partner of choice.
T-Systems migration of Zuellig Pharma systems from on-prem SAP on UNIX/DB2 to Azure SAP on Linux/HANA was accomplished with SAP tool SUM DMO (Software Update Manager - Database Migration Option) and phased over several waves: Sandbox, Development, QA, Pre-production and Production. IT-Conductor was pre-configured for each wave with best practices monitoring templates, along with global threshold and alert templates, then activated to monitor systems as they came online in Azure. Each go-live was fully supported by IT-Conductor 24x7 global team to work remotely in tandem with T-Systems and Zuellig Pharma teams.
In addition to monitoring the Availability, Performance and Alerts for the complex SAP landscape on Azure, IT-Conductor provided further support during the pre-golive testing of performance, HA failover, and security firewall. In post-golive, IT-Conductor works with T-Systems continuously to support the monitoring, performance analysis, root-cause analysis for critical events, customizing of dashboards, automated SLA reports, capacity reports, and custom monitoring of areas like Pacemaker cluster.
In summary, T-Systems was able to achieve immense success with the migration and management of Zuellig Pharma's very large SAP landscape to Azure, while IT-Conductor partnered with T-Systems to enable the delivery of high quality service level and performance management using its unique cloud-based APMasS automation platform.
