Business Challenges
The T-Systems architecture team first approached the IT Conductor team with the challenge of providing continuous monitoring of over 40 applications and a 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:
- Software licensing cost on the new platform to monitor HANA
- Single solution support for the entire environment
- Deployment of SME resources since the effort would be significant and take away existing resources dedicated to operations support and the migration project
- Deployment timeline and configuration effort required for new technology like HANA, Pacemaker, and Azure
Solutions
IT-Conductor promptly rose to the challenge. In a few quick online live demos, we demonstrated the full-featured monitoring capabilities of applications, databases, OS, and virtualization infrastructure. IT-Conductor highlighted the unique features and benefits of our 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 various application architectures. T-Systems provided a list of system connection information and a custom list of monitoring thresholds and alert requirements. Within 2 weeks, IT-Conductor's remote service team configured the following:
- Monitoring for SAP systems identified for SAP ECC, EWM, CRM, PI, SCM, and Solution Manager
- Warning and critical thresholds
- Subscriptions for alerts and notifications
- Custom dashboards
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 T-Systems and Zuellig Pharma decided 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 and global threshold and alert templates. Then, it was activated to monitor systems as they came online in Azure. Each go-live was fully supported by the IT-Conductor 24x7 global team to work remotely 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 dashboards, automated SLA reports, capacity reports, and custom monitoring of areas like Pacemaker cluster.
In summary, T-Systems achieved 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.
