The Challenge

A utility company wanted to adopt a structured, proactive approach to IT Service Management. The key objectives were to improve service availability, gain more control over the fault isolation process and to introduce real-time reporting capabilities. A solution was required that kept pace with changes to a widely distributed and constantly evolving network infrastructure and pinpointed faults to allow support teams to respond quickly. The customer wanted to avoid situations where outages were reported by end-users.

The Solution

Pirean helped the customer implement and bring to production status IBM Tivoli OMNIbus and Network Manager. The solution enables the customer to gain a clear visibility of key network events and ensure that uptime is optimised for critical business services. A customised big screen view provides a geographic map of over 50 sites, with a user-friendly "traffic light" system showing the status of each site at a glance. Operators are now alerted to critical outages before they are reported by end-users and the customer is able to pro-actively notify the providers of their outsourced MPLS network of any problems. False positives have been reduced by the introduction of custom rules which only trigger an alarm if certain events occur more frequently than pre-defined thresholds. Changes to the network are automatically detected and standard monitoring applied to new devices with little or no operator intervention.