Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As a commercial pilot landing at night on an unfamiliar runway, the last thing you want is a cockpit alarm telling you the passenger in 14A wants more ice in their soda. You need to concentrate on the job at hand. At that critical moment in flight, you only want visibility into the alarms that matter. It’s the same with your monitoring environment. Too often, you can be overwhelmed by a tsunami of alarms—thousands of monitoring alerts that all point to the same problem.

BASF is the largest chemical producer in the world with a revenue of EUR 59bn, 247 manufacturing sites and 110,000 employees. BASF’s Coatings division employs 11,000 people and develops, produces and markets innovative solutions for automotive OEM and automotive refinish coatings and industrial coatings as well as architectural coatings and related coating processes.

IT organizations are challenged with delivering quick, effective resolution to customers’ database, hardware or software downtime issues. Contractually binding service-level agreements (SLAs) place further pressure on IT engineers to accelerate incident resolution time and minimize downtime. Though engineers are obligated to meet their SLAs, they are unable to do so without the help of an automated alerting system.

Grafana is as open source analytics and interactive visualization application. You can connect different data sources to display chart and graphs or even trigger alerts. Wouldn’t it be great to add information about SIGNL4 alerts or about who is on call as part of your dashboard? In this case you immediately get an overview about open, acknowledged, and closed alerts per category. Of you can see wo it currently on duty. Here is an example with a who-is-on call, and an alert overview panel.

“Thanks to Enterprise Alert and the acknowledgement function, we can track the alerting and response digitally and have the certainty that our employees always take care of incidents in our critical IT infrastructure in a timely manner. IT alerting with Derdack, which has to be documented according to BaFin KRITIS, is highly reliable.”, Markus Reusch, Product Owner Monitoring, Debeka