Engineering a BMC PATROL data superhighway to the Cloud

Mike Smith , Senior Software Consultant at Interlink Software talks about how he’s helping one of our customers move tothe Cloud, taking their PATROL monitoring capability with them –intact.

To reduce IT costs, cut down on the burden of managing and maintaining on-premise systems, many of our customers  are moving to the Cloud.

One customer (a big name in the utilities industry) I’ve been working with lately is in the process of migrating all their compatible infrastructure from a hybrid physical data centre / private cloud environment to Microsoft’s Azure platform.

Moving their Interlink Software Automated Service Intelligence (ASI) IT operations management environment is part and parcel of the migration too.

The customer uses ASI to align the management of technology with business needs –instead of managing IT as a collection of infrastructure components.Integration with their systems, applications, and event management tool (BMC’s PATROL) is pivotal.

PATROL monitors the status of all the vital resources in their environment, equating to 60 message channels supporting 800 BMC PATROL agents running on machines across their environment.

Agent data feeds into their real-time and historical service visualization dashboards – giving frontline IT ops people a business view of infrastructure health. Essential stuff for keeping their millions of customers happy!

The Migration Challenge

They needed us to migrate their ASI environment in to Azure without losing any of the existing functionality and logic they’ve invested heavily in over the years.

They’re using a variety of message channel types, most of which are point to point between ASI and IT operations management tools for provisioning and application performance monitoring etc.

Early on we realised that a ‘lift and shift’ approach wouldn’t work for the 60 message channels supporting the 800 agents deployed in their existing environment. It would require engineering network connectivity for EACH of the 800 agents.

Engineering this large number of connections is feasible – but would create a substantial administrative overhead to maintain. This would also require a firewall configuration and could pose a risk to network security.

An SSH Tunnel to the Cloud

The solution was for us to design and engineer a collector to act as a proxy for their existing connections and message channels.

The PATROL integration will run on a remote server – then channel data securely via a Secure Shell (SSH) tunnel through to ASI in Azure – or a PATROL data superhighway to the Cloud you might say.

This project has proved to be a success of two halves –

A secure cost-effective way of maintaining management during the Azure migration.

Leaving them with the ability to continue to monitor legacy equipment that can’t be migrated.

Mike has 37 years’ experience in the infrastructure and network management field. Before joining us, he was Service Owner for all aspects of Enterprise / NetworkManagement at SSE Enterprise Telecoms.

Planning your move to the cloud? Contact us about your monitoring requirements HERE

More from Mike

Sourcing & Processing Data for 360-Degree Visualization of Service Health

PATROL is a trademark of BMC Software, Inc.,

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