Monitoring as a Service (MaaS) Case Study Large Retail Company Executive Summary: Large Retail Company successfully relies on Goliath Technologies to ensure availability of WebSphere Message Broker and MQ Environments during peak holiday season www.goliathtechnologies.com
Key Challenges Peak holiday season coming up (high volume of transactions) Prior problems with high volumes and quickly trouble-shooting issues Unsupported WMB and MQ Environments Need for WMB and MQ expertise Solution Overview Upgrade WMB and MQ to supported levels Products and Expertise to provide 24/7 WMB and MQ Monitoring and Support Knowledge transfer, best practices, and expertise for new business and technology requirements Key Results and Benefits 24/7 availability of WMB & MQ Environments Significant performance improvements Supported, Reliable WMB and MQ Platforms Reliable, Proven, Trusted ongoing partnership established between company and Goliath Background Rapidly approaching the holiday season, a major retail company contacted Goliath Technologies to assist with a challenge. The company is responsible for satisfying millions of customers during this time. The company was running on an unsupported WebSphere Message Broker (WMB) version 6 in their production environments that were supporting their critical retail stores and web based operations. They also had major components of their HR and backend warehouse systems running on these Brokers and MQ environments. 2
Figure 1: WebSphere Message Broker Environment before migration The company also experienced significant downtime, performance degradation, and delays in order processing the prior year and was determined to prevent it from ever happening again. Availability and reliability of this software infrastructure is essential for the company to effectively conduct business (including retail POS transactions), and any outage, downtime or reduction in performance has measurable and significant business impact. For this reason, ensuring the continued availability and effective operation of WebSphere Message Broker is a business critical need. Based on the increase in business expected during the holiday season, the company required getting their production WMB environments to a supported, recommended level and required comprehensive, 24/7 Monitoring and Support of their Production WMB environments during their peak season. 3
Solution The retail company trusted Goliath Technologies with their challenge and confidently left their concerns in our hands. Goliath Technologies worked with company to implement and successfully execute a reliable plan to upgrade to WebSphere Message Broker v8 and MQ v7 and then provide our managed service offering of 24/7 monitoring and support during their peak holiday season to ensure 100% availability of the WMB and MQ environments supporting their critical business applications. This monitoring and support included: Deploying Goliath Technologies Monitor product for WMB and MQ monitoring and complete System Monitoring of servers and resources. Defining clear SLA, incident levels, and support model for escalations and reporting. Proactive monitoring of the WebSphere Message Broker and MQ Production environments Incident management and resolution of production issues Weekly, management-level reporting on incidents, environment health and related metrics Maintenance, troubleshooting, and development resolutions for the WMB Production environments 4
Figure 2: WebSphere Message Broker after migration Outcome By trusting Goliath, the company was able to operate continuously and efficiently throughout the peak holiday season. Goliath helped them reach their requirements of 24/7 availability and high performance of WebSphere Message Broker and MQ supporting their critical systems. Based on this success, the company continued to engage Goliath to not only provide 24/7 monitoring and support, but also work with their team to provide subject matter expertise, development support, and knowledge transfer as company looks to continue to optimize their overall architecture and support additional business requirements. 5