Are all the web services up and running? Is the water usage filled in correctly by the client? Are they correctly handled by our IT infrastructure? Are all the operational tasks received correctly on the touch pads of the mobile workers? To help our client answer those questions we built a monitoring application to provide operational analytics.
Client background
This water services company is responsible for delivering water to +3 million households in +150 municipalities and offers many water-services to industry and companies. Typical challenges in this industry are ensuring high quality drink water, constantly innovating the technology to keep distribution costs low and making maintenance more efficient.
The challenge: End-to-end monitoring of primary processes
Our client is a front-runner in using digitisation for its operations, meaning they are becoming more and more dependent on their digital processes. A major part of IT is outsourced to specialised companies. To remain in control, this client wanted to monitor primary processes across all parties (end to end) to ensure they run successfully. Both technical (do processes work without errors?) and functional (are all work-orders synced on the tablets of the mobile workers?) monitoring was needed. This monitoring of course needed to result in reporting. These reports include average responses of services, error rates, etc.
The solution: Monitoring and operational analytics with the Elastic Stack
Devoteam presented the Elastic stack as a solution that would fit our client’s purposes best. The Elastic stack is a very flexible platform for monitoring and operational analytics. It provides a data collection tool called “Beats”, which can collect data from almost anywhere. This data is processed by “Logstash“, and stored in “Elasticsearch“. The Elasticsearch data-store is also very flexible, and can be used as a data source for “Kibana (Elastic’s own visualisation tool). Elasticsearch can also serve as a data-source for BI, which enables the use for advanced reporting and analytics using the client’s own BI tooling.
Devoteam has provided this client with solutions that are monitoring their day-to-day operations. Incidents are resolved faster due to early alerting (from Kibana “watches”) and they now have better troubleshooting because of Kibana dashboarding.
Improve Operational Analytics with Devoteam
Our teams can collect data from virtually any source, combine it, store it, and put it to use in our customer’s organisation. We offer a unique combination of expertise, with elements of DevOps (monitoring), and Data & Analytics (functional/operational analytics and data integration).
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