gw cs swiss life eng 2014

Cost Savings and Expanded Monitoring FunctionalityFor more than 150 years, Swiss Life has been a leading provider of life insurance and pensions, and has therefore gained unique expertise in the field. As number 1 in this market, the Group offers companies and private individuals optimal solutions for all life and pension requirements and risk situations.

Swiss Life has earned the trust of more than one million people by providing occupational and private life and pension solutions. Swiss Life is headquartered in Zurich. The Group employs 7,500 people worldwide. The IT department at headquarters with 150 employees supports about 1000 servers in the Zurich data centers.

An IT failure with its many services for internal employees and external field staff would severely harm the business and also have negative financial repercussions. Proactive, forward-thinking monitoring is therefore absolutely essential, though at any price.

Before November 2011 Swiss Life used a Big Four monitoring solution to track its systems. However, the version used at the time had reached end-of-life and needed to be upgraded and migrated to a new OS platform. The expenses for this migration and the associated licensing costs would have put a heavy burden on the IT budget for 2011. Prior to this time, maintenance costs for the solution reached a substantial six-figure amount, thus offering huge opportunities for optimization to lower annual recurring costs.

Swiss Life IT managers started looking for options, including in the Open Source business world. The goal of the new monitoring solution was to lower licensing, support and operational costs while maintaining or improving functionality. In other words, quality and cost-benefit ratio had to be right.

Internal tests with Open Source-based solutions showed that the monitoring functionality would largely fulfill the requirements. However, it very quickly became clear that pure Open Source-based solutions such as Nagios Core or Icinga Classic would not be able to satisfy requirements like reporting, scaling, dashboards, manageability, support etc. These would impose considerable additional efforts and involve internal development. For these reasons, the IT Management decided in favor of a commercial Open Source-based solution, and to implement this with a Swiss partner company.

The product GroundWork Monitor Enterprise was selected for its functional, price-related and technical parameters. Together with Swiss partner company RealStuff Informatik AG, the replacement of the Big Four solution was planned and implemented. The project timeline of just under 6 months was accomplished on schedule, and on December 1st, 2011 the production went live.

Case Study: Swiss Life Switzerland

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As part of Monitoring Lifecycles in 2011 Swiss Life made the leap and went with an Open Source solution. The existing monitoring platform was replaced by the Groundwork Monitor product.

Richard Huber, Managing Director, RealStuff Informatik AG

2014 GroundWork, Inc. All rights reserved.

The new monitoring platform includes a GroundWork Monitor Enterprise parent server as well as child servers for load distribution. Additional requirements that were added during the introductory phase were also completely satisfied. In addition to the planned monitoring of Microsoft Windows, Linux and AIX systems, Oracle DB, VMware, SAP, UCS and SAN infrastructure, it was decided during the implementation to replace the existing network monitoring tool and monitor the entire network infrastructure with Cacti, which is integrated in GroundWork Monitor. The introduction of Microsoft System Center Operation Manager was stopped, and today other Microsoft products such as Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory, Sharepoint etc. are monitored exclusively with GroundWork Monitor Enterprise. A bidirectional interface to BMC ARS Remedy was implemented, and tickets are now being generated automatically.

Metrics AIX Server Linux Server Windows Server including Active

Directory Server, Exchange Server, Citrix Server, XenApp-Server

Network devices ESX Server

Interfaces BMC ARS Remedy Text message alarm via GSM

modem Microsoft Exchange (active) Microsoft ActiveDirectory (active

via plugin) PostgreSQL (active via plugin) Network Time Protocol (active via

plugin) Oracle Grid Control (passive,

nsca) SAP (active via ccms) VmWare VCenter (active via

plugin) Swiss Life Health Checks (active

web service query of Swiss Life applications)

Microsoft SQL (active via plugin) Storage, fiber channel switches

(active via snmp queries) Internet & Intranet (active via

plugin)

With the migration to GroundWork Monitor Enterprise it has been possible to significantly increase the added value for the customer. A simple, transparent licensing model allows Swiss Life to better plan its monetary resources. This enables Swiss Life to save a six-figure amount in annual licensing and maintenance costs.

The operation has become simpler and clearer now by using only one monitoring tool. Since then, Swiss Life been able to provide management with high-quality reports and dashboards. It has considerably simplified error analysis, and correlations of failures are immediately obvious. Capacity planning evaluation can be centrally performed.



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The implementation of such a large project presented a real challenge for us. However, we believed in a successful implementation at all times during the process, even when the software occasionally did not want to work as we had planned and would have liked.

Maco Dorna, Scheduling & Monitoring Manager, Swiss Life AG



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With open interfaces and direct access to GroundWork Monitor Enterprises database Swiss Lifes staff has successfully implemented several additional useful solutions and put these into operation. Thus the monitoring solution adapted to Swiss Lifes requirements, and not vice versa.

Conclusion from RealStuff Informatik AGs point of viewRichard Huber, Managing Director of RealStuff Informatik AG

The implementation of such a large project presented a real challenge for us. However, we believed in a successful implementation at all times during the process, even when the software occasionally did not want to work as we had planned and would have liked. No doubt the excellent, cooperative teamwork with Swiss Lifes staff, too, significantly contributed to the success, and we will always remember this fondly.

Conclusion from Swiss Lifes point of view

Maco Dorna, Scheduling & Monitoring Manager

As part of Monitoring Lifecycles in 2011 Swiss Life made the leap and went with an Open Source solution. The existing monitoring platform was replaced by the Groundwork Monitor product. The launch of GWOS has been successfully implemented in all areas. With the company RealStuff Informatik we have won a competent implementation and consulting partner. We will continue to implement new monitoring projects in the area of Business Service Monitoring based on GWOS with our partner RealStuff.



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About GroundWorkGroundWork delivers Unified Monitoring for Real with an open software platform for shockingly easy integrations and customized visualizations of cloud, virtualization, network, application, server, and storage data.

Contact Uswww.gwos.com [email protected] +1-415-992-4500

GroundWork, Inc.201 Spear Street, Suite 1650San Francisco, CA 94105

Swiss Life AGGeneral-Guisan-Quai 40CH-8002 Zurichhttp://www.swisslife.ch

RealStuff Informatik AGChutzenstrasse 24CH-3007 Bernhttp://www.realstuff.ch

gw cs swiss life eng 2014

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