Business Challenge
Region Blekinge had many different IT systems and several different monitoring technologies, with no centralized overview or possibility to respond to alarms and warnings in a coordinated, systematic way.
Transformation
Region Blekinge gained a holistic view and the ability to centrally monitor its IT systems when IBM’s business partners Atea and Compose IT Nordic AB used an agile approach to implement the Compose Operation Platform, based on IBM® AIOps, for dynamic alarm management.
Results
- Provides a comprehensive view of several separate IT systems for monitoring and alarm coordination
- Increases proactivity and reduces the time to handle incidents
- Minimizes manual handling of alarms and incidents
Region Blekinge – Monitoring and Managing IT Systems Across the Entire Organization
Region Blekinge, founded in 1863, is responsible for healthcare, dental care, traffic and public transport, as well as regional development, culture, and education in Blekinge County, located in southern Sweden. The county has about 160,000 inhabitants spread over five municipalities.
Many IT Systems and Difficulty Getting an Overview
Like many other public organizations, Region Blekinge had a multitude of different IT systems and applications within its operations. The IT infrastructure department, responsible for monitoring these systems, faced a tough challenge. They had several separate monitoring solutions for individual systems but lacked a comprehensive overview of the entire environment. There was no integration between the tools, which led to duplicated work and longer lead times to resolve problems. Without a unified monitoring solution, IT staff had to manually correlate alarms, with no automatic way to distinguish false alarms from real ones.
“The customer needed a holistic view of monitoring,” says Anna Trägårdh, project manager at Atea. “They wanted to become more efficient and proactive as an organization and gain full visibility into their IT systems.”
To be able to prioritize and determine the customer’s specific needs, Atea proposed a preliminary study to evaluate and map the region’s needs in relation to possible software solutions. At the end of the study, Compose IT’s solution, Compose Operation Platform (COP), based on IBM AIOps, stood out as the clear solution for the region.
A Unified Monitoring Solution
A team from Atea and Compose IT began working together with representatives from the region’s IT infrastructure department and other stakeholders. During the preliminary study, risks, dependencies, problems, and opportunities were identified, as well as business requirements, which could then be used as a roadmap for the project.
The implemented system provides a consolidated view of the region’s IT systems, which exist in several different environments. Its AI features help deliver concrete insights and the solution automatically groups related events and enriches them with context for faster problem resolution.
“COP is really good at collecting information from many different sources and centralizing it in one place,” says the person responsible for monitoring at Region Blekinge.
COP enables the region to monitor and visualize many different information sources, providing a wealth of information about several systems. The system helps classify information and determine who sees which alarms. This ensures that users only see relevant information and that alarms and warnings are sent to the right recipients. The system also makes it possible to create customized views with drill-down features and alarm refinement.
The Head of Infrastructure & Operations at Region Blekinge explains:
“Implementing a monitoring solution like COP allows us to meet the challenge of providing secure and stable operations for several different IT systems monitored by different monitoring systems. Previously, we had several different monitoring screens with thousands of alarms or events displayed and support really didn’t know which of these events were critical. Now, users see in a unified way only the events and alarms they need to act on.”
Centralized Overview Means Fewer False Alarms
After implementation, Region Blekinge now monitors its various IT systems through a central tool.
The region can customize views for different roles, stakeholders, and their needs. Users can visualize the alarms on a map of the region’s facilities and see graphical reports in real time. Even regional services, defined according to the Swedish collaboration model PM3, are monitored so that the region’s employees can easily see if an individual system is affected.
The number of alarms that need to be handled has decreased because the system filters out irrelevant and unimportant warnings. Since alarms and warnings are routed to the right person, incident handling times have been shortened, as well as the manual handling of alarms.
By centralizing its monitoring operations, the IT infrastructure department has improved its productivity and proactivity.
The person responsible for Monitoring at Region Blekinge shares: “Compose Operation Platform was exactly what we needed.
The new solution has given us a consolidated view of critical systems and opened the door for future consolidation. It also opens up many opportunities to include more IT systems and to gather them in views based on the organization’s various service areas.”
Take the Next Step
To learn more about the solution described in this story, please contact Compose IT, www.compose.se.
About Atea
Atea is the leading provider of IT infrastructure in the Nordics and the Baltics. Atea is represented in 88 cities with nearly 8,000 employees in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Atea delivers hardware and software from leading global manufacturers and provides consultants and service solutions.
About Compose IT Nordic AB
Compose IT has been on the market for more than 25 years and specializes in streamlining and automating its customers’ IT operations. Customers are located throughout the Nordics, and expansion toward the rest of Europe is now ongoing.
