By Insight Editor / 6 Apr 2021 / Topics: Cloud Automation Microsoft Azure
Facts at a glance
Client industry:
Industrial automation / engineering
Size of Company:
500+ employees .
Challenge:
The client wanted to operationalize its real-time insights and improve proactive system monitoring so it could identify issues before they impacted customers’ operations.
Solution:
- Grafana®
- Azure® Monitor
Results
- Real time system health for customers
- Cloud and on-premises infrastructure monitoring
- Proactive issue identification
- Prevention of operational impacts
Solution area:
Insight’s Cloud + Data Center Transformation solutions help clients improve data center availability, performance and efficiency..
When the company’s project scope grew to include tracking real-time insights for its customers, it knew it needed a partner. Although Brock Solutions’ service included built- in traceability, it lacked the ability to present a holistic view that consolidated all of the information into a centralized data lake.
Azure® Monitor built the foundation for the company’s future growth with machine learning and artificial intelligence. The solution offered help with displaying the needed metrics in the operations center, but it had limitations Brock Solutions couldn’t live with.
For example, customizing Azure Monitor to display the required metrics proved difficult, and the 30-minute refresh rate limited real-time monitoring.
Having worked with Insight on a previous project, Brock Solutions knew of our capabilities and asked us for a proof of concept for a “wall of glass” that would display consolidated data in real time.
Our Cloud + Data Center Transformation team quickly demonstrated a proof of concept that used information provided by Brock Solutions and would be inexpensive to run long term. We proposed the use of a third-party, open-source monitoring visualization solution called Grafana® to improve system and infrastructure monitoring.
Grafana is a highly customizable, multiplatform, analytics and interactive visualization web application. It can natively consume data from the Azure® Monitor platform and display it on tailored dashboards.
Working closely with the client, our Cloud + Data Center Transformation team designed a wall of glass that would meet the real-time monitoring requirements for Brock Solutions’ customers’ cloud and on-premises systems.
We deployed a containerized instance of Grafana to the Brock Solutions Azure tenant. From there, we built a series of rotating dashboards, branded for Brock Solutions, to display in its operations center on the wall of glass. Azure Monitor is used to present a particular visualization that Grafana was unable to accomplish natively. Azure Monitor is also used for some web browser plug-ins.
Not only that, but the client is now equipped to use real-time insights to monitor customers’ systems and to identify and resolve issues before they impact operations. Thanks to the wall of glass, Brock Solutions is providing a higher level of support to its customers.
