Vattenfall Consolidates Network Monitoring Using Entuity

Overview

Vattenfall is one of Europe’s largest generators of electricity and producers of heat. The company’s IT group began to face serious challenges due to a disjointed monitoring environment that was spread across its regional operations centers. With Entuity, the company was able to consolidate a disparate sets of tools and monitoring approaches and centralize network management. This allowed the IT team to significantly increase operational efficiency and gain deeper visibility across the network.

Company Highlights

• Company Size: 30,200 employees
• Countries Supported: Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Poland, United Kingdom
• Network Management Software: Entuity network management

Business Needs

One of Europe’s largest generators of electricity and producers of heat, Vattenfall has approximately 6.2 million electricity customers, 4.3 million electricity network customers, 1.9 million gas customers and approximately 30,200 employees. The Parent Company, Vattenfall AB, is 100%-owned by the Swedish state, with headquarters in Solna, Sweden. Vattenfall’s IT monitoring operations were separately deployed across three main regions, including Germany, Sweden, and Poland. As a result, the company faced several challenges stemming from this decentralized monitoring approach. Specifically, each region was monitoring its part of the network using different tools with different levels of monitoring capabilities. One region was using a large, legacy framework network management solution, while the others were using multiple open source or low-end monitoring tools. Each region had to maintain skills with their own products, and each bore its own costs of monitoring. The company also lacked a global view of the network.

Centralizing IT Operations

As part of a corporate initiative, Vattenfall decided to engage in a project to centralize their IT monitoring operations in Poland. Entuity, along with BMC TrueSight Operations, with which Entuity has a tight integration, were chosen to replace the solutions currently deployed across their regional operations centers. “Entuity along with its integration to BMC TrueSight allowed us to consolidate a lot of functionality that was spread out across many locations,” says Andrzej Ciupa, Monitoring & Remote Operations Manager for Vattenfall. “It helped us move from a disjointed set of tools that were costly to manage, to a centralized way of monitoring the entire network consistently, proactively, and efficiently.”

Entuity: It Just Works

The IT team at Vattenfall chose Entuity as their network monitoring solution for several reasons. First, Entuity was easy to install. In the words of Ciupa: “Click, click, click, and it just worked.” No prerequisite software setup or complex configuration was required. Everything worked seamlessly out of the box. Second, Entuity Views make it easy for the team to breakdown their global infrastructure by regions. And the Explorer provides a “one stop shop” to view all of their required metrics as well as drill down for instant access to historical data. Third, Entuity’s dynamic mapping capability shows them exactly how the networks are connected and what else is affected during outages.

The team chose Entuity for other reasons too:

Built-in Device Support. Entuity supports hundreds of devices out of the box and immediately starts monitoring key metrics without requiring users to trawl through MIB files to select metrics themselves.

Extensibility. Entuity’s Stormworks development engine is a powerful mechanism for extending device support, which is critical for dynamic networking environments like Vattenfall’s.

Powerful Event Management. Entuity provides valuable events out of the box. Its sophisticated yet usable event management system allows the IT team to easily create rules specific to their network, to further prioritize events and reduce the volume of events forwarded to the TrueSight Operations console.

Customizable Reporting. Entuity’s embedded reporting functionality includes over 100 out of the box reports and allows the IT team to easily customize reports to meet their requirements.

Network Availability as a Service. Entuity’s Service availability monitoring gives the Vattenfall team a view of services across all parts of the network.

Easy Trap Monitoring. Entuity’s MIB Parsing allows for quick and extensible trap handling.

Easy Upgrades. Entuity’s simple upgrade procedure eliminates the need for complex pre-planning, which was often the case with Vattenfall’s previous solutions.

Built-in Integration. The TrueSight integration guarantees that Vattenfall has network visibility from the TrueSight central console and one-click workflow back to Entuity. This enables instant and deep analysis, and more accurate diagnostics.

“Entuity and its integration with BMC TrueSight allowed us to consolidate a lot of functionality that used to be spread out across many locations. It helped us move from a disjointed set of tools that were expensive to manage, to a centralized way of monitoring the entire network consistently, proactively, and efficiently.”
– Andrzej Ciupa, Monitoring & Remote Operations Manager, Vattenfall

Excellent Solution and Support

Today, Entuity is being used to monitor the whole Vattenfall estate of over 3000 devices and is integrated with TrueSight to provide a centralized events console for network, server, and application monitoring. The company has deployed eight Entuity servers across Poland, Netherlands, Sweden and Germany.

Entuity met Vattenfall’s challenge to centralize their monitoring and give them extensive control and visibility across the network. But the company is also impressed by the responsiveness of Entuity Support.

The Vattenfall team is happy to have access to a group of network experts who take time to listen to their needs and whom they can trust to work hard at addressing their requirements and challenges.

According to Ciupa, “Working with Entuity’s Support team is so different from our experiences with other vendors where we’ve made requests and then waited for months only to get no response or ‘no’ for a response. Entuity gets back to us quickly and does their best to help us do everything we need to do.”