Published on 28-Sep-2006
Validated on 22 Feb 2008
"Through the use of Tivoli Netcool software solutions, we can see what impact a problem may have on revenue, services and users." - Ewald Other, Manager, Automation Group, HUK-Coburg
Customer:
HUK-Coburg
Industry:
Insurance
Deployment country:
Germany
Solution:
Operational Management, Optimizing IT, Transforming IT
Overview
The HUK-Coburg Insurance (HUK-Coburg) Company is one of the largest insurance companies in Germany. With over 8,500 employees, 8.1 million customers and capital investments of almost 19 billion EUR (24 billion USD), HUK-Coburg has experienced astounding growth. As the company grew, the HUK-Coburg IT team faced new challenges in ensuring that services for internal and external customers ran smoothly and securely.
Business need:
Effectively integrate and manage network operations end-to-end across a highly heterogeneous environment
Solution:
An integrated, end-to-end security, systems, network and applications management infrastructure
Benefits:
Reduced volume of events by a factor of 10; saved hundreds of thousands of Euros; consolidated security alerts and streamlined security management processes; improved customer service
Case Study
“With Tivoli Netcool, we have a tool that integrates network events across the entire IT infrastructure into a single view.”
—Stephan Sigmund, Systems Management, HUK-Coburg
“We can better use our resources with the Tivoli Netcool deduplication and mechanisms reducing these one-to-two million events per day to a more manageable number.”
–Sven Schumann, IT Security, HUK-Coburg
| Why Become an On Demand Business? Ensuring constant availability and security of IT services and applications would support the delivery of the highest level of customer service |
The HUK-Coburg Insurance (HUK-Coburg) Company is one of the largest insurance companies in Germany. With over 8,500 employees, 8.1 million customers and capital investments of almost 19 billion EUR (24 billion USD), HUK-Coburg has experienced astounding growth.
As the company grew, the HUK-Coburg IT team faced new challenges in ensuring that services for internal and external customers ran smoothly and securely. “In the last few years, our IT environment has changed dramatically,” says Ewald Other, manager of the Automation Group at HUK-Coburg. “The implementation of our Internet branch, HUK24, in 2001 was a major catalyst for this change. We had to ensure that every customer’s experience using our Web-based services was positive at all times.”
To achieve this level of availability, HUK-Coburg staff needed the ability to monitor the company’s entire IT infrastructure in real time. After a detailed evaluation of available management tools, the company selected IBM Tivoli Netcool software. The successful implementation of Tivoli Netcool solutions to monitor the HUK24 environment led IT staff to centralize network management across the entire insurance group.
“With Tivoli Netcool, we have a tool that integrates network events across the entire IT infrastructure into a single view,” says Stephan Sigmund, responsible for systems management in the HUK-Coburg IT Department.
Tivoli Netcool software provided HUK-Coburg IT staff with the ability to manage and unify business processes across the entire enterprise with one solution. This meant being able to streamline support for a heterogeneous environment that spanned Microsoft® Windows® software, several databases and application servers, the entire network infrastructure (routers, switches and firewalls) and the company’s host computers.
Integrating operations management reduces complexity
HUK-Coburg also implemented Tivoli Netcool software as a “manager-of-managers” to collect, consolidate and correlate events from systems management applications across its environment. It was an important step in reducing the time that Network Operation Center (NOC) staff spent managing the infrastructure. With critical information consolidated in one central console, NOC administrators no longer needed to switch among five different consoles to piece together a view of service status. And, with the software’s sophisticated filtering and deduplication mechanisms, they no longer had to wade through thousands of alerts regarding the same event. “Very talkative systems deliver about 12,000 messages for one event,” said Sigmund. “Tivoli Netcool realizes when the same message is repeated a thousand times and only presents the first and the last message for a particular event. Overall, this reduces the number of events by a factor of 10 and improves the productivity of our operators and administrators tremendously.”
Greater insight improves business service management
The Tivoli Netcool solution also helps HUK-Coburg IT staff better understand the impact that events may have on services and groups of customers for most of HUK-Coburg’s business applications. Administrators can easily see the relationship between IT components and applications and view service-based, root-cause indicators that identify the reason and impact of problems.
“Using the Tivoli Netcool Real-time Active Dashboard, we can better understand the dependencies and relationships among infrastructure components and business services,” says Sigmund. “As a result, we have greater insight into our operations to help us quickly troubleshoot and isolate service problems.”
Additionally, the software provides administrators with insight into the user’s experience. For example, using Tivoli Netcool Internet service monitors, the organization can simulate user actions regularly to proactively monitor availability, response times and usability of Internet services. Likewise, through user-specific views of the network infrastructure, administrators can quickly see the service level delivered to various groups of customers.
Consolidating security events optimizes efficiency
In 2003, HUK-Coburg continued to integrate additional infrastructure components into its centralized event monitoring infrastructure. This included the monitoring of IBM System i™ platform messages. The correlation of disparate security components also became possible using Tivoli Netcool software in a separate installation for security purposes only. “Our anti-virus tools, firewalls and intrusion detection systems send numerous event messages, which previously were displayed on a variety of dedicated management consoles,” says Sven Schumann, responsible for IT security at HUK-Coburg. “It became apparent that we can better use our resources with the Tivoli Netcool deduplication and correlation mechanisms reducing these one-to-two million events per day to a more manageable number.”
In this parallel technical project, HUK-Coburg’s IT security team uses Tivoli Netcool software to gather information from all the distributed security components and applications—including log files of Microsoft Windows and UNIX® servers and physical security devices, such as entrance control systems. The software associates the data collected with corresponding policies and stores it in a database. This has helped HUK-Coburg simplify and streamline security management processes, including analyzing security events, developing situation-based security rules and defining security mechanisms.
In the final stage of its project, HUK-Coburg IT staff used Tivoli Netcool software to integrate IBM System z™ platform messages into its event monitoring infrastructure, further simplifying management of its complex infrastructure.
Real-time overview of IT infrastructure
By building an integrated, end-to-end security, systems, network and applications management infrastructure, HUK-Coburg has increased staff productivity, controlled operational costs and improved the quality of service it can deliver. In fact, simply automating the creation of trouble tickets using Tivoli Netcool software has eliminated months of wasted staff time, saving the company hundreds of thousands of Euros.
“Through the use of Tivoli Netcool software solutions, we now can understand the status of our technical infrastructure and see what impact a problem may have on revenue, services and users,” said Other. “This and the implementation of a separate system for security operations makes it possible for our NOC team to respond the right way at the right time before any real damage can take place.”
With security and customer-facing applications becoming an ever growing priority in an increasingly complex IT environment, HUK-Coburg executives are confident that Tivoli Netcool software will continue to support company operations well into the future. “Tivoli Netcool offers a broad management scope that will allow us to fine-tune our event management infrastructure as our infrastructure changes,” says Sigmund.
On Demand Business Benefits
Consolidation of event data and real-time monitoring of systems enables staff to pinpoint service-affecting faults quickly and resolve problems before they impact customers Filtering unnecessary events reduces and prioritizes the number of alarms and messages that must be acknowledged by network operators
Centralized interface across security, systems, applications and network infrastructure requiring minimal integration with third-party products helped deliver rapid results
Key Components
Software
- IBM Tivoli® Netcool®
For more information
Please contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner.
Visit our Web site at: ibm.com/tivoli
You can get even more out of Tivoli software by participating in independently run Tivoli User Groups around the world. Learn about opportunities near you at www.tivoli-ug.org
For more information about HUK-Coburg, visit:
www.huk.de
Products and services used
IBM products and services that were used in this case study.
Software:
Netcool/Realtime Active Dashboards
Operating system:
UNIX
Legal Information
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2006 IBM Corporation Software Group Route 100 Somers, NY 10589 U.S.A. Produced in the United States of America 09-06 All Rights Reserved IBM, the IBM logo, Netcool, On Demand Business, the On Demand Business logo, System i, System z and, Tivoli are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries or both. Microsoft and Windows are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the United States and other countries. Other company, product or service names may be trademarks or service marks of others. This case study is an example of how one customer uses IBM products. There is no guarantee of comparable results. References in this publication to IBM products and services do not imply that IBM intends to make them available in all countries in which IBM operates.