Customer Story
Magazine Luiza
Retail giant Magalu, largest e-commerce store in South America, intends to be the company that “digitalizes Brazil”. Icinga monitoring is a fundamental support for their ambitious plans.
The company felt the need to expand the monitoring portfolio and deliver something more than just a view on H/W infrastructure. After evaluating new possibilities of business-oriented, analytical monitoring, the choice was made for Icinga.
Magazine Luiza S.A., headquartered in Sao Paulo, is a stock market-listed company with over 40.000 employees throughout Brazil. The company started as a retail chain in 1957 and through expansion and acquisitions now turns over more than 7 billion US-Dollars.
An ever-growing variety of consumer products and services are offered following a multi-channel strategy with conventional stores, virtual stores, tele sales, e-commerce platform and the Magalu Partner ecosystem. The company declares the digital transformation of Brazilian retail as their key strategy.
The Magalu Universe
In a first step, Magazine Luiza successfully managed to digitize their business, having today a multi-channel operation but still attaching big importance to “physical points of human warmth”. Now, in the next step, the objective is to bring their entire digital infrastructure to the thousands of Magalu sellers as well as partner companies in Brazil.
By the end of 2021, Magalu’s total sales were 7 billion US-Dollars. The company brought together more than 160,000 sellers, industries and retailers of the most diverse sizes, origins and specialties. In recent years, Magalu shows exponential growth, multiplying the size and scope of the company.
Magazine Luiza operates 1,413 physical stores in more than 830 cities in 21 states, which are rapidly becoming advanced distribution centers for the company’s products and sellers, sold online. To supply these points, 26 Distribution Centers are located in different regions of the country. Logistics includes a total of approximately 8,200 drivers, providing customers with the fastest delivery in Brazil.
Among the different Magalu sales channels, none is as strategically important as the app. Mobile only and app first is one of the mottos that guide the company’s strategy. That’s why the sales app, created in 2015, has been transformed into a one-stop-superapp — a virtual environment where the customer can either buy products from Magalu and its sellers, or access public services and make payments. In September 2021, Magazine Luiza’s app was installed on more than 40 million smartphones.
Another important growth factor is Magalu as a Service (MaaS), a series of services and technological tools, developed for the company itself, but which began to be offered to all Magalu sellers. It´s a complete solution covering technology, payments and advertising designed to enable companies that want to sell digitally to do this easily.
Magalu´s declared intention is to be the company that will digitalize Brazil. These ambitious plans need to be founded on a safe and sound monitoring strategy. This is where in 2021 Icinga and its Brazilian partner SSYS Sistemas came into play.
The Challenge
Before using Icinga, the situation for Magalu´s central IT-team was characterized by high complexity. “Magalu’s large IT park is very heterogeneous and has many modalities, suppliers, and various technologies” states Fabio Hilário, Tech Manager of Operations at Luiza Labs.
Therefore, the general aim was to improve observability with the implementation of a uniform and more analytical monitoring system that “generates greater pro-activity and assertiveness with simplicity”, as Fabricio Lima says.
The new solution had certain requirements to meet, of which Integration with various platforms and high performance were key aspects.
The biggest challenge in the transitioning project was the consolidation of information and the validation of what was really necessary for the business. The team made a mapping of the company´s technological structure and, after evaluation of potential solutions, the client opted for Icinga as umbrella monitoring.
We were looking for a lighter, more practical solution that would give us the possibility of various integrations, greater ease of visualization and configuration.
The Solution
Icinga in three words? Lightweight, adaptable and simple.
Comprehensive Monitoring
The implementation of Icinga included the work of migration of information, cleansing of data and unnecessary monitoring as well as the creation of new dashboards. The project was not all plain sailing but with an Icinga-expert like SSYS at their side, all hitches and setbacks could be managed. “Problems and unforeseen events always occur in a large project, the important thing was the partnership to solve these setbacks,” says Fabio Hilário.
The Icinga installation at Magazine Luiza now monitors a daily growing number of hosts and services, sites, applications, links, database, servers and others. Currently, there are more than 11.000 hosts and almost 43.000 services. The monitoring infrastructure is composed of database servers, front-end server, satellites servers, integrations and collectors that receive information from external sources.
Managing Growth
Icinga comes with a built-in cluster mechanism that distributes the monitoring check workload across multiple servers. These additional nodes, called satellites, allow to manage a large number of monitoring objects. Magazine Luiza use an installation with a master zone and additional client-related zones.
Magalu´s monitoring experts use integrations via Plugin with Slack, e-mail, Stackdriver, ElasticSearch, New relic as well as VictorOps.
Success
Since 2021, Icinga is now part of the backbone of the company’s infrastructure. With its high integrability and scalability, it is enabling work and further growth of the digital Magazine Luiza ecosystem. The client sees the goals of the transition achieved and the whole project as a big success.
Work for the IT-teams at Magalu has changed considerably. Due to the growth and reliability of the data today, most of its monitoring is now centralized in the company’s Network Operation Center, allowing a holistic view of the infrastructure and business.
In the final design phase of this project, Magalu is further consolidating monitoring solutions in owned companies. Assuring total visibility and reliability of the enterprise infrastructure is key for their digitalization strategy. Therefore the company also considers backing up their monitoring teams with an official Icinga support subscription.
Magazine Luiza, the Brazilian digital pioneer is all set for a brilliant future !
We could use all integrations and add many new features. Compared to the previous tool we are safer, lighter and more compact for new integrations.
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