Customer Story
Telekom MMS
Telekom MMS, a leading IT services provider, uses Icinga to create custom monitoring at enterprise scale.
As a trusted partner to organizations in industries ranging from insurance and finance to retail and e-commerce, Telekom MMS ensures secure, scalable, and tailored IT services that meet the highest standards in compliance, data protection, and operational excellence. With a focus on open technologies and automation, the company drives innovation while maintaining maximum reliability for mission-critical systems.
Telekom MMS supports companies in their digital transformation and develops sustainable business models for digital experiences. As a leading digital experience service provider, Telekom MMS offers customer-centric end-to-end solutions and brings digital to life. With around 2,150 employees at ten locations and an annual turnover of around € 233 million in 2024, the company offers dynamic web and application management and ensures the highest software quality with an accredited test center for the highest software quality, accessibility and IT security.
The Challenge
Mandate separation and cost transparency were critical for us. We needed a platform we could confidently deliver as part of our Application Management service.
Complexity, Compliance, and Control
Monitoring at Telekom MMS is more than just a background task — it’s a key pillar of service quality and operational excellence. As a service provider with a broad customer base including insurance companies, fashion brands, and online retailers, Telekom MMS must meet a diverse array of standards, security protocols, and compliance rules. Their monitoring platform must be just as flexible and reliable as the services they offer.
“We work mainly in customer-facing operations, so our monitoring solution had to be customer-ready — meaning scalable, secure, and billable,” explains Martin Neubert. Additionally, the internal IT department, though a separate unit, uses around 90% of the same solution for their own monitoring needs, which makes shared development and collaboration especially valuable.
We had ugly experiences with config changes before — rolling back was painful. With Icinga Director, it’s just ‘teleport me back to how it was an hour ago.’ That’s powerful.
Driving Change
Prior to Icinga, Telekom MMS relied on a legacy Nagios & Cacti setup that struggled under growing complexity. Performance issues forced them to reduce check intervals to 10-15 minutes just to avoid overload. Cultural resistance to change and limited team access added to the challenge.
“The issue wasn’t technical — it was cultural. People were afraid to touch monitoring setups that were critical but hard to budget improvements for,” adds Martin Schurz. What finally moved the needle was strong management backing, defined deadlines, and automation that made transition safer and easier.
The Solution
Flexible, API-Centric Monitoring
The move to Icinga wasn’t just a tool swap — it was a strategic redesign. Every customer gets a fully isolated Icinga instance running on the Open Telekom Cloud. These setups are fully automated through Ansible, including provisioning, VM creation, and Director API-based configuration. Once a stack is deployed, service teams take full ownership, customizing checks and templates as needed.
 “We chose Icinga because it lets us build the monitoring around our needs — not the other way around,” says Martin Schurz. “Every monitoring environment can look different, and that’s fine. We needed something extendable, scriptable, and automatable.”
No one wants a tool that says: ‘This is how you do monitoring.’ We needed something that blends into our workflows, not breaks them.
Beyond Basic Monitoring
Custom monitoring is key. Telekom MMS goes far beyond basic disk or process checks — they monitor application-level logic through detailed scripts that perform real-world actions on production systems. Icinga’s flexibility and parallel execution solved critical pain points previously faced with NRPE.
“NRPE could only execute one script at a time. When your logic-heavy monitoring script takes 20 seconds, that’s a bottleneck. Icinga solved that for us.”, explains Martin Neubert.
Self-service and decentralization were equally important. Previously, only 1–2 config admins per team could make changes — now, with Icinga Director, all authorized users can update monitoring independently. This shift has drastically increased agility and improved response times.
We chose Icinga because it lets us build the monitoring around our needs — not the other way around.
Success
Our teams act fast, systems stay up, and that’s what our customers really feel.
Transparent, Scalable, and Customer-Centric
The results speak for themselves: faster response times, more agile service teams, and a higher quality of service across the board. Telekom MMS now operates over 35 isolated Icinga clusters, serving up to 2000 servers each, with real-time metrics stored in InfluxDB and on-call alerts handled via Asterisk — including text-to-speech voice calls.
“A robot voice waking you up at 3 AM is more effective than a vibration on your phone,” Martin Schurz laughs.
The monitoring platform is deeply integrated with GitLab, Kubernetes, Azure, AWS and OTC, as well as CI/CD pipelines. It serves not only as a control point but also as a data provider for automation. This API-first approach has unlocked significant efficiencies across the organization.
“We had a clear vision: provide data for automation — not just consume it. That’s why Icinga fits so well.”
Perhaps most importantly, end customers benefit too. Due to strict tenant separation and robust access controls, clients can view their monitoring data in real-time. This transparency builds trust and strengthens long-term relationships.
Looking forward, the monitoring strategy at Telekom MMS is clear: open, flexible, automatable, and customer-centric. As the company continues its journey into cloud-native environments and metric-driven observability, Icinga remains the foundation that enables this vision.
For a deeper dive into Telekom MMS’s unique monitoring architecture and lessons learned, watch Martin Schurz’s talk from the Icinga Summit 2024.
Outcomes
- Massive Scale: 35+ isolated Icinga clusters, up to 2000 servers each
- Full Automation: Ansible-driven provisioning and configuration
- Self-Service: Empowered teams, faster updates
- API-Centric Design: Smooth integration into DevOps pipelines
- Custom Monitoring: Deep application logic and script support
- Customer Transparency: Live access to monitoring data
- Reliability: Voice-call alerts and rock-solid uptime
Tackle Your Monitoring Challenge
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