Customer Story

With approximately 900 branches and new openings in the double-digit range every year, the Müller drugstore chain is continuously gaining ground both at home and abroad. To consistently offer a pleasant shopping experience to its millions of customers, Müller relies on Icinga to oversee all of its store IT.

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The Days of Icinga 1

After migration, Icinga 1 accompanied Müller faithfully for a couple of years and they were not among the early adopters of Icinga 2. But when they redesigned their images for the branch systems,  they jumped on the opportunity to roll out Icinga 2, thus enabling them to advance and make substantial progress in their monitoring strategy.

Stepping up – Migration to Icinga 2

Jens Schanz states that Icinga2 was an excellent fit for Müller and propelled them significantly forward: “First of all, it allowed us to scale across the board. We could actually operate each branch without hardware, without dependencies. And with the satellites we also had the advantage of redundancy. In the past, if the main PC in a branch broke down the entire history of the store was broken, too.”

The team then rolled this out on a larger scale, setting up and managing separate satellite systems for each country with its own zones. Each branch was then a zone with n systems. The whole transition went like a breeze. “You can do it pretty well on the side if you have a high level of automation.” Following the migration, they discovered that maintaining Icinga on their own was straightforward and they never needed any external consultation or assistance to resolve any issues.

Currently, there are 3 people in the team who take care of Icinga, just to maintain a bit of redundancy and to spread it out.

Intelligent Monitoring Architecture

Besides its vast store network in Germany, Müller has branches in Austria, Switzerland, Slovenia, Croatia, Hungary and Spain. All of the approx. 14,000 systems are administered and managed centrally for all countries from the headquarter in Ulm.

There is a pair of 2 satellites for each country and the agents are then attached to the satellite, which in turn passes it on to the core. In addition, there are independent satellites that are not connected to a country. These perform SNMP checks, especially those which are relatively CPU intensive in order not to interfere with the country satellites which run the checks for the cash registers.

In total, Müller has around 14,000 systems, including approximately 5,000 point of sale (POS) systems located in their stores. The most intelligent devices in the stores are the desktop PCs where employees work and the POS systems. An Icinga 2 agent is installed on them, which gets its config via the director. There are basic checks and then special checks for different devices in the stores, so that the helpdesk can quickly help employees when there are problems.

There are numerous peripheral devices at the cash registers that require inspection, such as verifying the correct operation of the cash drawer, monitoring the duration of its opening, ensuring that the thermal printer has enough paper, and so on. Everything runs together in the core and further into a database. The performance data is retrieved with InfluxDB and then vizualized with Grafana.

Facilitating the Work of the User Help Desk

At Müller, the primary objective of the Icinga monitoring platform is to assist the user helpdesk in tracking down issues, rather than simply alerting them. Jens Schanz explains that “The employees in the store often have no idea what the problem is, they call the user helpdesk and then the big troubleshooting starts.” Having the ability to promptly identify issues and provide informed responses is extremely beneficial for the helpdesk.

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