Customer Story
Photowatt
It is essential for the photovoltaic manufacturer to maintain seamless operations in their factory. Photowatt relies on Icinga to monitor a plenty of systems and networks, ensuring continuous performance.
The Challenge
Today, Photowatt operates on a hyperconverged infrastructure with VMware’s vSAN, and also hybrid solutions with Microsoft 365 and Azure. They have two computer rooms, each containing a vSAN node with backup for their critical machines stored in Azure using Veeam solution. Additionally, they have some virtual machines running in Azure.
Avoiding Production Downtime
Photowatt follows a continuous 3×8 schedule, ensuring uninterrupted factory operations. Maintaining resilient infrastructure is imperative as any disruptions could lead to production downtime. Consequently, being proactive in addressing issues is vital.
In 2017, Icinga was introduced to replace a Nagios system, which necessitated daily administration by someone proficient in Linux. The primary goal was to facilitate user-friendly administration for the entire team. After thorough research, the team identified Icinga as the ideal solution, offering a swift migration process, simplified administration and additional advanced features.
The Solution
Transition from Nagios went like a Breeze
The transition was incredibly smooth and effortless as they were able to use most of their plug-ins and integrate their existing hosts and services.
At Photowatt, the team is happy with the flexibility of Icinga, which enables highly detailed monitoring tailored to their specific needs. The Plugins seamlessly integrated with minimal development work, and the built-in administration interface of Icinga Web 2 required no extra adjustments. Additionally, they appreciated the option to integrate NagVis and connect it with Grafana.
The Icinga installation oversees all aspects of their IT system, encompassing physical and virtual components such as APC UPS, Windows/Linux servers, HP/Cisco/Aruba switches, Aruba WiFi APs, Ascom phone APs, Mittel Autocom, internet access (SD-WAN VMware), surveillance cameras, web services, SQL databases, and various other elements.
User-friendly and Easy Administration
The team enjoys working with Icinga and sees as crucial advantage the simplicity of the tool, all the while offering many advanced features.
Icinga provides clear visibility of current alerts and enables proactive response to alarms. They also appreciate that the community is very active, and numerous plugins are available for everyone, which is of great importance.
Success
On a daily basis, the entire team has a client (Nagstamon) on their workstation that provides them with real-time visibility of alerts. They also have a display screen in the office that constantly shows NagVis maps, allowing them to respond promptly to issues and resolve them before a total outage. Béranger is very satisfied that several times, they have been able to prevent costly production shutdown thanks to Icinga.
The solar energy sector in Europe is facing a challenging period. Fortunately, positive changes are underway due to initiatives by the European Union, although the progress is still in its early stages.
This said, Icinga will continue to be a central pillar of Photowatt’s infrastructure. Through their collaboration with a new integrator, the French Icinga Partner Easter-eggs in Paris, the team is currently enhancing their Icinga set up.
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