Customer Story
Worldline
Worldline, a global leader in payments, offers innovative payment and transactional services to a diverse clientele worldwide. The monitoring tool of their choice: Icinga
Catering to businesses across various sectors, Worldline streamlines payment processes, enhances security, and fosters seamless transactions. By leveraging cutting-edge technology and robust infrastructure, Worldline ensures reliability and efficiency in every transaction, empowering businesses to thrive in the digital economy. Icinga is their go-to solution for reliable and efficient monitoring of their global infrastructure and network.
Worldline SA, a French multinational founded in 1972 and listed at the Paris stock market, offers payment and transactional services in over 50 countries worldwide. Its offerings include Merchant Services, Terminals & Solutions, Financial Services, and Mobility & e-Services. Services span commercial acquiring, secure payment processing, diverse payment terminals, e-ticketing, and digital services. By 2023, Worldline registered over 18,000 employees and €4.61 billion in proforma revenue.
Founded in 1972 as the electronic payment division of France’s national telecom company, Worldline has evolved into a global leader in payment and transactional services. Over the decades, it expanded its offerings, embracing digital technologies and establishing strategic partnerships to fuel growth. Through merges and acquisitions, Worldline expanded its reach across Europe and beyond, becoming a powerhouse in the fintech industry.
Its tailored solutions cater to the specific needs of each client, enabling them to optimize revenue streams and enhance customer experiences. Through its comprehensive suite of services, Worldline simplifies payment management, reduces costs, and drives growth for businesses of all sizes.
The Challenge
I like to be on the latest and greatest for the tools that I am responsible for.
Globally Distributed Infrastructure and Network
Worldlines IT infrastructure is a huge network across the globe with many subsidiaries and subsequently acquired companies that need to be integrated in the network. While the company employs various monitoring tools like LibreNMS for traffic oversight, Icinga stands out as a cornerstone.
A Network Team member responsible for Icinga management discusses the comprehensive range of networking equipment—such as switches, firewalls, and routers—that require constant and careful monitoring. With offices spanning the globe, it is crucial to oversee every component, from wireless access points to switches, to swiftly address any issues.
The company operates multiple data centers across different countries, primarily in France, with additional sites in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy. Presently, Worldline monitors approximately 7,000 devices and 60,000 services, all virtualized using the VMware stack and centrally managed by the Network Team, supported by dedicated Icinga Satellites at each data center. Due to Worldline’s emphasis on security, strict protocols control firewall configurations, ensuring limited access, including for satellites.
Two years ago, the Icinga system was outdated and lacked high-availability measures. In response, the team upgraded to the latest version of Icinga, significantly improving Worldline’s monitoring capabilities.
The Solution
High Availability for Improved Security
The new Icinga installation consists of a high availability setup with two masters and 28 satellites. In the event of a failure, such as the first master going down, it automatically switches to the second master.
Most of the checks they use have been internally developed, including specific checks tailored for their firewalls. At Worldline, the team utilizes an automation stack and maintains a Git repository where plugins are stored. These plugins are automatically pushed to their satellites, which are configured with the latest features.
While they are currently migrating only new services to the cloud, there is still a significant amount of work ahead.
Icinga goes beyond simple device up or down monitoring. It also monitors services, such as CRC errors on interfaces caused by network cable interference, and triggers alarms accordingly. Additionally, it oversees BGP stations for various firewalls, routers, and other devices.
Automation Rules
Automation is key for the company, not only due to the size of their infrastructure but also by the imperative to eradicate potential human errors.
They leverage Icinga Director to integrate data from internal systems such as CMDB and network listings. This allows them to meticulously catalogue hosts, deploying configurations along with requisite service checks based on defined object groups and device types. Notifications are also managed seamlessly through this process.
When onboarding a new company post-acquisition, they replicate the monitoring stack by establishing satellites, a process which requires considerable time and effort.
For the Network Team automation has been a central theme in recent years. They underscore the effectiveness of Icinga in facilitating this critical aspect of their operations: “Automation has been the main topic in the last years and will remain so for the near future – and Icinga is great for this part!”
Icinga gives you lot of customization possibilities with the plugin integration. You can do whatever you want in whatever way you want. I don’t see any other product on the market where it’s as easy as this.
Integrations with Many Tools
According to Worldline’s Network Team, the greatest benefit of Icinga is that they can customize it in whatever way they want pretty easily. A team member says “Icinga gives you lot of customization possibilities with the plugin integration. You can do whatever you want in whatever way you want. I don’t see any other product on the market where it’s as easy as this.”
With eight Icinga users within the company, engineers utilize various tools to monitor devices within their respective groups, receiving alerts as necessary. Currently, notifications are managed internally, but they are integrating with ServiceNow for incident ticketing, with plans to migrate to PagerDuty and Slack in the coming months.
The team operates within tight SLAs for all devices, and they notice that Icinga DB has significantly accelerated their response times.
Icinga simplifies their workflow, particularly during updates to scripts or plugins, as they only need to deploy the necessary checks. The team is also quite happy about Icinga’s versionized Config which enables you to roll back to an older configuration version: “If you have any mistake in the config and try to rework it, it keeps its data.”
SLAs are very tight for all devices. With Icinga DB we are much faster now.
Success
For me Icinga is the best on the market for monitoring purposes. It has a lot of great features.
The network team at Wordline expresses immense satisfaction with Icinga, recognizing its significant contribution to their business. They highlight its ease of customization and unwavering stability, remarking, “it just works and works as expected.”
In addition to streamlining the integration of newly acquired companies and consolidating solutions, automation remains a top priority on Worldline’s agenda. Looking ahead, the team plans to transition from their old network inventory and database for device management to NetBox, likely leveraging the NetBox Importer Module for Director.
Throughout these transitions, the network team maintains a strong belief in Icinga’s enduring importance: “Icinga will continue to play a huge role in the next years. Even if some migration is going to the cloud, the future is hybrid cloud.”
Outcomes
- Icinga monitors 7,000 devices and 60,000 services globally.
- High availability setup ensures continuous monitoring with minimal downtime.
- Integration with internal systems automates configurations and reduces errors.
- High availability architecture and strict firewall protocols enhance security and stability.
- Versionized configurations allow easy rollbacks, simplifying workflows.
- Icinga DB accelerates troubleshooting and helps meet tight SLAs.
- Icinga supports hybrid cloud environments and smooth integration of new companies.
- Consolidating tools simplifies management and reduces costs.
Tackle Your Monitoring Challenge
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