The IEC IT challenge: Maintaining 24/7, seamless availability of IEC services

The IEC has about 20,000 customers worldwide who download publications and standards from the IEC website, apart from other services which IEC provides to their customers - the IEC family as they call it - for free. The Geneva headquarters acts as a global repository. This means these services are to be made available 24/7 to their customers from around the globe. The responsibility of ensuring continuous, uninterrupted availability of the IEC website falls on the shoulders of the IT department. We spoke with Francois Maisonneuve, head of the IT Infrastructure team at IEC, on his experience in dealing with the complex IT challenges that IEC presents, before and after ManageEngine.

The IT department has a commitment to ensure the earliest possible resolution of problems, especially minimizing IT hardware or service downtimes. This is no mean task, considering the fact that the IEC runs over 60 servers that host various web servers, applications servers and Oracle database servers. Because the IEC services are free, an enormous number of customers visit their website. This includes state and national governments, companies and industries. Downtime of even a few minutes, at any time of the day, would adversely affect the work of a huge number of very important people, which is something that IEC cannot afford to be responsible for.

The inherent challenges due to such a vast IT infrastructure make a strong case for having a comprehensive monitoring tool, a solution that can provide end-to-end visibility into the health and performance of applications and servers. This would enable the IT department to honor it's commitment of preempting potential performance problems and resolving them swiftly. And IEC global customers can enjoy round-the-clock availability of IEC services. To address the challenges of IT resource health monitoring, IEC IT department chose ManageEngine's Applications Manager. They have been using it for over a decade now, since release six of Applications Manager.

• Unified visibility into all the 60-plus servers being used, which eliminates the need for performing individual checks manually. Applications Manager has therefore assumed the critical responsibility of ensuring server health, uptime and availability of services.
• The out-of-box support for a wide range of applications.
• Stays updated across different versions / instances - IEC runs both Linux and Windows servers in production.
• Rapid implementation and timely rollout of support for the latest technologies and applications.
• Self-contained tool with small footprint server
• The performance statistics reporting feature -enables pulling up detailed reports from all the configured monitors, helps in reporting IT resource health status to higher management.