In the crowded space of Singapore’s Telecommunications sector, companies look at all ways possible to defend their market share through offering more affordable plans, providing more service offerings and improving service level.

With new entrants and old competitors engaging on price war, brand loyalty only hinges on the customers’ satisfaction with the network stability. Network and system outages can possibly destroy the customers’ trust in a company. Largest Telco looks at improving its network and system stability in a pro-active manner, through continuous monitoring and analysis of its infrastructure and devices, analyzing logs for patterns of anomalies and to address the symptoms pre-emptively. To achieve the objectives, the Telco establishes a monitoring platform consisting of Dell EMC PowerEdge servers, RedHat Ansible (along with Ansible Tower) and Elastic Stack.

The latest generation of Dell EMC PowerEdge servers incorporates the Redfish DMTF standard and enables the management through RESTful interface with JSON and OData. They also come with OpenManage Enterprise, successor of OpenManage Essential (OME), providing administrative functionalities such as configuration deployment and remediation, which can be invoked programmatically via RESTful interface. The features integrates seamlessly with RedHat Ansible Tower, enabling automation of server deployment and improving asecurity and compliance. Ansible, with Ansible Tower, allows administrators to execute regular patching and configuration remediation, to ensure both security and compliance. The automation will also reduce time spend by IT staffs on repetitive, mundane tasks. The time savings can be better utilized to achieve the primary objective of improving infrastructure performance. The above combination will ensure the monitoring platform is secured and able to scale to accommodate increase in log volumes when more devices come onboard.

At the heart of the monitoring platform is Elastic Stack Enterprise (consisting ElasticSearch, LogStash and Kibana). The platform will ingest logs from the target servers and devices, subsequently performs data correlation and analytics to provide insight on the infrastructure’s health and performance. Through machine learning, ElasticSearch is able to detect unusual patterns which are undetectable by conventional threshold approach. ElasticSearch’ s real-time nature and capability to execute complex queries at extremely fast speed, coupled with Kibana’ s visualizations, will bring to IT staffs’ attention of such anomalies, and devise solution before it becomes an issue.

In conclusion, the combination of mentioned products will provide the Telco with a real-time, automated and secured platform to closely monitor its infrastructure and take proactive actions, all to provide its customers with reliable and trustworthy services.