Redcentric

Moving to next generation IT Operations solutions

Mardling took the opportunity to introduce strong event management capabilities to link with an integrated service management model. Redcentric at that point used OpenText™ Operations Manager, which had been superseded by OpenText Operations Bridge. OpenText Network Node Manager i (NNMi) was also in use, and OpenText was in the process of consolidating this capability into OpenText Network Operations Management (NOM). Mardling commented, “With our history of OpenText solutions, we were delighted to see OpenText IT Operations Aviator on the horizon. This is a secure, private generative AI (GenAI) virtual agent that leverages domain-specific enterprise knowledge to elevate the user experience.”

Edward Jackson, Operational System Support Manager at Redcentric commented, “We already leveraged OpenText Universal CMDB, and it was clear to our process team, responsible for all system monitoring, that Operations Bridge and NOM were great additions to our monitoring capabilities. Meanwhile, our service management team adopted OpenText SMAX which also provided great integration opportunities for us. It was a natural progression to move to the next generation OpenText solutions. Although the solutions are very different, the concepts are still the same and the integration between our legacy tools and the new solutions gave us a seamless transition period where we could easily forward events to our new monitoring environment while maintaining business continuity.”

Creating observability to enhance network reliability and client service

The advanced Operations Bridge event correlation capabilities appealed to the team. This was clearly ahead of the existing model, and a simple API layer centralized event management across Redcentric within Operations Bridge. Mardling commented, “Operations Bridge was hugely ahead of what we built ourselves. Operations Bridge acts as the ‘Monitor of Monitors’. With advanced event correlation it gives us huge value in terms of not raising spurious incidents." The organization subsequently made four additional acquisitions and all different data sources were seamlessly migrated to Operations Bridge for consolidated monitoring.

With effective integration between Operations Bridge, SMAX, NOM, and Universal CMDB, a sophisticated event management platform centralized control and applied deduplication and correlation rules. This significantly reduced false alarms and operational noise within the environment. The resulting observability was integral in managing network performance and availability, enhancing network reliability and client service.

Focusing efforts on root cause analysis and auto-remediation

OpenText Operations Orchestration automates, integrates, and orchestrates any IT process. Redcentric introduced it to create seamless integration across the IT landscape to centrally orchestrate powerful and scalable workflows. Jackson commented, “With advanced integration between the OpenText solutions we could create runbook executions to support auto-remediation. All our efforts are aimed at automating our processes so that our human efforts can be focused on enhancing our service offerings instead of repetitive, routine processes.”

He continued, “A good example is how all events are correlated and deduplicated, so instead of having 10 tickets assigned to engineers, our AI-driven workflows recognize this as a single issue and will automatically raise a major incident which will be assigned to the correct group, with the 10 child tickets linked to the master ticket. This focuses our efforts on root cause analysis and results in a shorter time to resolution.”

Embracing AIOps aimed at preventing outages and minimizing client impact

The integration of OpenText IT Operations Aviator technology into Operations Bridge represents a significant leap forward in the world of AIOps, adding generative AI for IT operations to the existing causal and predictive AI capabilities. Effective anomaly detection event clustering and event-driven remediation suggestions can now become a reality for Redcentric. When the Operations Bridge event console encounters an event, Aviator can intelligently analyze the context and suggest remediation steps. With just a few clicks, the service engineer, or even the user himself, receives actionable recommendations to help resolve issues quickly and efficiently.

Jackson commented, “This smart way of working and providing deep observability enables us to take preventative actions before any outage occurs. This is where we see the real value in AI; when it helps us boost our customer satisfaction.”