Audi Turns to NETWAYS & Icinga for Open Source Monitoring

29 July 2013

Leading carmaker AUDI AG has chosen the open source specialists, NETWAYS GmbH to help migrate their monitoring systems to Icinga.

Faced with a disruptive release upgrade and high license costs, Audi appointed NETWAYS to assist in their monitoring migration and found the ideal replacement for their proprietary Tivoli monitoring system in Icinga.

The open source monitoring solution was chosen for its high scalability, flexibility in customization, easy implementation as a distributed system and ability to integrate into existing infrastructure. Set against other modular open source solutions such as Nagios, Icinga was preferred for its freely customizable Icinga Web user interface and its transparent, continuous development.

In an ongoing project NETWAYS gradually phased in the new Icinga monitoring system to cover over 10,000 hosts and 50,000 services. The scale of Audi’s IT environment presented an administrative burden of the same magnitude. A new approach to configuration and systems management was called for.

Collaboration between Audi and NETWAYS teams produced LConf – an LDAP based configuration management tool to display the entire IT environment in a tree directory. It also enabled configurations to be managed via drag and drop in its interface and allowed maintenance tasks to be automated through scripts.

Based on more than 20,000 entries regarding hosts, services and contacts, the configuration tool generated around half a million LDAP queries. Despite this volume of data, LConf reduced the configuration workload to enable just two system administrators to centrally manage the entire monitoring system.

With Audi’s endorsement, NETWAYS released the tool under GPLv2, contributing back to the open source community.

LConf and Icinga Web were then complemented with customized views and notifications. Combining Active Directory authorizations with Icinga Web ‘cronk’ widgets, views were tailored for each staff member to show only relevant hosts and services. Notifications too were extended with additional details to suit the individual user.

After the successful migration, Audi has continued to expand their Icinga monitoring system to cover its manufacturing facility in Györ. In line with Audi’s growth, the current monitoring environment of 50,000 services is anticipated to double over the next 3 years.

For more information, the full success story is found at: http://www.netways.de/en/de/info/success_stories/

[Images, logos and photos available. Reprints free of charge. Reference copy requested.]

- NOTES TO THE EDITOR -

About AUDI AG
Audi AG, headquartered in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, is one of Germany’s oldest and most established carmakers. Founded in 1909 by August Horch, the company merged in 1932 with DKW, Horch and Wanderer. Today Audi is owned by the Volkswagen group and is one of the leading, premium car manufacturers. In 2010 Audi produced over 1.15 million automobiles and more than 1.6 million motors. At the forefront of automotive innovation, Audi’s success is embodied in its mission statement and slogan: ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’ (Progress through technology).

For more information: www.audi.com

About NETWAYS
NETWAYS GmbH has been supporting companies to manage complex IT infrastructures for more than 15 years. Specializing in enterprise grade open source tools, NETWAYS ensures the smooth operation of networks, servers and applications. Solutions include availability and performance monitoring with Nagios and Icinga; service and configuration management; cluster and load balancing systems for open source data centers as well as hosting and managed services.

NETWAYS also organises conferences and training courses on open source monitoring and open source data center solutions.

For more information: www.netways.de

About Icinga
Icinga is an enterprise grade open source monitoring system which keeps watch over a network and any conceivable network resource, notifies the user of errors and recoveries, and generates performance data for reporting. Scalable and extensible, Icinga can monitor complex, large environments across dispersed locations. Icinga is a fork of Nagios and is backward compatible.

Though Icinga retains all the existing features of its predecessor, it builds on them to add many long awaited patches and features requested by the user community. This has culminated in standout features such as PostgreSQL and Oracle database support, improved extensibility through robust REST and plugin APIs as well as a user-friendly, dynamic web interface.

Concurrent to improving Icinga as a fork of Nagios, the Icinga Project is also actively developing Icinga 2. There are two development branches: Icinga 1.x (Nagios fork) and Icinga 2 (Core framework replacement / Nagios rewrite).

For more information: www.icinga.org

Ms. Eva Häusler
Public Relations Manager
+49 911 92885-0
events@netways.de
NETWAYS GmbH
Deutschherrnstr. 15-19
D-90429 Nürnberg
www.netways.de

This release was published on openPR.