DFS Uses MessengerConsole to Monitor and Manage Global Network
While international marketing and establishment of a presence throughout the Pacific Rim can lead to big profits for global corporations, monitoring and maintenance of data systems spanning the width of the Pacific Ocean can lead to big headaches for information technology professionals. The difficulty of the challenge became increasingly apparent to San Francisco-based DFS Group Limited, the world's largest travel retailer with more than 8,000 employees.
The company's critical accounting, inventory, ordering and distribution functions are handled through a network of numerous AS/400s in San Francisco and in eight remote locations. The firm's Galleria retail stores are organized in clusters around regional operating nodes in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Australia, Hawai'i and other sites. AS/400 systems operate in each of those locations, ranging from small point-of-sale-type controllers to large servers running accounting applications. Because each of the remote locations processes information that is critical to the company's overall international operations, functions at each location must be monitored around the clock, every day of the week.
The Solution
When James Huey joined DFS as global operations manager earlier this year, the company was already using Bytware's MessengerPlus monitoring and paging tool on its central servers. But monitoring of all the other computers in the company's vast network was performed manually. That required a significant personnel commitment. One of Huey's first duties was development of a more cost-effective approach. He turned to another Bytware utility, MessengerConsole, designed for managing events from multiple AS/400s.
"Normal alerting software can do only paging. Both MessengerPlus and MessengerConsole do much more," said Huey. "You can set it to auto reply, ignore a message, or call and execute a CL program. So you can use it as a scheduler or to trigger a response to fix a problem. It has more intelligence than conventional alerting software. It can monitor a job for completion, then auto reply to begin another function."
That's precisely how DFS has been using MessengerConsole since April. "With today's lean and mean operations, we can't afford to have people assigned to do console monitoring around the clock," said Huey. So the overnight shifts in five remote locations are unstaffed. DFS has installed MessengerPlus and MessengerConsole on each remote AS/400, and all error messages and other system alerts are monitored in the San Francisco headquarters.
In addition to monitoring for system errors, DFS routinely uses MessengerConsole to verify completion of batch jobs at remote locations. Each location is responsible for compiling inventory and sales data and generating a nightly management report. Ordinarily, those jobs are completed by midnight."We put in checkpoints to send an alert if end-of-day batch jobs are not completed by 2 a.m., and that still allows us time to fix a problem before the start of the next business day. I don't think any other monitoring software can do that," said Huey.
Learn more about Duty Free Shoppers.
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Resource Details
Type: Case Study
Product: MessengerConsole
Customer: Duty Free Shoppers
Summary
DFS rises to the challenge maintaining a marketing and business presence throughout the Pacific Rim by using MessengerConsole to monitor and report on remote locations, routing all error messages and system alerts to the San Francisco headquarters.
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