Tailor-made instead of ready-made

Approach

The first step was for Novatec to establish requirements for the new Application Performance Management solution on site in direct dialog with Generali and select appropriate tools. After all, there is no “one-size-fits-all” approach to Application Performance Management (APM).

There are countless APM solutions on the market, but most of them only cover individual aspects of it. If the tools’ strengths are combined, there is great potential for creating customized APM solutions. Novatec used its own in-house initiative “openapm.io” for this purpose. This landscape provides an overview of suitable open source tools and puts together the right package depending on requirements.

In an initial Proof of Concept, Novatec set up an exemplary solution for Generali’s new system. Prometheus, Grafana and Zipkin were selected as tools. Prometheus records performance data and issues an alert if deviations are detected. This performance data is then visualized on dashboards using Grafana. Zipkin provides insights into the distributed application’s control flow.

OpenShift and Apache Kafka monitoring was also set up with the help of Prometheus and Grafana. Prometheus collects important data about the OpenShift and Kafka clusters. This provides insights into the platform’s resource utilization and associated health status. Here too, alarms can now be triggered in the event of critical system states.

Results

Thanks to the right Application Performance Management, Generali can better monitor and ensure IT application service quality. “We can now see directly how the platform is performing,” says Nicoll, “so we can intervene more quickly and effectively. And the internal sales staff also have a more comprehensive view of information available in the company. They can now advise our customers better. Last but definitely not least, this increases customer satisfaction.”