Cost effective solution for non-intrusive application monitoring
Full Story
Challenge
Pharma Mall is an integration electronic hub initiated by a joint venture of the pharmaceutical companies Bayer Healthcare AG, Boehringer Ingelheim, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Novartis and PharmaLog. The platform interconnects ERP systems of the associated pharmaceutical companies with those of their customers. In contrast to independent trading platforms, Pharma Mall is initiated, financed and supervised by producers of pharmaceuticals themselves. Pharma Mall also ensures reliable and efficient processes through solutions for the handling of returns and stock depreciation compensation according to the well-known Web-Shop principle.
Pharma Mall keeps the availability of IT services and secures the mirrored ITInfrastructure in the actual point. The two independent datacenters are placed about 30km from each other and connected through exclusive fail-safe data lines. All the data are stored in real time in both data centers. This infrastructure ensures that the data remain available even in case of a total blackout in one of the datacenters. Furthermore, all the applications and system components are operated as a highly available multi-site cluster, thus a failure of a portion of components do not affect the overall operation.
The Flowmon APM gives us the most cost effective opportunity for monitoring our applications and guarantees us to track the response times of our systems in a very easy way. The biggest benefit of this solution is that everything is done without any changes or performance impacts on the application-platform.
Stefan Feller
Head of IT
Solution
Regular testing of the infrastructure in the areas of data protection and recovery procedures for data system components belong to the standards at Pharma Mall. For monitoring of incoming traffic, several Flowmon probes have been deployed. The probes send measured data to the Flowmon Collector for its collection and analysis. Flowmon Collector also includes anomaly detection system Flowmon ADS. Flowmon ADS system analyzes all data and alerts to any suspicious network situation, anomaly or attack.
Pharma Mall offers its clients the possibility of on-demand operation of applications and services to be operated on company’s highly available infrastructure. A strict separation of data, dedicated access and guaranteed service levels are commonplace at Pharma Mall.
That is where Flowmon APM solution comes into place. Without installing agents on servers or without server reconfiguration it monitors applications from the end user perspective. For all users, all user transactions and in the real time it provides detailed information on true application performance.