The Organisation

Client: Foreign & Commonwealth Office

Industry: UK Government

Services: IT Infrastructure

FCO was a ministerial department from October 1968 to September 2020. It merged with the Department for International Development to create FCDO.

The Challenge

FCO Services, part of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, needed to implement a comprehensive monitoring solution for their diverse IT infrastructure. The key requirements included:

• Monitoring HP C700 Chassis and blades
• Monitoring Cisco UCS Chassis and blades
• Monitoring customer Windows 2003 and 2008 servers
• Monitoring internal Windows 2008 servers
• Monitoring Xen Server environments
  
  

FCO Services required a solution that would provide robust monitoring capabilities while ensuring resilience, security, and scalability.

The Solution

Altiatech proposed implementing Microsoft System Centre Operations Manager (SCOM) to meet FCO Services' monitoring needs. The solution included:

1. SCOM Implementation and Deployment

• Creation and configuration of SCOM virtual machines
• Installation of Windows Server, SQL, and SCOM components
• Deployment of SCOM agents and gateways
  
  

2. Configuration and Tuning

• Creation of override Management Packs
• Configuration of notifications and network discovery
• Set up of Service Level Objects
  
  

3. Monitoring Capabilities

• Implementation of Management Packs for various systems
• Set up of Console Actions for quick issue resolution
• Configuration of Agent Actions for self-healing capabilities
• Implementation of Alert Notifications
• Creation of Operator Workspaces for role-based monitoring
• Development of Distributed Application Models
• Configuration of Service Level Targets
• Implementation of Synthetic Transactions for web application monitoring
  
  

4. Service Transition

• Execution of a comprehensive test plan
• Rework of the solution as required
• Update of design documentation

The Results

The SCOM monitoring solution offered by Altiatech was designed to deliver the following benefits to FCO Services:

• Comprehensive monitoring of diverse IT infrastructure components was provided.
• Issue detection and resolution were improved through predefined actions and tools.
• Service availability was enhanced through self-healing capabilities.
• Faster response to incidents was enabled with customised alert notifications.
• Management of services was improved through role-based monitoring.
• Better visibility of service performance against defined targets was achieved.
• The capability to monitor web-based applications without deploying agents was offered.
• Scalability to monitor up to 1,000 agent-managed servers and 100 agentless exception managed client devices was provided.