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APM Terminals Intros Monitoring System
APM Terminals, an international container terminal operating
company headquartered in The Hague, has commenced the global
rollout of an advanced application monitoring solution, capable
of spotting issues with performance before they start to
negatively impact operations.
The new solution, which has already been rolled out to 11
terminals, will ensure business continuity, improve terminal
efficiency, and safeguard consistency (peak moves per hour) by
ensuring that applications consistently operate at the speed
they're supposed to. It will also prevent minor problems from
combining to cause a major outage.
According to APM Terminals Global Capability Manager, David
Pickup, "This industry first provides the same level of service
normally only provided by advanced IT companies to their
customers."
Traditionally the company relied on the basic monitoring offered
by the suppliers of the company's global standard terminal
operating system (TOS) Navis. This year, the company's TOS
Support teams and Global Core Capability Centre (GC3) have
established a new application monitoring capability that combines
Riverbed and Elastic technologies. GC3 was established in 2018 to
provide unrivaled internal technical capability around TOS.
Instead of simply monitoring isolated points, the solution
monitors end-to-end performance - including code, application
architecture, servers, disk space, databases, user endpoints and
more. The data is fed into one central dashboard, which is
monitored 24/7 by the Maersk global Command & Control Center
in the UK and the GC3 support team.
"The dashboard operates using a simple traffic light system,"
says David Pickup. "Green means that no issues are detected.
Amber flags have the potential to impact the business. Our goal
is to fix these before they turn to red flags. Red flags indicate
that the issue is probably already impacting our operations. This
new solution enables us to identify any issues before the end
user even notices that something isn't working as it should."
Asked about real-life examples, Mr Pickup explains that the
company's databases should automatically purge themselves of old
data, to ensure that they don't run out of disk space. "There are
a number of reasons why this could go wrong," he says. "For
example, a user running a query that blocks the database. At a
specific threshold, we'd already want to be flagging this and
investigating the reason before it impacts system performance."
Nov 22, 2019
