Case Study: How Railway Corporation Unleashed Economies of Scale with Motadata

Motadata enabled a railway corporation, with headquarters in Navi Mumbai, Maharashtra, under the brackets of Ministry of Railways to monitor, analyze and resolve IT operational issues to establish a centralized modern infrastructure in their project.

The project is one of the India’s most ambitious railway projects that runs through coastal western India, linking Mumbai to the western region of Goa and Mangalore.

It covers about 170 railway stations under its remit. The biggest challenge they faced was that they needed to consolidate their network monitoring operations for a unified view.

Scalability Equals More Challenges in Monitoring and Uptime of Network Devices

Before the railway corporation decided to deploy Motadata, it was trying hard to catalog all the challenges its vast network of geographically distributed devices posed.

There were multitudes of problems and challenges that were prevalent in the Railways.

It did not have a centralized monitoring system for network devices to get a view of non-performing components, which created issues for active components.

Instead, they had in place a legacy in-house network monitoring solution that supported an outdated infrastructure.

There was an urgent need to move to a modern newer generation hardware installation across the railways to overcome the challenges such as limited scalability, manual interventions that was time consuming, and the difficulty to integrate with 3rd party systems.

In order to categorize tickets based on location since the operation is distributed across multiple locations that are about 168-170 stations, there was a need to have a ticket management solution in place.

They required a system that could facilitate proactive Alert Monitoring to notify UPS power outages and maintain the optimal level of 4-5 hours storage supply.

They were in dire need to have an automatic Ticket Routing based on the level of expertise, location, priority, availability, and the load of the technician and get notified on any kind of SLA breaches and measure SLA performance with compliance monitor.

Another challenge that was faced by the railway corporation was to identify users, applications, and network devices that are consuming the most bandwidth thereby quickly resolve network slowdowns.

What did Motadata offer?

Motadata supplied & implemented the end-to-end pre-integrated product suite from Monitoring to IT service management with 5 years of support for the railway organization: Part of Indian Railways Project. The products supplied for the project are as follows:

• Network Performance Monitoring through Motadata Infrastructure Intelligence Platform (IIP)
• Change, Knowledge and Patch Management (Part of Motadata ServiceOps Platform)

Streamlining IT Operations Management with the Following Key Highlights

Unified Monitoring:

Motadata offered seamless network and flow monitoring of various applications, servers, firewalls, switches, databases, etc.

through a user-friendly interactive Unified Dashboard. It facilitates auto-discovery of devices in IT infrastructure, viewable through network topology displayed on a centralized monitoring console.

RCA with Context:

Motadata offered an advanced root cause analysis tool to troubleshoot issues fast and to get more actionable insights when critical issues were discovered.

The platform eliminated the need to manually interpret dozens of data sources to know the root cause.

Network Topology:

The client can now visualize interconnectivity in their complete network across all layers with network topology.

Automated network discovery allowed them to rescan and automate topology/relationships in order to auto-detect changes.

Flow Management/Network Flow Analyser:

The module helped to check and monitor the bandwidth / traffic pattern and determine, how network bandwidth is being utilized.

This allowed them to generate real-time insights into bandwidth usage and network traffic caused by IP addresses, protocols, or programs.

An important aspect is that it supports leading flow technologies by capturing flow data to monitor network traffic from network devices primarily sflow in this case.

SLA Tracking & Management:

The helpdesk platform offers default as well as customizable SLAs based on priority.

With SLA tracking and management, technicians are able to resolve incidents quickly based on priority, get notified of SLA breach, and measure SLA performance with a compliance monitor.

Pre-Integrated with Motadata ITSM:

Because of a pre-integrated platform, tickets are automatically created from NMS alerts through REST API.

The tool gave them complete flexibility in viewing, editing, and resolving tickets through a web console.

Helpdesk with Smart Ticket Auto Allocation:

The solution has a built-in intelligent ticket routing mechanism that automatically assigns customers’ tickets to technicians based on priority, workload, location, and expertise.

This enabled them to resolve tickets faster; this is evident from the fact that the SLA adherence is 98% now from the day of implementation.

Powerful Asset Management:

Our asset management solution allows them to easily operate, maintain, deploy, and dispose of IT assets in a sequential manner.

It helps IT teams to gain more visibility and control over IT assets to fight everyday IT issues and problems, and manage the impacts on the users & business.

Patch Management:

The module helped in deploying over 500 Window patches that saved time, resources, and effort.

It was customized for specific applications and departments within the network, on the desired day and time, at a convenient frequency.

The module only has to be scheduled once and the entire process is automated and notifications are available at each step.

Lower TCO:

The licensing of Applications & Database was bundled to reduce the overall cost of the project.