Arup are a global architectural engineering company, behind ground-breaking structures such as: Sydney Opera House, Changi Airport Singapore, Hong Kong Zhuhai-Macau Bridge, and many more.

Behind these amazing projects sits a large IT infrastructure, spanning 44 countries, across 3 key regions Americas, UKIMEA & APAC. We worked closely with Anthony Ashmead – Enterprise Monitoring Consultant at Arup, to identify key performance and usability issues with ServiceNow when accessed from key remote sites and better connect SCOM and ServiceNow as part of Arup's fully integrated, end-to-end monitoring system.

History: Migration from regional, localized monitoring to a global operating system

The initial challenge was a well-known problem ‘tool sprawl’! As in many businesses, Arup were using a range of monitoring solutions:

• OnPrem Multi Cloud (Azure/AWS)
• Different monitoring tools in regional IT teams (SolarWinds/PAMonitor/SCOM)
• Native tools for platforms (OCOM/Vcentre/VROps, etc)

Arup needed an overarching enterprise monitoring tool, capable of integrating all their regional tools and systems into one centralised place – so they used SCOM, coupled by ServiceNow for their global ITSM. This meant that regional offices and users could continue to use localised tools; keeping these teams upskilled, happy and engaged in the process of moving to a fully integrated solution.

But, as with many large migration projects, they faced some challenges along the way.

The challenges of delivering a fully integrated, end-to-end monitoring system

It soon became clear that SCOM and ServiceNow would not provide enough integration, visibility or granularity of data, to clearly understand & monitor issues on a global scale.

Arup experienced significant issues with latency, time-outs and slow page loading in 4 key regions: London, Amsterdam, Australia & North Europe. Despite users in these regions consistently reporting issues, ServiceNow was not flagging any problems; instead ServiceNow’s performance metrics where ‘green’ and in theory full support was being provided.

Rightly-so, Arup concluded the problem must be a localized issue in their network.

How to avoid inefficient, time-consuming, trouble-shooting!

Arup needed to understand, monitor, and test what was happening at a local level. But, as we all know time can be easily consumed by trouble-shooting local apps, investigating individual user systems, and generally shooting in the dark for a solution!

So, they let our ServiceNow Monitoring MP do the hard work for them!

Cookdown were able to take out all the hard work out of this process, with a quick and easy to integrate solution! We worked with Arup to implement a new monitor to deliver greater visibility of Arup’s ServiceNow incidents, so they could get straight to the root of the problem - our ServiceNow Monitoring MP was set up and configured in less than a day!

How does The ServiceNow Monitoring MP work?