Infor has an astounding global footprint. Headquartered in New York City, the enterprise software provider is a strategic partner to more than 90,000 customers spread across 170 countries worldwide.
They produce industry-specific software solutions for some of the most well-known companies in the world, including 18 of the top 20 aerospace firms, 20 of the top 20 automotive suppliers, and 21 of the top 30 global banks.
In order to support their purpose-built applications, ranging from process-oriented solutions for Ferrari’s engineers to data science analytics for the Brooklyn Nets, Infor leverages a substantial and extremely sophisticated deployment in Amazon Web Services (AWS). Infor’s deployment runs the gamut of AWS services, including more than 14,000 EC2 instances, as well as ECS, ELB, EBS, RDS, Elasticsearch, Auto Scaling, Lambda, ElastiCache, and more.
Maintaining visibility into the more than 50,000 AWS resources supporting their application solutions is not a trivial task. Infor uses LogicMonitor’s SaaS-based automation, depth of coverage, and built-in extensibility to face this challenge head on.
Why Infor Chose AWS
Faced with the limitations associated with on-prem infrastructure—issues of speed, maintenance, and scalability —Infor has made a strategic move away from managing their own physical data centers, opting to host the majority of their applications and services in AWS. Infor made this decision because of AWS’s focus on “customer experience, rapid pace of innovation, and standards-based architecture…” According to Infor, this partnership “allows us to focus on our core competency of building the best enterprise applications for our customers…”
AWS has enabled Infor to continuously develop, test, and deploy software more quickly than ever, resulting in a constantly-increasing list of innovative solutions for the world’s most advanced manufacturers, financial institutions, healthcare providers, and more.
LogicMonitor provides boots-on-the-ground visibility from inside AWS that we just didn’t have with our previous tools…We were using 3-4 tools to get what we’re now getting from LogicMonitor with one.
Durga Dash Director of Cloud Operations, Infor Multi-Tenant Cloud
Why Infor Chose LogicMonitor
Before LogicMonitor, Infor relied on several monitoring tools, but primarily used an agent-based system that needed a significant amount of ongoing maintenance and configuration. With more than 14,000 EC2 instances, upgrading and configuring agents required substantial staffing investments. Infor was able to “develop processes to help automate the deployment of agents, but the frequent need to upgrade them only during appropriate maintenance windows for such a huge fleet was a constant challenge. On top of that, updating an existing agent or adding a new agent to a host carried the risk of affecting other production processes and services on that host.” Infor therefore set out to find an enterprise-class monitoring solution that was elastic and scalable, and that would easily integrate with their AWS stack, as well as their other IT Ops tools, including ServiceNow and SumoLogic.
Infor has been able to streamline their monitoring processes and improve mean-time-to-resolution by leveraging LogicMonitor’s built-in automation, actionable alerting, and depth of coverage for AWS resources. They’ve been able to reassign staff to more strategic activities than configuring and upgrading agents, and are currently focused on migrating the remaining portions of their on-prem infrastructure to AWS. LogicMonitor will be critical to maintaining visibility into AWS during that migration.
Durga Dash, Director of Cloud Operations for Infor’s Multi-Tenant Cloud team, explains how with Infor’s “…previous monitoring tools, we had to put the agent on every instance, or else spend significant time trying to write our own automation around this process. With LogicMonitor, we don’t need to worry about that. The LogicMonitor Collector deploys quickly, automatically discovers devices, and covers thousands of of services, so we don’t have to deal with agents at all. Operating individual agents for thousands of nodes is a huge headache.”
In addition to streamlining their monitoring workflow, Infor has also been able to access critical metrics more efficiently. LogicMonitor automatically collects AWS performance data using three main methods to provide a complete picture: the CloudWatch API, the AWS SDK, and via the LogicMonitor Collector installed in an AWS environment.
Using the CloudWatch API, LogicMonitor gathers basic performance metrics like CPU and Memory for an EC2 server. By installing a Collector in their AWS environment, users can go beyond CloudWatch. LogicMonitor’s Collector covers thousands of technologies, giving users access to OS- and application-level metrics for almost any device. For example, the Collector will pull Requests, Status, Response Time, and more, for an Nginx instance running on an EC2 virtual server. Out-of-the-box monitoring is flexible and can be extended to gather additional custom metrics.
LogicMonitor also uses the AWS SDK to monitor other relevant info related to a user’s AWS account. Infor uses this capability to track event-related data like EC2 Scheduled Events, giving its team the ability to identify instances that are scheduled for maintenance or deletion.
This multi-pronged monitoring strategy provides a deeper and more robust picture of resource performance. Data from all of these collection methods can be alerted on, displayed on rich, customizable dashboards, and disseminated through detailed reports, all from within LogicMonitor. Further, LogicMonitor’s comprehensive, yet flexible, approach to infrastructure monitoring means it’s easier than ever for Infor’s various business units to agree on a monitoring solution. This has resulted in more transparency and improved knowledge-sharing across the organization’s many teams.
According to Dash, LogicMonitor provides “boots-on-the-ground visibility from inside the AWSVPC that we just didn’t have with our previous tools. We can tell right away if the VPN is up or the Peering is up. We can ping sites and get a measure of latency, tons of things we couldn’t get to before. We were basically using 3-4 tools to get what we’re now getting from LogicMonitor with one.”