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redcentric logoRedcentric

Managed service provider leverages AI and machine learning to support growth, improve service delivery, and streamline operations

redcentric logo

About Redcentric

A UK-based managed service provider offering a wide range of IT solutions, including cloud services, connectivity, security, and collaboration tools. Redcentric supports businesses in optimizing IT infrastructure for reliability, scalability, and security.

Two people conversing over a laptop data storage solution
  • Employees:
    500
  • Number of customers:
    2,000+
  • Locations:
    11

Summary

Challenges

  • Introduce advanced event correlation and deduplication capabilities by integrating all relevant data sources.
  • Reduce the number of events for faster issue resolution.

Solution

  • Moved to next generation IT Operations solutions.
  • Created observability to enhance network reliability.
  • Focused root cause analysis and auto-remediation efforts.
  • Embraced AIOps to prevent outages.

Results

  • happy-laptop Improved capacity planning and reduced manual tasks
  • process-data-visualization Boosted productivity by 25% with process improvements
  • performance-graph-stats Minimized manual intervention through clever use of AI

Challenges

  • Reduce the event noise in the environment and create clear observability for consolidated system monitoring
  • Leverage AI and machine learning to automate routine tasks and realize auto-remediation

Paul Mardling joined Redcentric with relevant experience on the value of a robust system monitoring solution. His previous organization had used an IT monitoring solution, but as the IT infrastructure grew and more platforms and applications took their place in the environment, it was clear that this lacked the advanced event correlation capabilities to integrate all relevant data sources. As a result, duplicate events were consuming a lot of the team’s time. The interim solution was to build a piece of bespoke monitoring software on top of the existing tool to create a more effective event management platform.

When the organization was acquired by Redcentric and Mardling was appointed CTO, his first priorities were to reduce the number of events the team was working on, realize a faster meantime to resolution, and reduce the noise within the environment created by duplicate events. Mardling explained, “Industry analysts talk about the value of observability, which resonates with me, as it’s the key to solving our main pain points. AI technology can pave the way for this in stages, starting with predictive AI, and moving to causal AI and generative AI (GenAI).”

a person viewing a phone with data storage

With clever use of the OpenText AI capabilities we can cut through any manual intervention and create ready-made solutions that will lead to a fully closed-loop incident process and ultimately of course auto-remediation which is the holy grail in IT and service management.

Paul Mardling
CTO, Redcentric

Solution

The OpenText IT Operations solutions portfolio created a centralized event management platform, significantly reducing false alarms and operational noise. Advanced AIOps increased network reliability, enhanced service delivery, and automated remediation.

Products deployed

Services deployed

Moving to next generation IT Operations solutions

Mardling took the opportunity to introduce strong event management capabilities to link with an integrated service management model. Redcentric at that point used OpenText™ Operations Manager, which had been superseded by OpenText Operations Bridge. OpenText Network Node Manager i (NNMi) was also in use, and OpenText was in the process of consolidating this capability into OpenText Network Operations Management (NOM). Mardling commented, “With our history of OpenText solutions, we were delighted to see OpenText IT Operations Aviator on the horizon. This is a secure, private generative AI (GenAI) virtual agent that leverages domain-specific enterprise knowledge to elevate the user experience.”

Edward Jackson, Operational System Support Manager at Redcentric commented, “We already leveraged OpenText Universal CMDB, and it was clear to our process team, responsible for all system monitoring, that Operations Bridge and NOM were great additions to our monitoring capabilities. Meanwhile, our service management team adopted OpenText SMAX which also provided great integration opportunities for us. It was a natural progression to move to the next generation OpenText solutions. Although the solutions are very different, the concepts are still the same and the integration between our legacy tools and the new solutions gave us a seamless transition period where we could easily forward events to our new monitoring environment while maintaining business continuity.”

Creating observability to enhance network reliability and client service

The advanced Operations Bridge event correlation capabilities appealed to the team. This was clearly ahead of the existing model, and a simple API layer centralized event management across Redcentric within Operations Bridge. Mardling commented, “Operations Bridge was hugely ahead of what we built ourselves. Operations Bridge acts as the ‘Monitor of Monitors’. With advanced event correlation it gives us huge value in terms of not raising spurious incidents." The organization subsequently made four additional acquisitions and all different data sources were seamlessly migrated to Operations Bridge for consolidated monitoring.

With effective integration between Operations Bridge, SMAX, NOM, and Universal CMDB, a sophisticated event management platform centralized control and applied deduplication and correlation rules. This significantly reduced false alarms and operational noise within the environment. The resulting observability was integral in managing network performance and availability, enhancing network reliability and client service.

Focusing efforts on root cause analysis and auto-remediation

OpenText Operations Orchestration automates, integrates, and orchestrates any IT process. Redcentric introduced it to create seamless integration across the IT landscape to centrally orchestrate powerful and scalable workflows. Jackson commented, “With advanced integration between the OpenText solutions we could create runbook executions to support auto-remediation. All our efforts are aimed at automating our processes so that our human efforts can be focused on enhancing our service offerings instead of repetitive, routine processes.”

He continued, “A good example is how all events are correlated and deduplicated, so instead of having 10 tickets assigned to engineers, our AI-driven workflows recognize this as a single issue and will automatically raise a major incident which will be assigned to the correct group, with the 10 child tickets linked to the master ticket. This focuses our efforts on root cause analysis and results in a shorter time to resolution.”

Embracing AIOps aimed at preventing outages and minimizing client impact

The integration of OpenText IT Operations Aviator technology into Operations Bridge represents a significant leap forward in the world of AIOps, adding generative AI for IT operations to the existing causal and predictive AI capabilities. Effective anomaly detection event clustering and event-driven remediation suggestions can now become a reality for Redcentric. When the Operations Bridge event console encounters an event, Aviator can intelligently analyze the context and suggest remediation steps. With just a few clicks, the service engineer, or even the user himself, receives actionable recommendations to help resolve issues quickly and efficiently.

Jackson commented, “This smart way of working and providing deep observability enables us to take preventative actions before any outage occurs. This is where we see the real value in AI; when it helps us boost our customer satisfaction.”

Two people conversing in the data storage area

With over 10,000 configuration items in our IT landscape, the observability we get from our OpenText IT Operations solutions is invaluable to us. We have all the engineering information at our fingertips and can support our clients directly with their capacity planning and bandwidth reporting.

Edward Jackson
Operational System Support Manager, Redcentric

Results

Sophisticated solution integration created clear observability to improve the efficiency of ticket management and reduce the meantime to restore. AI capabilities supported auto-remediation and closed-loop incident management.

Supported clear capacity planning with automated processes

The advanced integration between the OpenText IT Operations solutions has driven significant process automation, root cause analysis, and auto-remediation. Operations Bridge has a two-way federated integration with SMAX. This is extremely helpful in anticipating system downtime as the SMAX downtime module updates Operations Bridge in near real-time. This then triggers an update in Universal CMDB so that any device status is clearly presented and addressed.

Jackson explained the value of integration, “With over 10,000 configuration items in our IT landscape, the observability we get from our OpenText IT Operations solutions is invaluable to us. We have all the engineering information at our fingertips and can support our clients directly with their capacity planning and bandwidth reporting.”

Improved productivity by 25%

When an outage occurs, the main priority is to get the issue identified and resolved. With relevant operational data integrated and easily available, engineers have the context they need to pinpoint a problem much faster than before. This directly improves the efficiency of ticket management and reduces the meantime to restore. “We estimate that across the board our productivity has increased by at least 25 percent, thanks to leveraging process automation, preventing human error, and having the visibility we need to improve our speed and agility,” said Jackson.

Minimized manual intervention through clever use of AI

With the Aviator capabilities directly integrated into the IT Operations solutions, the team expects to completely revolutionize its way of working, according to Mardling, “As technology gets more complicated, it becomes harder to achieve a faster meantime to restore because we deal with so many components within each technology stack. With clever use of the OpenText AI capabilities we can cut through any manual intervention and create ready-made solutions that will lead to a fully closed-loop incident process and ultimately of course auto-remediation which is the holy grail in IT and service management.

He concluded, “The OpenText solutions form a holistic framework and the backbone of the operational activities that drive the success of our business. I’ve been impressed with the support quality and the in-depth product expertise that we’ve encountered with our OpenText contacts. We’re excited to see what our Aviator future will bring us.”

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