With a heritage spanning over 175 years, Springer Nature is a global academic publishing business for the research community. it was formed in 2015 through the merger of Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan, Macmillan Education, and Springer Science+Business Media. Springer Nature is home to many trusted brands including Springer, Nature Portfolio, BMC, Palgrave Macmillan and Scientific American and today has more than 10,000 colleagues and 200 offices in more than 50 countries worldwide.
One would think such a large organization requires a large global monitoring system, yet through its embracement of technology and customization, Springer Nature has employed ways to work smarter, not harder—or more costly—to support various IT teams across the organization. They also support many users, managing upwards of 13,000 websites for book and research releases, hosted research content and customer services, with new assets added every day.
THE CHALLENGE
Since the 2015 merger, various teams within the now combined Springer Nature IT department—such as the network, SysAdmin, and infrastructure teams—from different countries and with different backgrounds, methodologies, and vendors— had to collaborate and consolidate.
Springer Nature was already using SolarWinds® solutions upon Senior Systems Monitoring Analyst Dave Morris’s arrival at the company. He recalls, “It was a smaller SolarWinds environment then, and we’ve since grown it. After the merger, many other legacy products were very niche, and we couldn’t justify the cost of maintaining them as they were no longer suitable for the needs of the company and team.
"We decided to focus on SolarWinds, and because we utilize so many SolarWinds modules and we keep growing it as we go, the environment—and the benefit we receive from SolarWinds—continues to build."
- Dave Morris, Senior Systems Monitoring Analyst
Though the Springer Nature IT infrastructure is now immense, it’s managed by a team of two: Morris and Software Engineer Consultant Liam Miller. Together, they comprise the global systems monitoring team for the entire Springer Nature business. As proponents for SolarWinds and in introducing SolarWinds products to the internal IT teams, it has been a process of building a team’s confidence in what the solutions could deliver as they get used to newer ways of working and scalability.
“One thing I’ve learned as a SolarWinds administrator is you can’t be fixed to one area of IT,” said Miller. “You have to be able to talk to the network engineering team in terms they’ll understand and be able to turn around and immediately speak with someone in infrastructure or security and showcase the capabilities in ways they understand from their perspective.”
The team’s most significant challenge was unifying its monitoring solution and maximizing its utilization due to an extremely small global systems monitoring team relative to its size.
SOLUTION
Springer Nature has gone from using a combination of SolarWinds Orion® Platform-based modules and leveraging their ‘out-of-the-box’ templates to adopting a more tailored solution—taking advantage of the benefit of customization and integration with other systems, which has been their push over several years.
“We’re monitoring the entire stack, consisting of thousands of devices,” said Morris. “We have different departments and teams utilizing many SolarWinds modules for various reasons. We have thousands of servers and a large network infrastructure. We monitor things like power delivery, USPs, PDUs, aircon thermostats, UNDP to do custom polling on devices. We basically monitor every device on-premises.”
In addition, the company is migrating applications and services to the cloud. How can the team adapt? Automation and customization. Morris adds, “We’re automating where we can. We use SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN) and SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor (SRM) modules for our virtualization and storage teams.”
For example, during a recent migration, SolarWinds VMAN data was utilized and—using the SolarWinds API integration—incorporated other reporting tools so management could view documents showing live graphing. Additionally, during a storage area network (SAN) consolidation, the team needed to know the usage of various SANs in a standardized format to plan for an upgrade. The analysis and reporting tools in SRM allowed the team to efficiently provide the standardized data required in the desired format. “An afternoon’s work saved us weeks,” said Morris.
The team also recently started using SolarWinds IP Address Manager (IPAM) to replace older, manual methods with dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) integration and automated scanning. They pushed this initiative further by using IPAM to identify where every device was in the SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) module and link them to other documents, allowing changes to be made automatically.
“We thought the transition to automate would be challenging as you have to take into account that many of the teams have set historical processes. But with a clear demonstration of how we can manage it more efficiently, the teams have seen the benefits and have been very supportive of and receptive to adaption,” added Morris.
Morris and Miller use the SolarWinds API extensively—in their words, “for pretty much everything.” They’ve integrated it with in-house solutions like a configuration management database (CMDB), and they’re performing two-way syncing. Originally, they were using it to pull properties down for users, but they now see the benefits of using the data inside SolarWinds.
“SolarWinds is now reaching into all areas of our IT environment—pulling in huge amounts of data and pushing out huge amounts of data,” added Miller. “When troubleshooting issues, we’re able to see across the environment with one solution to easily identify where the root cause may be.”
For further seamless collaboration—both internally and externally—Morris and Miller utilize the SolarWinds AppStack
and PerfStack
features of the SolarWinds Orion Platform. When an end user has an issue with their service or website, AppStack helps the Springer Nature teams efficiently determine whose issue it is (network, infrastructure, database, application, etc.) so they can focus their efforts to address it.
PerfStack proves helpful in troubleshooting and discussing the root causes of unknown issues among teams. Morris and Miller use its customizable charts and graphs to depict issues needing to be solved. They can highlight an issue and determine what was happening on other layers at the same time. They’re able to share the information visually and simultaneously across multiple teams for real-time, collaborative troubleshooting.
RESULTS
Today, the teams across Springer Nature’s IT department experience increasing efficiency due to the global monitoring team’s high level of customization of SolarWinds products. As the teams’ needs evolve, the monitoring team can adjust the views and alerts through the various SolarWinds modules to keep them relevant, reducing troubleshooting time and making the IT teams’ jobs easier.
“Our IT colleagues know when a server is turned on in their name, the right thing is being monitored. They find it so helpful knowing they can look at a system, request certain alert criteria, and we can deliver what they need with the out-of-the-box functionality, customized if needed,” said Morris.
The teams can set maintenance and patch management windows on the fly and automatically manage them so they don’t receive alerts. They can customize widgets with the SolarWinds API and export live information for migration, such as live graphs for external documentation. The graphs show historical and real-time data, which they regularly send up the chain across departments and executives for increased visibility into how migrations are going.
“We regularly see members of our IT organization advising colleagues on other teams on how the customization of SolarWinds products can streamline operations. To see this occurring organically is rewarding and shows that our work and the benefits of SolarWinds are selling themselves."
According to Morris and Miller, end users are experiencing the benefits of automation as well. “They like receiving the data they want, in the format they want, with the alerts they want, helping them do their jobs and make their days easier,” said Morris.
TAKEAWAYS
Plenty of things keep Morris and Miller up at night—but not in the way one would think. They’re constantly struck by moments of “We could automate this,” or “We could help facilitate that in an easier and faster way.” As a result, they’re doing far more than just monitoring. They see occurrences or incidents as opportunities to utilize SolarWinds products better, helping them manage—and improve—their IT infrastructure.
“I have not yet seen another company achieve the level of automation and integration that we have. Where appropriate, we are trying to utilize it everywhere where it makes sense and can better support processes,” said Miller.
"What we do is a concerted effort. Once we adapted to a more customized and tailored approach, making the product work for us and our systems, things changed by leaps and bounds. We now have the opportunity to tailor everything to our specific environment." - Dave Morris
Morris and Miller urge other companies to constantly improve and see new opportunities to use and expand SolarWinds products to solve problems in an automated way. It makes their teams’ jobs more manageable and introduces a level of observability across the IT environment that has not’ been as fully possible as before.
CURRENT SOLARWINDS PRODUCTS
Configuration
- IP Address Manager
- Network Configuration Manager
- User Device Tracker
- Server Configuration Monitor
Database
- Database Performance Analyzer
Network
- Network Performance Monitor
- NetFlow Traffic Analyzer
- Kiwi Syslog® Server
- Engineer’s Toolset
Infrastructure/Applications
- Server & Application Monitor
- Log Analyzer
- Storage Resource Monitor
- Virtualization Manager
- Web Performance Monitor