Company Profile
Petrofac is an international provider of facility solutions for the oil and gas production and processing industries. Petrofac’s range of services provides a total solution approach to meeting customers’ needs across the full life cycle of oil and gas assets. The Petrofac Group has its origins as a Texas-based engineering, procurement, and fabrication (EPF) business founded in 1981.
Business Needs
Petrofac Malaysia Ltd. was in the process of revamping and enhancing its information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure. Their new ICT infrastructure was to consist of various types of high-end servers and networking equipment for both the headquarters and off-shore MOPUs. Petrofac was concerned that this type of setup would result in too many monitoring tools being used within the IT department, resulting in either the neglect or underutilization of a myriad of tools that often provided too much unused information.
The Challenge
Petrofac’s off-shore floating oil rig site moved slightly in accordance with the sea’s motion, which caused problems with its satellite network connection. The oil rig’s network often suffered from high latency and occasional disconnects, which intermittently caused the rig’s monitored IT infrastructure to appear to be offline when monitored from the HQ. This generated false positives and incorrect historical performance data in Nagios, which was problematic for the IT department.
Why Nagios?
To solve its monitoring challenges, a Nagios appliance was deployed on the oil rig and synchronized with the Nagios instance at HQ. This solution eliminated the false positives and incorrect historical data Petrofac was experiencing.
Nagios was selected and introduced as a monitoring solution because of its flexibility to incorporate and aggregate a wide range of monitoring services. By using Nagios, Petrofac was able to leverage other systems’ own monitoring tools and filter out only those events and services they deemed critical to monitor. Nagios was also chosen as the preferred monitoring solution because of its ability to monitor deep inside IT systems and monitor services such as virus pattern updates, backup job results, mail queue status, database health, and database query speeds.
The Bottom Line
Petrofac’s IT department is enthusiastic about the power and flexibility they now have from using Nagios to monitor their ICT infrastructure. Nagios’ ability to display all monitoring information in a single window, collect historical performance data, provide centralized monitoring, send alerts via e-mail and SMS, and monitor any type of device—all at a low cost—has made it a clear winner for their needs.
