Technology Stack & Use Cases

Full Automation of a Legacy Network Infrastructure

For a medium-sized manufacturing company with locations worldwide, an Ansible-based orchestration solution was planned and built for switches from the manufacturer Juniper. The project’s goal was to preconfigure the network devices without any manual interaction (Zero Touch Deployment), considering all company-wide defined standards as well as regionally necessary special settings. Additionally, the configuration of all switches (>700) worldwide was to be centrally managed using the Infrastructure as a Service paradigm.

With the Ansible automation of the switch environment, a solution was created that perfectly integrates with the already existing orchestration of all Linux servers worldwide (also Ansible), which was also implemented and managed by enthus. It also integrates with the global monitoring solution Zabbix and the Big Data Analytics / SIEM solution Splunk.

Building a DevOps Infrastructure for a Software Manufacturer

A software manufacturing company with around 100 employees, focused on industry-specific software for customers in the logistics sector, set a goal to make its software development processes more efficient, reduce error rates, and deliver developments to customers faster and with less effort. Additionally, the company wanted to become more attractive to software developers by focusing on modern technologies, as it is experiencing strong growth.

Our team, together with the client, planned and implemented an on-premise DevOps software platform consisting of tools around GitLab, GitLab CI, and other partially open-source, partially commercial tools. A hyper-converged infrastructure was also installed to enable the dynamic deployment of entire Kubernetes clusters directly from CI/CD pipelines, providing end customers with direct access to the applications hosted by the software development company. The entire environment was equipped with an operations, backup, and restore concept, as well as a monitoring/observability stack. In collaboration with the client’s developers, workshops were conducted to implement and optimize CI/CD pipelines to make the best use of the new infrastructure.

We are currently working on expanding the infrastructure towards Edge Kubernetes (housing at end customers) and the corresponding network and security concepts for cross-cluster network communication.

Development of an Observability Event Streaming Platform

For a managed service provider, a platform was developed as part of a proof of concept (POC) and a subsequent implementation project. This platform extracts monitoring metric data in realtime from a central system monitoring tool (Zabbix), enriches it with meta-information from the same monitoring system as well as from other tools such as the CMDB, and filters this data based on the enriched meta-information according to the affiliation of various end customers. This filtered data is then made available to these customers through a standardized interface in the event streaming system Kafka. On the receiving side, a microservice developed by enthus acts to retrieve the customer-specific monitoring data from the Kafka topic and transfer it into a customer-side Prometheus monitoring system.

Our team has supported this platform since the project planning phase and continues to assist the client in operating and further developing the solution. New metrics are continuously integrated, new use cases are implemented, and additional metadata is connected to continuously increase the value of the obtained metric data.

Implementation of a Monitoring and Automation Platform

A medium-sized customer in the manufacturing sector was operating a monitoring platform that was inflexible and no longer supported by the vendor. With the assistance of our consultants, this platform was migrated to the monitoring solution Zabbix, as recommended by us. By using a software tool developed by us to support the migration, it was ensured that all use cases implemented in the old solution were fully and functionally transferred to the new monitoring solution. In addition to the monitoring solution, an automation platform based on Ansible was implemented simultaneously, initially used for the rollout of monitoring agents on the Windows and Linux servers as well as for maintaining the monitoring software itself. The customer now also uses this platform for extensive system changes, maintenance tasks, and continuous software and configuration management.