VW FS optimizes with AIOps from Dynatrace and managed services from amasol

“The Key to Mobility” – this is the motto under which Volkswagen Financial Services AG (VWFS) coordinates the global financial services activities of the Volkswagen Group. The main business areas include the automotive banking and leasing business, insurance and services, mobility services and payment services – in 47 countries worldwide. Volkswagen Financial Services relies on the AI-based monitoring solution (AIOps) from Dynatrace to monitor the heterogeneous application landscape.

VWFS is working with amasol as its implementation partner, which also provides the operation of the monitoring platform as a managed service.

Project overview

On-premise, private cloud, public cloud: distributed application landscape with high heterogeneity

“At Volkswagen Financial Services, we have a heterogeneous, distributed application landscape consisting of in-house developments and purchased software. Some of the applications run on dedicated virtual machines in our company’s own data centers in Braunschweig or in our Cont- ainer platform (PKS) and Microsoft Azure stack, a cloud-on-premise,” says Maik Blecker, describing the status quo at VWFS. Since 2017, he has been responsible for the ITIL process B04 – Manage Availability as a technical specialist and, as team leader, forms the bracket around all monitoring and AIOps topics in the IH-IOAS Service Operation & Processes unit at Volkswagen Financial Services. He complements: “Some of the applications are now also operated in the public cloud – Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS).” Accordingly, the application monitoring landscape at VWFS used to be very extensive, with numerous different monitoring tools in use.

As part of a 2021/2022 joint project with amasol, a system integrator headquartered in Munich, the aim of the project was to gain an overview of the monitoring landscape at Volkswagen Financial Services and to identify potential for optimization. This involved checking the monitoring of 70 of the more than 200 business-critical VWFS applications. Maik Blecker remembers:

“In workshops with the technical application managers (TAM), business architects (BA) and application managers of the relevant applications, we worked out how monitoring is currently carried out, whether and how it can be connected to the central event handling console in the VW Group and what optimization options there are.” In total, more than 100 workshops were held.

At the end of the project, it was clear to everyone involved that it no sense to continue working on the topic of monitoring as part of isolated initiatives. In addition, the project participants realized that there was no central entry point for the topic of monitoring at VWFS: the birth of the Monitoring Center of Excellence at Volkswagen Financial Services.

Monitoring Center of Excellence as a central point of contact

According to Maik Blecker, the first task of the Monitoring Center of Excellence (MCoE) is to be the central point of contact for all monitoring issues, to which application and business managers can turn. In addition, the topic of monitoring is now already taken into account in the project initiation process. Maik Blecker explains: “As early as the introduction of a new application, colleagues also have to deal with the topic of monitoring and receive the appropriate support via the MCoE, e.g. when choosing the appropriate monitoring tool. This means that monitoring is into the entire application implementation process and no longer only appears on the agenda at the very end.”

Another task of the MCoE at Volkswagen Financial Services is to define and develop company-wide standards for monitoring and to carry out regular analyses of the monitoring landscape at VWFS. The MCoE is also responsible for maintaining the existing monitoring portfolio. The aim is to gradually increase the company’s application monitoring maturity.

What are the benefits of AIOps for the customers of a financial services provider in the automotive industry?

Maik Blecker already answered this question in a presentation at the BizOps Forum 2022 in Munich. He explains: “The constantly growing focus on the cloud has meant that conventional APM solutions have reached their limits in the area of monitoring. In order cope with the dynamic and highly scalable infrastructure, it was necessary to migrate to a modern and highly automated solution. At the same time, an attempt was made to find a solution that not only enables APM in the cloud, but can also used for log monitoring. After a prototype evaluation of several market providers, the decision was made in favor of Dynatrace. We are going down this path together with the VW Group and the various brands.”

When deciding on Dynatrace AIOps, the first priority was therefore to exploit automation options that would ensure greater stability of the VWFS applications. The automated root cause analysis made possible by the solution should lead to a reduction in the mean time to repair (MTTR), while the use of AI should improve the anticipation of possible faults and errors especially in the dynamic and highly scalable system environments at VWFS. By analyzing metrics and traces in the cloud, potential bottlenecks and disruptions were to be identified at an early stage. In summary, according to Maik Blecker, the aim was to make it easier to understand the “inner workings” of the applications used at VWFS and their relationships and dependencies across relevant layers.

Following project preparation, the Dynatrace cluster was integrated from fall 2021 and the agents were rolled out. This was followed by the onboarding of the central VWFS leasing application for the German market and five other national companies.

In spring 2022, Dynatrace was then established as a managed service by amasol at Volkswagen Financial Services. Since then, event management and ticketing for the integrated applications have been running, as has the onboarding of other applications. These are no longer just applications that are operated in the container platform (PKS) on-premise at Volkswagen Financial Services.

Operation of the monitoring platform by amasol

Maik Blecker explains the reasons for having the monitoring platform operated by an external service provider: “amasol already looked after part of our monitoring landscape at VWFS AG in the past. The old APM solution, which was replaced by Dynatrace AIOps, was also managed by amasol. It therefore made sense to continue benefiting from the solution and operational expertise of our colleagues in the future. “Blecker’s conclusion on the experience with Dynatrace AIOps and the cooperation with amasol so far:

“Our experience with Dynatrace AIOps so far has been very positive, although we are not yet using all of the platform’s features. As far as the cooperation with amasol is concerned, we have been working with amasol for several years now, both in projects and in the operation of our monitoring tools, in a professional and cooperative partnership. We benefit from the comprehensive product and project know-how and the close personal cooperation.”

VW FS optimizes with AIOps from Dynatrace and managed services from amasol

Project overview

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On-premise, private cloud, public cloud: distributed application landscape with high heterogeneity

Monitoring Center of Excellence as a central point of contact

What are the benefits of AIOps for the customers of a financial services provider in the automotive industry?

Operation of the monitoring platform by amasol

Dynatrace

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