FirstGroup accelerates business, reduces emissions with the centralized visibility and management of Azure Arc and Azure Monitor

Minding the monitoring gap

FirstGroup had historically received monitoring, alerting, and event triaging for its on-premises and multicloud environments from an external provider. However, the provider was struggling to consistently meet the company’s requirements. Engaging Servent as its expert cloud partner, FirstGroup set about gaining a holistic, future-leaning monitoring solution capable of extending across on-premises and multicloud systems and services.

“We had an obvious gap in our monitoring,” recalls John Windsor, Infrastructure Architect at FirstGroup. “We had different systems monitoring multiple cloud deployments and on-premises environments. With Azure Arc and Azure Monitor, we can integrate all our environments into one central monitoring solution.” FirstGroup hoped to combine and centralize the monitoring of its systems running in on-premises, Azure, and Amazon Web Services environments. And it wanted better insight into how its workloads were running and performing. “We wanted a single pane of glass view of all of our infrastructure systems so we could get real-time insights into the utilization and connectivity of each system.”

Working with Servent, FirstGroup quickly and seamlessly stood up its Azure Arc and Azure Monitor deployment using infrastructure as code. “FirstGroup was particularly impressed with the initial Azure Arc onboarding,” says Dan Adams, Senior Azure Cloud Engineer at Servent. “It was as simple as provisioning the onboarding script using a Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager task sequence, and then within minutes, everything was onboarded and ready to build on.”

Seeing more with Azure Arc

FirstGroup’s Azure Arc deployment focused on connecting servers to achieve comprehensive, cross-environment monitoring. Azure Arc and Monitor offered the prospect of enhanced visibility and centralized management. “Azure Arc and Azure Monitor appealed to FirstGroup because of their ability to provide total visibility through a single pane of glass for the company’s hybrid and multicloud estate,” says Adams. “It was a perfect fit.”

The company’s solution consists of rule-defined monitoring of its Azure Arc–connected servers. It implemented a standard selection of heartbeat alerts and disk and resource consumption metrics to gain insights into memory availability. Additionally, it deployed Windows Event Log to monitor unexpected system shutdowns and application-specific error logs, which the company needed to ingest and alert on.

FirstGroup is using the Log Analytics workspace to log data for Monitor, log to metric conversion to implement time-based alerts, and Azure Logic Apps to tailor alerting by server name and issue resolution. The company also uses Logic Apps to manage email alerting, which relays incoming alerts to the correct inbox for action. And FirstGroup is using Azure Workbooks to visualize the new data streams that Monitor is capturing. With workbooks, the company can see things like network dependency mapping and performance metrics, and with its Azure Arc–specific workbook, it can monitor the general health of its environments and watch for disconnections.

Better monitoring with greater efficiency

Through its Azure deployment, FirstGroup can work in a more agile and efficient manner. With centralized visibility and management, the company has gained a single source of truth on the state and performance of its environments, so various teams can better align, collaborate, and solve problems. Additionally, the ability to change code and roll out updates through automated pipelines accelerates development and improvements, thereby allowing FirstGroup to modernize and enhance workloads.

Says Servent Founder and Azure Solutions Director Des McGuire, “With the management and automation capabilities of Azure Monitor, FirstGroup has greatly simplified its monitoring configuration processes. FirstGroup can implement monitoring and alerting improvements and conduct management and maintenance easily and efficiently.”

Through better monitoring, the company is realizing improvements in the performance of its workloads. Azure Monitor helps FirstGroup see the resources it uses to support workloads, particularly the queue length and disk latency of its on-premises workloads. With disk metric ingestion around queue lengths, the company can more easily pinpoint which workloads it might want to migrate for enhanced performance. “Using the outage and alert length data, Azure Arc and Monitor help FirstGroup remediate issues faster,” says Adams.

The transportation company’s monitoring solution is also supporting key business priorities, such as helping reduce costs and emissions. “By basing its entire monitoring solution on Azure Monitor, FirstGroup has increased its efficiency, helped control costs, and minimized the headaches of having numerous vendors,” McGuire says. And with Monitor, the company can create only the metrics and alerts it needs, so it can rightsize its solution to further optimize costs. 

The streamlining and centralization of the cloud also supports FirstGroup’s sustainability initiatives. As a provider of public transportation, the company plays a major role in decarbonizing the United Kingdom’s economy, and increased visibility into its digital resources facilitates more sustainable decisions to reduce its carbon footprint. “As a private company that runs public services for the Department for Transport, FirstGroup has sustainability mandates,” states McGuire. “And by moving to a cloud-first strategy and cloud infrastructure with Azure, it becomes more sustainable.”

Next stop, cloud-native

With Azure Arc and Monitor, FirstGroup has harnessed the power of the cloud to set itself up for continuous improvement. The company plans to move more workloads to Azure and continue streamlining processes and enhancing performance. “With Azure Arc, FirstGroup took its first step into the cloud,” says McGuire. “Now, it has the freedom to migrate workloads to Azure as necessary, leaving on-premises only what makes sense for regulatory reasons.”

Indeed, the company anticipates taking full advantage of other cloud features in the coming years, like Azure-native security capabilities through Microsoft Defender for Cloud. “FirstGroup has gained powerful monitoring capabilities with Azure Monitor,“ concludes McGuire. ”And adopting a cloud-native approach along with Azure Arc will help FirstGroup increase its efficiency, accelerate change, and benefit from modern work practices.”

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