Deployment and Monitoring - Arsys

Arsys is a company with 1.5 million active services and 266,000 customers. Its portfolio includes more than 100 different solutions that are in constant evolution: new versions and continuous improvements, features and releases. In the evolution of this dynamic portfolio participate a variety of technical and commercial departments, according to their own responsibilities and tasks: Operations, Security, Platform, Business and Product Development, Customes Care, Technical Support, Quality and Assurance, etc.

Most of the departments and technical resources are located in different workcentres and/or different Data Centers. This reality demands a powerful, perfect and easy-to-use channel of communications, considering always that any improvement is made on production platforms in most of the cases, and changes can not affect the levels of quality and service of any solution that Arsys provide to their clients. Avoiding any risk to hosted services and any conflict with actions from other departments is critical in this procedure.

For this purpose, Arsys has been developing for years the platform "Change Tracking Centre" (CTC). This is an internal application to coordinate and monitor all of these actions.

Among the main functionalities that are collected in the CTC, these are the most outstanding features:

Documentation and active follow-up of the whole life cycle of any type of intervention/change/evolution. Understanding by change:

  • Any type of intervention on the physical infrastructure of the Workcentre or Datacentre. o Any type of intervention on the architecture of the technical platform in production o Any kind of code modification in development, pre-production and production environments.
    • Any type of action on licensing.
    • Disclosure of new products or discontinuation of obsoletes.
    • Changes to the company's online security policies.
    • Etc.
  • Define intervention’s window of each change, detecting conflicts with other scheduled interventions.
  • Running services affected.
  • Affected customers.
  • Risks.
  • Rollbacks.
  • Problems derived from interventions.
  • Interventions logs.
  • Generation of reports.
  • Notifications alerts:
    • In the different stages of the life cycle of an intervention, notifications are sent to the stakeholders.
    • When there is some type of conflict between two or mores interventions, automatic alerts are generated.
  • The application also uses Profiles Management, with different levels of permissions, according to their role in the project.

Besides, Arsys Quality Control Department works with the CTC application to cover certain points mentioned in the general rule ISO 27001, as Information security risk assessments and treatment. Additionally, CTS is also used for Incident Management (included in ISO 27002) and Information Security incidents.

The aim of this case is using a specific application (Change Tracking Center), conveniently customized for testing and monitoring:

  • The correct deployment of an application through ADAPT-ACSmI in different environments/Datacentres. [KR4],[KR5]
  • Test monitoring and communication wWith ADAPT User Interface (UI) [KR5]
  • The application's redeployment after one or several failures of the initial, requirements closed in the definition of the application. [KR4], [KR5]
  • The automatic re-simulations in Optimus before any re-deployment.