Microland Digital Warriors

Microland Digital Warriors | 69 © MICROLAND LIMITED 2020. Internal Circulation Only 68 Making clients fall in love with automation “At our level,” says Varun, “We only hear the bad stuff!” But when the client wrote a long mail of appreciation for his work and integrated Varun’s automation solution into their network monitoring system, he knew he had hit good news. The client was in love with Varun’s solution. But there is more to the story of this Digital Warrior. Read on… Of the 45,000+ network devices Microland manages for this client, 5 -10% have problems once a week. That’s 3000 - 4,000 problems for engineers to solve. A big chunk of these tickets are low criticality and need minimal manual intervention. But 20% are real problems that need immediate attention. This means engineers have to, anyway, go through all 4,000 tickets, soaking up an inordinate amount of resources. In addition, the quality of troubleshooting drops and so does efficiency. Varun asked himself the obvious question, “Can I reduce the overheads on the engineers?” That question made him turn to SmartCenter and Ansible to create an automation solution. Once he had automated the process, about 2000 odd tickets were automated to resolution, dramatically bringing down the manual effort. But here is the bigger part of the story: The client meanwhile had bought a shiny new monitoring tool that could dig deeper for problems and the number of tickets grew by almost 30%. Under normal conditions this would have meant Microland putting in more resources. But the client was amazed that Microland was not complaining about the growth in tickets—all thanks to Varun’s solution, no one even noticed that the ticket volumes had gone up. Varun’s inspiration for automation comes from listening to tech podcasts on the tube in London, when he shuttles between home, following the English Premier League and the University of London where he is enrolled for a MSc. “At the university we are doing cool tech all the time. It’s a lot of fun stuff going on,” says Varun. He says he will use that learning to push Microland harder towards the culture of automation. Varun V This Digital warrior automated GE Incident management operations to reduce the turnaround time, reduce cost and improve customer satisfaction. This process improvement is also replicatable across multiple client scenarios.”