Going Azure to build a modern platform

Kleinschmidt provides managed cloud EDI, data integration services, and more to leading companies and brands worldwide. They build and support supply chain integration solutions that enable organizations to communicate and collaborate on a level playing field with trading partners across all industries around the globe. With technology overgrowing, the company decided it needed to move to a more scalable, cloud-native architecture. As a result, it developed a new modern cloud platform based on Azure.

Azure portal is powerful for building enterprise-grade solutions but complex to manage and monitor; this invites a lot of challenges. The first and foremost challenge was the lack of application visibility. While many tools and capabilities exist, a concise operational view of the platform is not easily obtained in the Azure Portal.

“Since our Azure resources are scattered across different subscriptions, regions, and tenants, it is challenging to traverse between them to know their status.”

In addition, the scope of RBAC management in Azure makes it challenging to define a focused ‘role’ for a particular application without a great deal of effort and forethought. Another pain point would be consolidated monitoring, Frank says,

“While Azure Portal offers much native monitoring and alerting capabilities, it is difficult to define multiple alerts cohesively.”

Achieving holistic visibility of Azure environment

Kleinschmidt understood that Azure created a fragmented view of its environment, making it difficult to achieve the observability needed to optimize its solutions effectively. Kleinschmidt recognized it needed a new approach and began to assess the market to see how it could improve its monitoring capabilities.

Kleinschmidt selected Turbo360 as it offered a single source of truth for their entire Azure environment. Turbo360 allowed enhanced application visibility and an easy-to-use alerting mechanism, which helped them monitor the components based on throughputs and other thresholds.

“We have seen a quickly evolving product that is working towards matching the success of their BizTalk360 platform. We look forward to all the ways we will be able to leverage the product in our environment to ease our staff’s operational and support burden”.

Turbo360 addressed the operational challenges by allowing the user to aggregate the view with an intuitive interface and role definition(s). These are independent of Azure Active Directory (given that the underlying permissions are provided) to make operational control/monitoring more efficient and user management simpler than a specific application defined within the tool.

• Single source of visibility – With Turbo360, Kleinschmidt has a single observability solution across its entire environment, providing all the insights it needs from one dashboard.
• Cross-team collaboration – The organization’s support team, applications team, and infrastructure team all share this same dashboard, improving collaboration and enabling them to deliver more excellent business value.
• Reduced alert storms – Turbo360 consolidates alerts, suppressing alert storms and enabling teams to quickly identify the answers they need to resolve problems.
• Better user experiences – Turbo360’s precise root cause analysis capabilities enable Kleinschmidt’s operations and support teams to understand the full context of the issue and resolve it much faster than before to minimize the impact on user experience.

“The support is top-notch! The support and product teams are very responsive and eager to solicit and listen to our concerns and suggestions”.

Manish Upadhyaya,

Senior Cloud Architect, Kleinschmidt