Monitoring becomes crucial for complex Azure Stack

BBC Worldwide is a principal commercial arm and a wholly-owned subsidiary of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Its vision is to build the BBC’s brands, audiences, retail returns, and reputation worldwide. They have been using Azure for years. It helped them build great solutions, but it was hard to manage and monitor. BBC did not have insight or control over the performance of vital, mission-critical cloud services underpinning its platform. It meant that when issues did arise, it was difficult to pinpoint the root cause in a centralized manner.

“The main challenge we faced was Monitoring the resources. Achieving consolidated monitoring for Azure resources as our immediate need.”

BBC’s other challenge was to get role-based access control for the team members. Initially, they used Service Bus explorer, where they had to provide a connection string. In that case, everyone will have access to all the components, and role-based access control was not feasible.

BBC wanted an all-in-one monitoring solution that could provide precise, actionable answers in one place, to help teams make faster, more data-driven decisions to optimize customer experiences.

Optimizing performance across a complex stack with centralized monitoring

BBC sought an intelligent observability platform to consolidate all monitoring data into a single pane of glass across the company’s end-to-end technology stack. After evaluating the market, BBC identified Turbo360 as the obvious choice due to its flexibility, comprehensive capabilities, and ability to quickly identify and solve performance issues. Turbo360 flexibility and extensibility enabled them to monitor their custom applications with minimal manual effort.

“Turbo360 resolved the two significant challenges from our end. We achieved consolidated monitoring at the application level with Business Applications’ help. The other challenge, role-based access control, was rectified as Turbo360 uses the Service Principal, which helped us restrict or provide role-based access to the team members to the specific components.”

Apart from monitoring, they also use Automated tasks, which became their favorite feature from Turbo360. Since BBC is dealing with Service Bus, the Automated Tasks automatically helped them schedule and process the Dead-Letter messages. This feature was beneficial in reducing the manual intervention.

“Turbo360 is very useful. It has a lot of features that benefit our business needs. It eases our daily routine tasks by centralizing everything in a single place. We can monitor the resources and perform operational activities at the same place. I am very happy with the tool.”

• Resolve business-impacting issues – Turbo360’s monitoring capabilities help BBC’s teams better understand user behavior and error data to resolve problems faster and more effectively.
• Reduced alert noise – Turbo360 consolidates notifications, suppressing alert noise and enabling teams to identify the answers they need to resolve problems quickly.
• Diverse notification channels – With Turbo360, notify appropriate stakeholders via collaboration tools like Teams & Slack and utilize the ability to design customizable email notification templates.
• Secured RBAC – Role-based access control was rectified as Turbo360 uses the Service Principal, which helped them restrict or provide role-based access to the team members to the specific components.

“The team was very supportive. We once had an issue with an automated task due to some configurations. We reported this to the team, they found the solution, and it was fixed.”

Firoz Alam & Yashpal Singh,

BBC