The company is one of the market leaders in the distribution of mineral oil products in Germany. More than 30 locations in Germany and the Benelux countries as well as an extensive network of partners and subsidiaries ensure that Aral, Castrol and BP fuels and lubricants are always delivered on time.
Organization: Mobene GmbH
Sector: Mineral oil products
Position: Market leader in mineral oil distribution in Germany
Founded: 2011
Locations: Over 30 in Germany and Benelux, 75 logistics locations
Until the start with i-doit, the IT documentation was done with Excel spreadsheets, among other things. Michael Peter, Senior Consultant at Mobene responsible for IT operations and network planning, explains:
"We needed a standardized tool to be able to carry out our IT documentation in a structured way."
During the selection phase, the IT managers at Mobene tested both free and proprietary solutions, but then opted for an open source-based solution.
"The open database structure is key for us. This allows us to make small adjustments ourselves or have them made."
When the Mobene experts used the i-doit tool for the first time, they were immediately convinced and have been using the professional version of the solution, including a support contract with synetics, since the subscription became available.
Thanks to good preparation, the item import went relatively smoothly. All mass data from clients, screens, etc. could be extracted and automatically imported using i-doit's CSV import function. Today, the infrastructure managers have around 80 percent of what they want to record in the system.
The documentation covers all hardware, the entire SAN and the complete network infrastructure at the 28 company-owned and around 75 logistics locations. In total, 151 routers, 80 switches, a total of 72 servers (including virtual ones), 350 monitors, 300 clients, 100 notebooks and 30 access points of the company's Germany-wide WLAN infrastructure are documented in the branches.
And for everything concerning network management and overall IT service management, open source software is used, i.e. Icinga/Nagios, ((OTRS)) Community Edition, and above all i-doit.
i-doit is the central Mobene tool for IT service management. Admins as well as support and helpdesk staff are able to complete all tasks from there. The support team initially has a general overview of the locations and buildings, and can query the status of the switches or routers, for example, via the link with Nagios.
Via the link to OTRS, all tickets can be viewed directly from i-doit or new ones can be opened directly. As these tickets can be referenced directly to the individual objects in i-doit, an admin can see, for example, how many tickets are running on a certain i-doit object and can thus localize - and solve - a potentially fundamental problem.
Once you are ready, you can devote yourself entirely to IT and therefore company tuning. With i-doit, Mobene not only has an overview of its IT infrastructure, but also of its rolling items. Around 160 of the company's tankers have their own invoicing system, where the invoice for the end customer is printed directly on the tanker. The corresponding tablets, printers and SIM cards, including the vehicles, are documented in i-doit. Peter explains:
"In cooperation with a mobile phone company and using Windows CE-based remote control software, we can manage these devices remotely. We solved the problem of constantly changing IP addresses on the tablets caused by the mobile network by having the devices constantly report their IP to a service developed by us, which then adjusts the current IP in the i-doit database."
In general, Mobene will increasingly focus on automatically filling highly dynamic information into the database in the future. According to Peter, this is where i-doit comes into its own:
"This is exactly what is possible in i-doit because the database structure of this software is simply outstanding. This allows us to exchange data with external applications. This is extremely important for interactive IT operations, because we want to maintain as many things as possible automatically and have to enter as little manually as possible."
A practical tip from the expert:
According to Peter, beginners should always think about what they want to document first.
"i-doit is very powerful, you can document down to the smallest detail. So be careful not to backfire. The complexity can become so great that the effort required to keep everything up to date becomes far too high."
Michael Peter summarizes:
"On a day-to-day basis, it's simply about finding the info I need every day quickly and easily!"