The Case: Maestro Brings a New Touch to Corporate Cloud Reporting
Effective cloud usage for an enterprise requires various tools, including resource management, corporate integrations, and establishing effective communication with end users.
By default, cloud providers offer crucial alerts out-of-the-box, with additional alerts being customizable and provisioned as a service. This setup works well once you use only one provider and a small infrastructure. However, in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments, tracking complex infrastructures efficiently becomes more challenging.
Enterprises have different methods to address these challenges, ranging from manual sorting to integrating third-party tools. However, not all these methods are flexible enough to respond promptly to technological updates and market demands. This is where the need for a better solution emerges, leading to our case study on migrating to Maestro.
Problem Statement
An enterprise using a hybrid cloud with AWS, Azure, GCP, and OpenStack-based infrastructure utilizes a legacy system for virtual resource management and user communication. The current system overwhelms users with excessive notifications, causing them to miss or ignore crucial alerts. Additionally, it provides insufficient details on reported findings and not enough analytics for the current scale of infrastructure, placing extra load on the support teams.
The enterprise requires a new approach that enhances cloud analytics and reporting, making it more transparent, efficient, and valuable for both the enterprise and individual users within it.
Proposed Solution
The Maestro team offered connecting the enterprise infrastructure to an on-premises Maestro entity, focusing on customizing the reporting system to address the customer’s existing tasks and improving analytics, recommendations, and report usability.
The team estimated the reporting system migration and customization would take 6 months and initiated the work.
Investigating the Legacy System and Updates Planning
At the start, the team analyzed the legacy reporting system and identified 130 reports sent to users. To facilitate working with the reports, we categorized them into five groups:
Understanding the target audience allowed us to revise the content of the reports, align them with those in Maestro, and determine updates to enhance the entire report collection's usability.
As a result, we identified which information could be restructured, removed, or added. We also reassessed the recipients of each report to ensure they receive only pertinent information they can act upon. Additionally, we incorporated Maestro reports not available in the legacy system to provide deeper insights into FinOps and Security analytics and recommendations.
To the existing pack of the reports, we also added Maestro reports, that were not available in the legacy system and give deeper insights into FinOps and Security analytics and recommendations.
Migration Planning
In addition to sorting recipients and purposes, we categorized the reports to be migrated or added by their impact to construct a precise migration plan. This resulted in the following migration targets: