Business opportunity
National Australia Bank (NAB) is executing a long-term strategy to become a more customer-centric, efficient and agile organization. As the bank seeks to create seamless experiences for customers and employees it is increasingly enabled by digital, data and analytics and investing in secure, simplified and resilient technology.
As part of the drive for simplification and modernization, NAB aimed to exit an existing data center and decommission older technologies, including legacy IBM Power8 servers.
The business goal was to move investment towards modern systems that would deliver better cost-efficiency over time, while also providing greater flexibility, reliability and operational efficiency.
Technical challenge
NAB aimed to consolidate their legacy monitoring system, IBM Tivoli Monitoring (ITM, previously Netcool), into architecture-approved observability patterns. To achieve this, Kyndryl was tasked with migrating all applications running on ITM, which monitored events on Windows, Linux, AIX and Solaris production servers, and relayed information to NAB’s ServiceNow Incident Management system.
Within six months, Kyndryl and NAB collaborated to:
- Extract current rulesets and monitoring thresholds from ITM
- Replace ITM with Grafana observability technology
- Integrate Grafana with ServiceNow
- Migrate alerting rules and configure dashboards
- Deploy Grafana Alloy agents
- Develop direct feeds to ServiceNow for systems not supported by Grafana Alloy
Our solution
NAB and Kyndryl collaborated to streamline ITM monitoring by decommissioning multiple environments and implementing a unified, highly scalable solution powered by Grafana's observability technology, selected for its advanced dashboard capabilities and seamless integration of NAB's diverse data sources into a single platform.
Kyndryl resolved Grafana Alloy gaps by enabling ServiceNow feeds, migrating alert ticketing, shifting MQ/SQL/Apache monitoring to APPD, redirecting logs to OpenSearch and leveraging DAF/KONG APIs for Mainframe Broadcom SOLVE and other systems.
Throughout the project, Kyndryl monitored and controlled risks, managed change controls and provided detailed status reports to maintain NAB’s confidence in the process. During cutovers from ITM to Grafana, the Kyndryl team provided daily progress summaries and increased support levels to deal with issues as they arose.
At NAB, we’ve improved how we monitor our critical systems by closing alerting gaps, simplifying ticketing, adopting Grafana for better visibility, enabling ServiceNow feeds, and using APIs to connect key systems—helping us deliver more reliable, future-ready services for customers.
