Founded in 1929, Chow Tai Fook is a renowned global jewelry group with a retail network spanning mainland China, Japan, South Korea, Southeast Asia, and the United States.
01. Background
Chow Tai Fook's Information Technology department supports the stable operation of thousands of nodes and dozens of systems both inside and outside the Group. According to the process, when a business fault occurs, it is reported by store staff to subsidiary IT personnel, who then escalate it to the headquarters service desk, which forwards it to the IT department. By the time the headquarters operations team receives the notification, it is often an emergency, requiring them to drop their current tasks for immediate handling.
The troubleshooting process was not always smooth.The previous monitoring system only supported host monitoring, which was not comprehensive and lacked application resource topology, making it difficult to pinpoint the fault-causing node immediately. Resolving faults through manual investigation often took several hours.
Chow Tai Fook has four data centers distributed in different cities. These were unconnected, and each region managed and built its own systems, making it difficult for the headquarters to implement unified planning and management.The operations tools used were functionally isolated, only solving problems in specific areas. Integration was difficult and costly, and the process could not cover the full lifecycle from problem prevention to resolution, leading to delayed fault reporting.The application of new technologies and the growth in business scale also imposed higher demands on operations management.
Chow Tai Fook's IT department aimed to change this situation, moving from a passive to an proactive stance, to discover faults promptly or even preemptively, eliminate risks, and ensure more stable business operation.
02. BlueKing WeOps Assists in Launching the IT Operations Digital Transformation
After evaluating and researching vendors in the operations market, Chow Tai Fook ultimately decided to adopt the Canway BlueWhaleWeOps One-Stop Operations Platform.
WeOps Platform Architecture Diagram
WeOps is fully functional; a single platform provides capabilities covering the entire operations lifecycle, such as CMDB, monitoring/alerting, fault self-healing, automation, work orders, and dashboards, and they are interlinked and not siloed. The platform supports the integration and unified governance of previously self-built operations tools from various regions.Its foundation is the Tencent BlueKing PaaS architecture, which offers flexible extensibility for continuous operations system development. The built-in development framework enhances Ops Development capabilities, truly achieving autonomous control.
In less than a month, WeOps was officially launched at Chow Tai Fook, with over 600 nodes integrated in the first phase, and results were immediate:
① Built a business-centric configuration management platform, achieving unified governance of the four data centers and automatically generating application topology. It supports automatic discovery and collection, as well as manual import, and automatically writes back data when other operations scenarios call configuration management data, ensuring data timeliness and accuracy.
② Through the intuitive display of dashboards, the real-time status of resources and business can be clearly seen.
Delayed fault reporting has been properly resolved
After the launch of the Canway BlueWhaleWeOps platform, monitoring scope expanded beyond host monitoring to include operating systems, databases, middleware, virtualization, cloud platforms, and basic applications. Operations personnel can proactively set up processes for discovering and resolving issues based on key business-impacting metrics.When a metric exceeds the alert threshold, the platform automatically triggers the backend self-healing process: an email and SMS are sent to the corresponding responsible person, who immediately evaluates the issue and clicks to approve treatment. The platform then automatically fixes the fault according to the settings, resulting in an alert response efficiency increase of over 90%.
At the same time, the platform's Integrated Alert Center effectively converges the previous thousands of daily alert messages into dozens, freeing operations personnel from alert storms to focus more on problem location and resolution.
In addition, the degree of operations automation has significantly improved.
Previously, the department's DBA had to arrive at the office at 7:00 AM every day, spending one hour logging into each database system server sequentially to perform inspections and eliminate potential risks, thus ensuring the normal operation of business systems during work hours.After WeOps was launched, the DBA created a periodic task in the operations platform. Every day at 7:30 AM, the system automatically checks the completion status of all database jobs according to the settings and sends the summary of the inspection results to the email. The DBA only needs 1 minute to check the report.
There are many similar scenarios; repetitive work that previously had to be done manually can now be automated by WeOps. This change led the operations team supervisor to state, "The launch of WeOps allows us to devote more energy to more valuable work."
03. Subscription Installments Make Operations Upgrades Simple
The subscription model also keeps the cost of operations transformation from being prohibitively high.
If a comprehensive operations system were built traditionally, one system at a time, it would be difficult to see results without spending millions. WeOps has a short deployment cycle, uses subscription-based installment payments, provides quick results, and has low trial-and-error costs. Its operations scenario functions can gradually deepen and be enriched with use.
Furthermore, the enterprise's suggestions for product function improvements are well-received and, following evaluation, are included in the product's natural iteration schedule, eliminating the need for burdensome custom development.For instance, regarding the remote management function, Chow Tai Fook's IT department wanted a unified entry point via WeOps to instantly access and manage the corresponding server upon receiving a server alert. After receiving this request, the WeOps product department discussed and decided to include it in the product's natural iteration, and the new function is now live.
The stable and efficient support for Chow Tai Fook's global retail network and rapidly developing smart retail business is only the beginning of automation.In the future, Chow Tai Fook's IT department will leverage the platform, through the precipitation of capabilities and data, to further deepen the application of intelligent operations scenarios, upgrade the operations organization and management model, and more calmly face the challenges brought by new technologies and new businesses!
