Towngas Group is the portfolio of businesses invested in and managed by The Hong Kong and China Gas Company Limited in mainland China. Since entering the mainland in 1994, it has consistently focused on the gas market, with business covering the upstream, midstream, and downstream of natural gas. Currently, it operates over 300 gas projects across 24 provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities, serving over 40 million customers.
01. Massive Operations System，Frequent Challenges
Currently, critical applications such as Towngas's email and business systems cover nearly 10,000 users, primarily supported by the Shenzhen-based operations team of the Towngas Information Management Center.
With the launch of the Towngas Operation Platform (TOP Platform), the number of business modules has increased and the IT infrastructure has become more complex. The existing IT operations model faces higher demands for management efficiency and business continuity, placing severe pressure on the current operations team.
Demand 1: Comprehensive Monitoring and Timely Fault Awareness
The monitoring system requires all-around real-time monitoring and alerting for all IT objects. In particular, the upcoming IoT platform has higher requirements for K8S container monitoring. Faults need to be quickly located and resolved to ensure stable business operation, preventing operations staff from passively "firefighting" after users report issues.
Demand 2: Higher Level of Operations Automation for Greater Efficiency
As the scale of management increases, the burden of routine repetitive tasks, such as fault inspection, patch update management, and work order approval management, consumes significant time and energy. This makes it difficult for operations personnel to focus on higher-value work.
02. Escaping the Passive Operations Dilemma with WeOps
To effectively improve IT operations efficiency and business continuity, and to change the operations team's passive response dilemma, Towngas implemented the Canway BlueWhale WeOps Integrated Operations Platform. The platform was deployed and implemented within one month, gradually integrating and replacing traditional operations tools and offline processes.
The product adopted a subscription-based model to rapidly deploy new-generation monitoring, alerting, and automated operations scenarios.
Specifically, WeOps established a Full Fault Lifecycle Management System for Towngas. It integrates and links asset management，monitoring/alerting, operations automation, and visualization functionalities, enriching operations scenarios across various dimensions.
This platform implementation achieved a dual improvement in IT operations efficiency and business continuity.
1) Full-Stack Monitoring and Intelligent Alerting
The monitoring system comprehensively covers over 20 types of IT objects, including hosts, databases, and network devices. It links intelligent alerting with rapid fault location functionality to help operations personnel quickly analyze and resolve issues.
2) Operations Automation for Enhanced Efficiency
The operations management tools are ready-to-use (out of the box), enabling tasks like bulk updates of Windows OS patches, automated health checks, and rapid work order approval.
3) Resource Visualization for Improved Operational Effectiveness Visual dashboards
Such as Resource Overview, Application Wall, and Core Application Monitoring were built to dynamically display business operation status, facilitating the rapid scheduling and management of system resources.
03. Significant Results After WeOps Launch
1) 24-Hour Monitoring to Prevent Risks, Real-Time and Accurate Alerting
WeOps provides comprehensive monitoring of various IT objects, including hosts, operating systems, and network devices.
Combined with dashboards and data visualization screens, any anomaly triggers a real-time alert, quickly locating the fault root cause. This allows operations personnel to perceive and handle issues promptly, resulting in a fault response rate improvement of over 90%.
Furthermore, relying on alert algorithms such as aggregation, suppression, convergence, and filtering in the Event Center, effective alert strategies can be customized to free operations personnel from alert storms. Alerts can also automatically generate work orders, forming a complete fault closed loop.
In addition, WeOps supports the unified governance and monitoring of coexisting traditional and Cloud Native architectures.
Towngas plans to build an IoT platform based on a container foundation, and will use WeOps to monitor and alert on the system's K8S containers. This includes supporting the automatic discovery and collection of K8S namespace and workload, pod configuration information, and relational dependencies, enabling K8S monitoring data collection and monitoring policy configuration, and using intelligent alerting to assist with fault handling.
2) One-Click Patch Installation, Time and Effort Saving
Previously, updating WSUS (Microsoft's networked free patch distribution solution) patches required the simultaneous presence of operations personnel and application owners for centralized updates. Patches were often updated only once per quarter or even every six months, requiring 2-3 days to complete.
Since implementing WeOps patch installation, the team has achieved monthly batch installation of Windows OS patches, ensuring timely system vulnerability fixes. The automated batch update, restart, and check process also leads to a higher patch installation success rate. Operations personnel can now utilize their spare time, completing all system patches in 3 batches at different times, with each batch taking about 5 hours. This reduces the total time spent by 57 hours, resulting in an average efficiency increase of approximately 5 times, and the update frequency has changed from quarterly/semi-annually to monthly.
3) Health Check Efficiency Increased by 230%, Fast and Convenient Work Order Process
Previously, operations personnel conducted inspections quarterly, which took approximately one week to check all IT objects.
Since WeOps was launched, operations personnel only need to spend 5 minutes daily on a conventional health scan check.
Using WeOps for daily health scans of IT infrastructure resources (servers, OS, databases, application systems) allows personnel to monitor the status of IT objects at any time and quickly discover issues. This significantly reduces inspection time, effectively lowers security risks associated with spot checks, and saves labor costs.
4) Automated User Requests, Time Savings
Previously, the Towngas Information Management Center team handled at least 50 request work orders daily from users nationwide. Now, based on the AD IT service desk, they can configure the service catalog and design request management workflows in the backend. After a user submits a ticket, it can be executed automatically with just an approval click. This also allows for work order data analysis, effectively reducing repetitive work and saving 80% of the operations staff's time.
5) Visualized Data Dashboard, Operations Status at a Glance
Operations personnel use WeOps's built-in visual dashboards—Resource Overview, Application Wall, Core Application Monitoring, etc.—to visualize abstract data, dynamically displaying the operational status of over 20 applications and resource conditions like host systems. This provides a more intuitive comparison of operations status.
Client Testimonial:
"The Canway BlueWhaleWeOps Integrated Operations Platform has effectively improved our operations efficiency and met system security requirements. Features like patch installation, automated inspection, and monitoring alerts, in particular, have saved us operations labor costs and time costs." – Towngas
