See how IT automation specialists UC4 realized an 80% savings in administration and achieved full traceability through automation.

1. 1
P4@UC4: Version and Automate
Everything
Bernhard Burger
Manager QA
UC4 Software
bernhard.burger@uc4.com
www.uc4.com
Logo area

2. 2
Outline
• P4@UC4: Start and First Setup
• Experiences and Learnings
• Second Setup: Automate Everything

3. 3
P4@UC4: The start
• Decided to go with P4 around 4 years ago
• Started in three different locations, two local
Servers and a proxy
• Windows based installation

4. 4
Setup
• Two
Masters:
1
in
US,
1
in
Europe
(latency
issues)
• The
setup
was
good
enough
to
meet
the
needs
of
Development
at
the
Dme
of
creaDon

5. 5
Setting up housekeeping
• HA/DR
• Index rebuilds
• Verification
àdone using windows services, scripts and tooling
according to our P4 consultant (who is GREAT!)

6. 6
Typical Problems
• Sometimes these services just stop
• Error handling, monitoring, auditing is limited
• Upgrades have to be done by hand on every
instance

7. 7
Solution
Eat (y)our own dogfood

8. 8
UC4 ONE Automation

9. 9
Basic Architecture
• Central Engine and
repository
• Agents on target
systems
• UIs
Active/Active

10. 10
The looks of it

11. 11
Combining the SW Stacks
• Setup a UC4 System for Use with P4, Agents on
all P4 machines
• Define Installation and roll it out
AUTOMATICALLY
• Bring all the Housekeeping tasks into UC4

12. 12
Managed
and
Automated
by
UC4
New Setup

13. 13
What we do - Rollout
• Complete P4 environment
• Directories, binaries
• Config files
• Broker configs
• Reseed- and restore scripts
• In case a replica crashes, it can be reconfigured on new hardware in no time
• Triggers
• Binaries
• Trigger table
• P4 configureables
• Permissions
• Upgrade process
• Prod and test instances
• Either prod or test instance for all locations can be upgraded in one run

14. 14
What we do - Housekeeping
• Maintenance for all locations
• Log rotation
• Verify
• Replica sync
• Backups

15. 15
What we do – Health Check
• Monitoring for all locations checks, if
• Hosts online?
• UC4 Agents?
• RAID actice
• Disks mounted?
• Disk space
• Running processes (PIDs)
• CPU usage
• Mem usage
• Swap Usage
• Last run of maintenance scripts
• Pulling of archive files?
• Meta data current?
• SSH & public key
• P4 licenses
• Network interfaces
• P4 processes (p4 monitor show)
• None of the above checks was running more than an hour ago

16. 16
Some stats
• 33000 tasks/day
• As defined in around 170 UC4 Templates ootb
• Savings of 80% in Administration and Rollout
(while increasing Monitoring and Reliability)

17. 17
You Aint Seen Nothing Yet
• We also use UC4 to to manage the build
process of our software in close integration with
P4 (Build Triggers, Check-in of Build Artifacts)
• Additionally build artifacts are deployed
automatically by UC4, either from FS or from P4
• Integration with Ticket Systems/ALM tools are
possible to add further traceability

18. 18
Summary
• UC4 enables us to automate our P4 operations
• Not only Operations, but also Deployment and
Build processes are managed and automated
• UC4 and P4 are a first class DevOps toolset

19. 19
Questions?
Are you UC4 customer?
Bernhard.Burger@uc4.com
www.uc4.com