Service level monitoring increases UK coastal readiness

New management tool assures vital maritime communication and search and rescue systems.

The Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) is in the midst of a major programme to update its specialist monitoring and alert systems.

It is rolling out service level monitoring and management tools to guarantee the uptime and performance of IT infrastructure key to its monitoring of over 1,000 Class A vessels at any one time and managing approximately 16,000 search and rescue (SAR) incidents a year.

The use of NimBUS from service management vendor, Nimsoft as its corporate standard for monitoring IT infrastructure and key applications across the entire organisation, will help the MCA monitor vital communication and search and rescue systems.

James Findlay, MCA head of ICT told IT PRO the use of software to monitor core, often outsourced IT components that support key specialist tracking and SAR systems has improved IT support response times and helped the agency carry out its duties without technical interruption.

"It's often not realised that 97 per cent of the UK's trade by weight comes in by sea, so the systems we support are pretty vital to the UK economy," he said. "We are required to have high system availability from the perspective of the function we provide for the coastguard communications systems too, where we're dealing with the safety of human lives as well as the prevention of pollution."

The MCA operates 19 Maritime Rescue Coordination Centres (MRCC) along the UK coastline, which house these mission-critical systems, such as the Automatic Identification System (AIS), a Navigation Warning System and an Integrated Coastguard Communication System (ICCS). The Agency's Incident Management System (IMS) provides the mechanism to coordinate and record search and rescue events. And all these systems run across over 130 Windows servers at locations around the UK, while being managed remotely using the service level tools.

"By taking a service level management approach, we can essentially monitor the availability of systems and sometime even spot faults before the users do," said Findlay. "We already have very high levels or redundancy in the systems, but NimBUS also helps us assure the tough service levels with our contractors are met. It's also really simple to use and really user friendly."

The move to NimBUS also comes as the MCA prepares to complete its implementation of a European Union directive that extends the UK's vessel traffic monitoring systems to cover over 10,500 miles of coastline and some of the busiest international seaways in the world such as the Dover Strait.