Viking Line monitor their ships via satellite link

Viking Line is an Åland shipping group with traffic on the Baltic Sea. It transports around 7.5 million passengers and 130,000 freight units. The annual turnover amounts to EUR 570 million and IT has approximately 3,100 employees. The head office is situated in Mariehamn where the group’s central IT operations are also placed.

Viking Line is using op5 Monitor for all operational monitoring today, and some time ago they decided to expand their monitoring to include servers and network components on board their ships. As a first step, we installed an op5 server on board the M/S Isabella,

Industry:
Shipping
The Challenge:In the shipping industry the challenge is to have a communication with good quality between the ships and the headquarter. Communication usally goes by satellite, which is an expensive, limited way to communicate. It is of great importance to have an overview not only for the servers, printers etc. but for the whole infrastructure. The shipping industry is under-going the same evolution as the rest of the world in adding more and more IP based systems. This includes moving to voice over IP systems, infotainment systems for ITv, passenger wifi access etc. All of this requires onboard monitoring to assure service quality for best passenger experience. As many ships travels where traditional internet access is very limited and expensive i.e. satellite only, the control systems like monitoring, needs to be fully distributed i.e onboard with configurable local monitoring and when available full uplink capabilities.
The solution:op5 Monitor can replace several distributed monitoring tools. This meant that everything is gathered in one system, with total overview and uniform working methods.
The result:A solutions that scales and are constantly improving for the best monitoring solution for the fleet.
which currently oversees office servers, networking equipment and cash registers – a total of about fifty IP addresses.

In order to maintain a connection with the monitoring center in Mariehamn they use a satellite link when the ship is at sea, which switches over to WiMAX when the boat is in the port. In this way Viking Line is not only capable of rapid response to network failures, continues to expand its current operating statistics used for the continuous improvement of the IT environment.

“Originally, we used a system of monitoring from Nagios, so it was a natural step to upgrade to op5 Monitor which is, in fact, largely based on Nagios, but with a lot of improvements. It’s among many other things much easier to add new items to op5″, said Jonas Lindroos in the IT department at Viking Line.

What’s more op5 Monitor is constantly evolving and Jonas Lindroos particularly appreciates the improvements in scalability and support for distributed solutions.

“There have been improvements in functionality when we communicate via satellite links. It is easier than before to have the servers on board to communicate with our main servers on shore”, said Jonas Lindroos.

Having had such a positive experience, Viking Line is now ready to take the next step in  monitoring of all seven vessels in the company.

About Viking Line

Viking Line commenced service in 1959, when the S/S Viking began sailing between the Finnish mainland, the Åland Islands and Sweden.

Today’s Viking Line Abp was established in 1963 under the name Ålandsfärjan AB. It gained a listing on the Helsinki Stock Exchange on July 5, 1995.

Today Viking Line has seven vessels, which sail between the Finnish mainland, Åland and Sweden as well as between Finland and the Baltic states. Operations include passenger services, recreation and cargo carrier services.