Tourism EMEA

Automatic alerting on network anomalies

The companies that make up Quality Group have a combined revenue of about 150 million Euros annually, transporting more than 55,000 passengers each year. 2,000,000 catalogue copies are distributed throughout Italy and more than 250 people are employed by the group.

Challenges

Centralized visibility into network traffic
Visibility into virtual environments
Policy compliance

Key Benefits

Single overview of traffic structure
Anomaly detection and behavior analysis

Deployed products

Flowmon ADS
Flowmon Collector (Virtual)
Flowmon Probe (Virtual)

Situation

"Quality Group operations rely heavily on IT", says Massimo D’Eredità, Quality Group Board Member. "We are really proud to have developed an internal system named Aladyn to build and personalize the itineraries requested from our customers. Aladyn has been developed with a very strong partnership with Amadeus, the most widespread GDS system in the world. An efficient and fully functioning IT infrastructure is crucial to us".

"We were looking for a solution able to detect anomalies and problems enabling our IT department to quickly act and fix them. After trying an opensource solution that didn't fit our needs in terms of ease of use and configuration, we found out that Flowmon was what we were looking for".

Solution

A one-month PoC, carried out by implementation partner 3C Informatica SRL, showcased the solution, highlighting previously unknown latency spikes and other issues, e.g. the forgotten remnants of a legacy system that could be switched off, a third party API that asked for credentials in plain text as well as a couple of machines falling victims of phishing attempts; all of which were discussed in a detailed report the partner created for Quality Group at the end of the testing period.

The solution is deployed in a virtual environment and consists of a virtual Collector with Flowmon ADS. 5 Virtual Probes are deployed to collect data from the virtual switches of 5 Quality Group hosts, bringing full visibility even in virtual traffic. This combination provides insight into network traffic and detects network-borne threats. 3C Informatica provides consultancy for the customer, reviewing the data periodically and maintaining the solution.

“The information we are getting from Flowmon enables our IT admins to better understand our network and what goes on in it, automatically alerting us on anomalies while they are happening,” says D’Eredità. “That’s the kind of visibility that we completely lacked before and that, as the network grows in complexity during the time, we dearly need.”

Ing. Massimo D’Eredità
Quality Group Board Member