Featured Projects 

Telephony Project with Infrastructure, Hosting and Voice Services

The Telephony Project was to assist Voice Services with capturing voice requests better and automatically creating service tickets with SerVU. Our team utilized Power Apps for form creation, SharePoint for receiving the data, and Power Automate for sending data to SerVU.

Atlassian Applications Upgrades

VUIT DataOps strives to keep all Atlassian Applications upgraded to keep security upgrades current, and keep applications updated on frequent fix bugs and added features. The Atlassian application includes Atlassian Confluence, Bitbucket, Jira, Artifactory and Bamboo.

Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) migration to Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC)

OBIEE has been our on-premises Oracle visualization application since 2016. VUIT DataOps, led by Cortlyn Bowers, migrated thousands of reports, dashboards, analytics, and hundreds of users to the upgraded cloud version, OAC. This was a six-month effort including approximately ten departments. This effort included migrating users from Vanderbilt’s Active Directory to OAC’s security model. A big thank you for the teams and departments that reviewed their usage, visualizations, and migration testing.

VUIT DevOps Internship Success Story

During the Fall semester, the VUIT DataOps team had the privilege of working with Matthew Zlibut, a Data Science student from Fisk University. The guidelines for this internship included the completion of a data & analytics-related project and presentation. The project included the build-out of a data lake in the cloud as a proof-of-concept (POC) for future initiatives. This was quite an undertaking. Matthew collaborated with each member of the DataOps team to learn AWS cloud and Tableau visualizations. Matthew created a data lake POC and documented this accomplishment in a presentation to an audience that included our Chief Information Officer Rich Germano, Chief Data Officer Olivia Kew-Ficus, and Vanderbilt’s Office of Data and Strategic Analytics (DSA). This presentation led to Matthew getting a job interview with DSA and eventually a job offer. A clear indication of the great work performed by Matthew. Congratulations to Matthew on a job well done and a special thanks to the DataOps team for their contribution to this great learning opportunity! Jennifer LeBlanc and Cortlyn Bowers instructed on AWS cloud services and the presentation. Jeanette Honeysucker, Jillian Poris, and Phil Neely instructed on Tableau, databases, and presentation.

VUIT DevOps and VUMC PBX Pager Improvement

PBXPager, an application for on-call schedule tracking and pager forwarding for Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) physicians, recently had some improvements made to it to ensure business continuity and resiliency. This custom-built application developed and managed by the Application Development & Integration (ADI) Identity Services team within VUIT Development & Operations (DevOps) had experienced some disruption in the past due to some issues with its upstream dependency on the enterprise’s scheduling system, Automic. Identity Services and the DataOps team, also within DevOps, worked together to eliminate this potential single point of failure associated with scheduled jobs and introduced support for the automated creation of high priority SerVU tickets based on monitored events. In addition to this, PBXPager also now has the ability to failover to a secondary scheduling solution to ensure its processes continue and not experience an outage. The VUIT staff involved in this effort include Mike Gay, Andy Green, Kiran Kamatham and Jennifer LeBlanc.

Dataops supports Apple Developer Applications for Vanderbilt

The DataOps team supports initialization and certification setup for the Enterprise Vanderbilt Apps in the Apple Developer Program which currently includes VandySafe, VU Commodores, Vanderbilt University, Dore Rewards, and the latest, Vanderbilt Campus Guidebook. This past month, DataOps worked with Elizabeth Flier from the Strategic Communications Staff to initialize, setup certification, and support the Apple Development registration of the Guidebook App. This App was up and running for the 2021 Family Weekend on October 1 to assist families with events and schedules.

Window into VUIT Support of Research

Have you ever wondered about the type of support opportunities VUIT provides for research at Vanderbilt? VUIT Relationship Manager, Michael McAllister, approached our DataOps team in search of a solution for quantifying the work VUIT does for research. Michael shared with our team that “visualizing this data will not only provide a window into the support VUIT provides for research, but it will also help with developing criteria for when to select the research support checkbox.” To visualize all SerVU tickets currently flagged as research support, DataOps started with an incident summary of tickets and added visualizations in PowerBI. This report highlights tickets that have the research support checkbox selected in SerVU.

Installed and Implemted XRay into JFROG-Artifactory

XRay is a universal Software Composition Analysis (SCA) solution that identifies vulnerabilities and license compliance violations within the coding artifacts and images within the coding repository. Platform Services installed, configured, and is currently creating policies to assist developers within Application Development & Integration (ADI) with locating potential vulnerabilities within their codebase for enterprise applications.

Organize and Optimize Jfrog Artifactory Artifacts 

The Platform Services team within VUIT Development & Operations (DevOps) recently implemented a change to achieve a cost reduction with its JFrog Artifactory service offering. Artifactory is a fully automated DevOps platform hosted in AWS and utilized by the Application Development & Integration (ADI) team for distributing software releases from code to production. Artifactory managed and stored over 2 TB of artifacts and it was the team’s goal to remove nonessential artifacts, and optimize space and costs. Jennifer Leblanc was the lead and primary engineer on this project. The Platform Services team worked with the ADI team’s developers to query, verify, and remove the nonessential artifacts. Upon the removal of the nonessential artifact,s the team released approximately 850MB of artifacts. Next, the team moved the remaining artifacts from expensive disk storage to AWS S3 bucket storage. The entire process took months of work and planning. Platform Services estimates the initial cost for the disk storage to be approximately $215.00 per month. Now, the final cost for this S3 storage should be approximately $9.00 per month for a savings of approximately $206.00 per month.