Maritime watchdog monitors critical apps

The Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) has deployed an applications management system to co-ordinate shipping monitoring and sea-rescue agencies.

The MCA has been instrumental in co-ordinating some of the rescue efforts around UK coastal flooding in the latest bout of torrential rain this summer. The other high-profile event it co-ordinated was the rescue, beaching and subsequent salvage operation of the container ship, the MSC Napoli, off the southwest coast of England in January this year.

The Agency co-ordinates the activities of search and rescue at sea through HM Coastguard and enforces international safety rules around the UK coastline from Falmouth in the south to Shetland in the North Sea.

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It relies on critical systems such as an Automatic Identification System and an Incident Management System which identify and co-ordinate responses to maritime emergencies, alongside an Integrated Coastguard Communications System which co-ordinates communications between the various sea rescue forces.

The Agency has implemented an application management system called NimBUS which monitors the CPU and memory usage of these applications and raises an alarm if any of the apps go down.

MCA corporate systems technical manager, Wayne Quinn, said: "Any monitoring in today's IT environment is fairly critical, especially where you are carrying out search and rescue events. These systems prevent loss of life and major pollution disasters. NimBUS gives us a heads-up as a preventative method and proactive monitoring of the hardware and applications the MCA depends on to do its job."