Collaboration on High Availability for Direxis’s SQL Server

Direxis and Medical Transport

Direxis is a corporate group that brings together several companies specialized mainly in mobility and passenger transport. Its offering combines public transport, medical transport, technology services, and asset management, moving approximately 50 million passengers a year, an enormous volume of operations.

Direxis‘s medical transport system relies on a SQL Server database server that constantly suffered outages and availability issues. Despite having very powerful infrastructure (in fact, oversized for the workload it ran), it suffered sudden interruptions that made the application extremely slow and, on many occasions, caused it to stop working entirely.

   

Direxis asked TechsBCN for support, who carried out a consulting engagement that exposed the main problems in the SQL Server configuration. TechsBCN didn’t stop at a theoretical review —several measures that solved the availability problem where implemented: reviewing workloads and problematic queries, implementing targeted, strategic indexes to optimize load, deploying observability tools, configuring alerts and automated recovery actions, and designing and implementing a highly available SQL Server ecosystem with secondary nodes and load balancers.

A Highly Available SQL Server Architecture

On the technology side, the solution is based on configuring SQL Server for high availability, using Always On Availability Groups, primary and secondary replicas, and WSFC (Windows Server Failover Clustering), among other elements.

For observability across the ecosystem, Grafana and Prometheus were implemented, making it possible to monitor the state of SQL Server at all times and proactively detect any degradation before it affected end users of the medical transport service.

The Result

Thanks to this intervention, Direxis‘s medical transport application stopped suffering outages and interruptions, regaining stable and predictable performance. The new high-availability architecture, together with automated alerts and recovery actions, makes it possible to anticipate problems before they affect the service.

At TechsBCN we are proud to have helped Direxis ensure the continuity of a critical service like medical transport, providing both the consulting work and the actual implementation of an end-to-end high-availability solution.