I recently had the chance to speak to a couple of potential customers looking to address long-standing issues that their current IT ops tools don’t cover. One of these companies has a number of existing monitoring tools including Microsoft SCOM, Netcool, and Splunk to do syslog monitoring. They also have Remedy and a fairly well-established CMDB. Despite having these tools in place, they still struggle with providing effective IT ops. But it doesn’t have to be this hard...
In a recent webinar, I discussed a new and dramatically simplified way of investigating, diagnosing and troubleshooting application incidents:
1 – Identify your applications and define the connections to other systems
2 – Consolidate, correlate, and display application information in a unified workspace that users can easily modify based on their role
3 – Drill down into aggregated data to quickly view the source of issues, diagnose complex situations and resolve incidents 50% faster
The customer I referenced earlier is doing step 1 and 2 pretty well. They have already established their inventory of applications and have defined their application models in their Remedy CMDB. They have deployed legacy and modern IT ops tools and have all of this data at their disposal. However, something is missing. This organization has not yet done step 3 – aggregate data into a single consolidated system to gain end-to-end visibility. Could they use one of their existing tools to aggregate the data? Perhaps. However, only one of their tools, Splunk, could handle the velocity, variability, and volume of ops data.
Based on their situation, we suggested they take a look at PuzzleLogic Service Advisor. When they saw how the solution could aggregate their existing data, plus their config data, to allow for a more structured view of their applications, they immediately saw the value. They liked how the solution could help more easily pinpoint the problem area of an application using reported symptoms and the knowledge of the application stack. I’ll let you know how things progress as this company considers undertaking a pilot in one or two application areas.
The second prospect story is a bit different. This company is a major telecommunications provider with a large enterprise managed services group that delivers WAN and telecom services for their enterprise customers. They have multiple service offerings with multiple service teams providing their “piece” of the total set of services. As such, each service team is fairly siloed. This creates a challenge for the customer account and ops teams to have a single, end-to-end view of the health of all the services for each of their customers.
After previewing PuzzleLogic Service Advisor and seeing how the customer services and underlying infrastructure can be loaded into the system, this telecom company saw the potential to solve some very long-standing issues. Things that stood out are: the ability to model their customer environments, the integration capabilities, and the ability to create a customer-oriented ops dashboard that can be used to troubleshoot customer issues.
These two examples are some of the ways that customers and prospects are seeing the value that Service Advisor could bring to their organizations. We look forward to discussing how this brand new and exciting IT ops product might solve some long-standing issues in your organization.
Drop us a line and we’d be happy to explore the possibilities.
Rick
