Align IT to Business Service Level Management
Just knowing what's up and what's not in your IT is no longer sufficient. Go beyond Ping, with OpManager's Business Centric Philosophy. Let your IT Management take a proactive stance by promising high availability, and delivering it as well. Know the service criticality, and the consequent business impact before an issue even manifests.
As the IT head of your organization, be it with networks, data centers, or both, you would know the weight of the responsibility for the perfect running of all your business services, and the gravity of its possible breakdown. For a hypothetical business critical service, let us assume that you are responsible for the 'Voice Over IP' services (VOIP) of your company. This uses a Cisco Call Management Gateway and a secondary Gateway for redundancy, 150 IP phones and 100 desktop soft phones. If any of these devices go down, the organization's critical communication service gets directly affected. Traditionally, you would get an alert every time a device went down, irrespective of its business criticality. Thus, you are forced to either give the same priority to all devices, or had to manually prioritize while raising a ticket. With OpManager, you now know right from the beginning as which service gets affected and how. This would enable you to ensure that the negotiated service levels are acted upon before they are exceeded.
Ensure High Service Availability
Giving a service centric eye to your entire system means you can directly view information about your businesses. With availability reports, you can graphically analyze the percentage that the given service has been running without any hindrance, during the specified period.
You can now view real time availability of a particular service, and also pull out historical data for any specified period. While checking the availability distribution over the past 24 hours, you may notice that the mail service had been down from 10pm to 11pm. You can then drill down and find that the server had been down for that period. Upon investigation, you realize that the servers were being patched at that time. You then just have to add a note about this on the availability report for 10 to 11pm before sending it to your boss as e-mail.
Prove Service Levels
No one knows the pain of a missed or exceeded service level, as much as an IT manager. It doesn’t even matter whether the customer is internal or external.
Being responsible for ensuring 99.99% availability for the VOIP and e-commerce services, you would wish to know the percent unavailability level so far. Both these services are business critical, and have an outage on the last day of the month. You need to prioritize between them. All you have to do now is look into their availability statistics and notice that the e-commerce service will exceed the negotiated SLA in two hours, while the VOIP service has five hours to spare. With this information, you can prioritize according to what needs immediate attention.
View Business-Level Dashboards
Orienting your IT to your business means you get complete real time analysis of your network’s impact on your business. Keeping your IT on track with your business is the best way to reap the complete benefits of your infrastructure systems and processes. With OpManager’s business level dashboards, you can see how and where your business is getting affected on a continuous real time basis.
Every time a device failed, you had just had to blindly fix it and just get it working. You had no data on its correlation with other devices and were forced to react mechanically. Now, you might notice that the devices on a particular service say e-commerce, go down more frequently. Consequently, you could see patterns and choose on a more appropriate course of action (such as increase the capacity for the devices on that service).
