Network Management Solutions for Service Desk Software
Monitor the heartbeat of your critical business services.
Many organizations monitor the health of business services using infrastructure management tools. Infrastructure management tools monitor and report on issues with the underlying hardware, software, and networks that support the services required by the business. In addition to management tools, most organizations have implemented service desk software to manage logging and troubleshooting with the underlying infrastructure. Infrastructure management and service desk/tech support groups often operate as isolated departments. Typically, the systems used by these departments are not tightly coupled because integration requires significant effort and cost. We believe that it is critical that these groups and systems be fully integrated if the business is to benefit from a unified, end-to-end approach to service management.
Providing end-to-end service management means you must be in control of all the factors that can influence your service. What many organizations tend to overlook are the alerts triggered by infrastructure management tools. These alerts can throw your service management planning into chaos.
Definition of infrastructure alerts
Alerts have a direct impact on your level of service. It is important to measure IT’s performance in addressing these alerts and the impact it has on the services provided to the organization. Many types of alerts are entered into Incident Management. Because most organizations don’t correctly identify alerts, they risk not being able to track which incidents were created from management tools and which were created by IT staff or end users. Recognizing the source of the incident will help organize the services IT provides and ensure that normal daily work is not affected.
The following are examples of the types of alerts found in most management systems:
1. Alerts that require immediate attention.
2. Wake up alerts
3. Awareness alerts
1. Alerts that require immediate attention
These alerts are the most important to your organization. For example, this could be a message saying that your server has crashed, possibly because a fan is not working (for example). If the server is running your organization’s critical applications, once identified, all appropriate resources should address the problem immediately.
2. Wake up alerts
Messages from your system to warn you that you need to act on something, which is less important but must be done.
3. Awareness alerts
Messages that simply tell you how systems are doing, what the status is, etc.
Typically, these alerts are handled based on different priorities and different SLAs, which will have a different service impact for your organization. And managing your organization’s service is something that should be supported by your service desk software solution.
Configuration and integration of service desk software with monitoring tools
The organization must ensure that when the management tool generates an alert, a ticket is immediately logged in the service desk software solution. The service desk software must be configured so that it can recognize the type of messages and automatically assign the ticket to the appropriate group or individual. Service thresholds and service rules can be defined to manage ticket resolution throughout its lifecycle.
Running reports and configuring key performance indicators (KPIs) around alerts and time to resolution will help you instantly improve your service and stay on top of everything that affects your service, using a single solution of front-end that is already there: Your service desk
To provide end-to-end service management, you need to integrate your service desk software with infrastructure management tools. A popular application is Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM). SCOM will be configured to monitor the infrastructure for specific alerts. When a configured alert occurs, the ‘event’ is sent to a central SCOM server, where a database is maintained that includes a history of alerts.
Ease of integration with popular software products has often been a contentious issue, however, it has now been resolved.