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Take control of your complex IT infrastructure with
specialists in cloud and infrastructure monitoring: Opsview
A
utomation is defined
differently depending
on where you look and
is highly context dependent. A
generally accepted definition
is that “Automation is the use
of machines, control systems
and information technologies
to optimize productivity in the
production of goods and delivery of
services.” IT monitoring that works
with automation tools can scale
with the speed of your business,
discover new infrastructure, and
self-configure. Automatically
deployed and configured
monitoring is intrinsically more
available and reliable – giving you
an important edge in preventing
costly outages of monitored
assets. Opsview provides unified
insight into dynamic IT operations
on-premise, in the cloud or hybrid.
Opsview is a modern, scalable
monitoring platform that enables
digital transformation. Opsview is
trusted by hundreds of businesses,
government organizations
and service providers globally.
Customers include Sky, Cisco,
IBM, Comcast, Telefónica, PayPal,
British Telecom, Norfolk Southern,
CIT, Fujitsu, HMRC and AAA.
Alerting
When a problem occurs on your
monitored equipment, you will
want to know about it as soon as
possible just in case you are not
watching the display when the
event happens, or it is 2AM and
you are the stand-by engineer.
This is where notifications come
into their own. Most modern APM
/ IT monitoring systems allow
users to setup alerts so that when
a problem occurs they get an
email alerting them of an issue
occurring. The more advanced
solutions allow users to choose
from multiple methods, along
with specifics on which hosts
to be alerted for, which services
on those hosts, etc. In Opsview
Monitor, they have the concept of
“notification profiles” which allow
users to choose specifically how,
when and what alerts they get
receive. This automation allows
administrators to be informed
immediately for only the problems
they want to be aware of, instead
of the dreaded “notification spam”
whereby they get alerted for
every change in state. This alert
refinement, along with the ability
to choose when and what for,
and to have the option to get the
notifications via a multitude of
methods, allows administrators
to be aware immediately of
problems, so that they can fix
them faster.
Service Desks
The next stage of automation is
service desk integration. Some
of the higher-end APM / IT
monitoring solutions can integrate
with your service desk using API’s,
in order to automatically create
tickets when they occur. This
removes the cumbersome need for
an administrator having to view
the problem, login to the service
desk, raise a ticket, and then add
that ticket number against the
original issue. With service desk
automation, in the event of an
error occurring, Opsview Monitor
will automatically create the ticket
for you in the service desk group
/ project desired (depending on
CRM/Service desk), and then take
the ticket number and add it as a
comment next to the original error
within Opsview Monitor. This
allows subsequent administrators
to log-in and see what the issue
is, and what the ticket number is,
in order to prevent duplication
of tickets, etc. This service desk
automation allows administrators
to keep an eye on the ticket queue
specific to the monitoring system,
i.e. the Opsview Monitor queue,
and work tickets raised based
upon the criteria given during
setup.
Pro-active Monitoring
One of the benefits of automation
and monitoring systems is to have
the monitoring solution actually
solve the problem for you, leaving
you to spend time figuring out
why it failed, rather than actually
“Out-of-the-box support for leading enterprise hardware, application stacks,
service desks and notification software makes on-boarding our platform easy.”
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