These case studies articulate how RightITnow ECM has changed the way IT operations are being managed across industry verticals; Once you have evaluated our solution and are ready to bring your IT ops to the next level, our customers will be happy to share with you their successes and challenges in a live conversation.
A global investment firm
The various infrastructure elements we monitor are Windows, UNIX, and Linux operating systems, storage appliances, networking and telecom equipment, virtualization platforms such as VMWare and Hyper-V, server hardware from various vendors, rack PDUs, software automation, and both in-house and third-party applications. We used a combination of custom shell scripts, Orion, Nagios, and SCOM for monitoring. Our primary workflow tool was an in-house incident management system (IMS).
There were some inherent problems: it was not possible to see all infrastructure problems through a “single pane of glass”, so correlating issues was difficult; our NOC had to watch several monitoring consoles, which inhibited response times; using an IMS for an event management workflow was too bulky and time consuming for basic operational and break/fix issues; the IMS did not de-duplicate events; workflows differed across technology areas.
After overhauling our monitoring infrastructure, all platform-specific monitoring tools were configured to send events to our globalized middleware, which funnels events into ECM. Unifying our monitoring environment came with several benefits: Our NOC now only watches ECM, which has improved response times; we’ve unified our workflow across technology areas, which reduced administrative overhead; standardizing the format of our alerts and events led to programmatic linkage between alerts and documentation; providing standardized documentation for each alert has led to more streamlined operations; streamlining our operations has resulted in fewer escalations, improved operational efficiency, and pre-emptive resolution of potentially business-impacting problems.
A large system integrator
Our initial deployment of monitoring tools did not allow for true scalability as each element manager reported via email to our ServiceDesk.
Introduction of a new element manager required additional staff to manage the increase in alert triage and manual Incident creation. It also required us to re-train the Servicedesk to understand the new alert format.
Introducing ECM allowed us to abstract the Servicedesk from the element managers and ensure all alerts were delivered to them in a standard form.
This allowed us to add element managers without the need to re-train the staff receiving the alerts.
The integration with our Incident Management tool via the connector delivered with ECM allowed us to mostly automate the creation of Incidents reducing the load on the Servicedesk.
The implementation of ECM has had a the desired effect of reducing the load on our Servicedesk staff thereby allowing us to deliver cost effective improvements to our capability.
We are now handling an estate in excess of 10,000 services with considerably reduced strain on our staff and processes.
A financial services group
Previously, our firm has regarded all events arriving into monitoring systems as incidents. This process, while manageable for some time, has been unable to scale with our growing business and increasing service level demands. Thanks to the history and correlation functionality, we were able to start generating value immediately: chronic issues that were long masked had become obvious within a few days, allowing us to dramatically cut down our event volume. This delivered value before we even began to train our operations staff on the platform.
Use of ECM has allowed us to set effective SLAs and provide automatic escalations to supervisors and management through the SLA rules function as well the RSS alert feeds. This allows us to take a more proactive approach to service assurance versus the traditional metrics-based reporting that normally drives service improvement.
The centralized console also enables us to leverage a shared level one support organization more effectively. Previously, all organizations were largely responsible for their own alerts, but by providing a single, consolidated console, we are able to more effectively utilize our shared infrastructure operations team.
A government agency in Europe
Multi-vendor management systems (IBM, HP, Juniper) were implemented per project so we lacked a common console for centralized global processing.
Central consoles from one of the existing management products would be extremely expensive in license , support and maintenance costs;
The time required to implement and deploy such a solution was also a significant concern;
With RightITnow ECM , we were able to deploy a central event processing console against these existing legacy systems in record time ;
RightITnow provided us with a simple cost-effective licensing model and allowed us to operate within the allocated budget