Streamlining IT Operations Management with Entity Owners and Maintenance Windows

Enrich Entities with Owners to Automatically Assign Associated Alerts

You can assign owners to entities. RightITnow ECM will assign any new alerts originating from this entity to the entity owner, eliminating the need to assign these alerts manually. For example, if you have an email guru in your organization, then you can assign this guru ownership of all of your email related entities so that anytime there is an email issue in your IT Ops environment, your guru would automatically be assigned to address those issues. This is super efficient and a huge timesaver.

Automatically Create Maintenance Windows

You can use the Create Maintenance Window action in correlation rules to automatically create a maintenance window of the specified length in hours for an alert’s entity or for the entity group of the alert’s entity. This way, you can automatically put an entity into maintenance when ECM encounters alert conditions you specify. For example, if an ECM encounters an alert with a disk full message, then you can configure ECM to automatically place all such associated entities into maintenance, and if you also assigned an owner to those entities as described in the previous section, then the owner would automatically be assigned these alerts.

Deep Maintenance Window Features to Enhance IT Ops Management

RightITnow ECM offers deep maintenance window features. You can use an action to create maintenance windows automatically as described in the previous section, or you can create them manually. You can push ECM maintenance windows to Zenoss Device Groups. When you create a maintenance window for an entity group imported from Zenoss, ECM also creates the maintenance window within Zenoss. You can schedule deployment and undeployment of Close Maintenance rules. Entity groups can inherit maintenance windows for more efficient bulk processing, saving you from creating the same maintenance window recursively down the hierarchy. An entity can have multiple maintenance windows and you can also deduplicate events during maintenance windows. By default, ECM deduplicates events received from an entity that is in maintenance only against alerts that are in maintenance. If the event would deduplicate against an alert that is not in maintenance and there are no alerts in maintenance, then a new alert, with different deduplication criteria, is created. However, you can configure ECM to allow events to deduplicate against alerts that are not in maintenance.

Surfacing Entity Ownership and Maintenance Windows to a Single Pane of Glass

You can add the Entity Owner entity field to the Alerts Console grid to reveal more information about the entity which triggered the alert, and the Overall Maintenance dashboard displet indicates which devices are under maintenance. This visibility, coupled with the ability to assign ownership and create maintenance windows for entities helps keep you on top of your entity topology and underlying issues. See http://www.rightitnow.com/operations-management/configurable-it-operations-alert-menu for more about the Alerts Console and http://www.rightitnow.com/operations-management/it-operations-management-dashboards for dashboard information.