Tips & Advice

Here’s a few secrets from the experts at CirrusPoint that will empower you make some good decisions this year. Click on each of the icons to see if you are heading in the right direction with your enterprise monitoring & reporting architecture and transformation efforts.

Contrary to belief, that is the wrong approach since the ticketing system is a reactive system and a downstream solution that’s used after incidents, outages, and issues have occurred.   To become proactive, you need an early warning system like ServiceDashboard that understands how to analyze performance trends and automates RCA prior to generating incidents and tickets. 

Achieve success by focusing on methods and solutions that leverage data and tools and provide (business-level analysis and correlation) so you can start preventing impact to customers and promote more preventative action within IT Operations before outages and issues occurs.  You can bring in some AIOps pretty easy with analytical reporting from CirrusPoint that focuses more on the trending ‘health’ of business – and less on just collecting data and creating tickets. 

Effectiveness in IT Operations Management (ITOM) will require real-time analysis and automated intelligence for detecting anomalies and root-cause early on and before human intervention.   

Hopefully something will come of all that data right?   The industry says it’s the new currency.   Do you know how to make it more actionable?   The”point-tool” vendors keep telling you that they are “the one”.  But wait, they are a database company, a network device provider, a cloud ticketing system… what do they know about centralized monitoring and business perspective? 

The truth is that anyone can collect and consolidate data, but most vendors and tools in the market are missing key components such as AI (Automated Intelligence for RCA), Business Impact Analysis, and the appropriate Data Model approach to make information more useful beyond just IT. 

Organizations today collect a tons of useless and costly event data which ends up being technical noise for Operations .  Additionally most of the legacy tools are just glorified logfile or trap consolidation engines and lack any real intelligence for automation at scale so the value becomes limited for the organization.

Success comes by leveraging a unified data model on the back-end to help bridge everything together (data/events/etc.).  The front-end should focus on providing a perspective of “connectivity” and exposes the dependencies and relationships.  The visual presentation layer should put it all together with dashboards and reports. 

Without having data model assistance, it will be impossible to automate problem/symptom determination (aka RCA) and correlate data to the customer, location, impact, and risk. 

To get this right, the decision makers have to ignore the industry marketing for a second and jump in the weeds for a bit to understand the real options available for building a solid foundation first that can support real success. 

It may sound logical to just send everything to a CMBD-based ticketing system or the date lake in the clouds, but in fact it is not.  The more that manually-derived and disparate data is consolidated – the worse it becomes to accurately report on things.  That impacts the credibility of the tools themselves. 

Since users lose trust easily in the source, event data needs to be correlated across ALL sources (with automated analysis) in effort to reduce incidents and those expensive all-hands calls.  If your organization is consuming excess time in remediation and chasing down the root-cause, then you can benefit from a better approach to integration.

Expensive break-fix activity can be reduced by bringing all data and event sources together more intelligently and analyzing for root-cause and performance impact prior to service now.  This should be done before all other tasks; namely those that waste time and makes people upset such as chasing down non-actionable events/tickets and sending false-positive notifications/alerts to peoples mobile devices at inconvenient times.