These case studies show how organisations across industry verticals have used RightITnow ECM to bring their IT operations to the next level. Once you've evaluated the platform, our customers are happy to share their successes — and challenges — in a live conversation.
The various infrastructure elements this firm monitors span 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. Monitoring relied on a combination of custom shell scripts, Orion, Nagios, and SCOM, with an in-house incident management system (IMS) as the primary workflow tool.
There were some inherent problems: it wasn't possible to see all infrastructure problems through a single pane of glass, so correlating issues was difficult; the NOC had to watch several monitoring consoles, which inhibited response times; using the IMS for an event management workflow was too bulky and time-consuming for basic operational and break/fix issues; the IMS didn't deduplicate events; and workflows differed across technology areas.
After overhauling the monitoring infrastructure, all platform-specific monitoring tools were configured to send events to a globalised middleware layer, which funnels events into ECM. Unifying the monitoring environment came with several benefits: the NOC now only watches ECM, which has improved response times; workflows are unified across technology areas, reducing administrative overhead; standardising the format of alerts and events led to programmatic linkage between alerts and documentation; and streamlined operations have resulted in fewer escalations, improved operational efficiency, and pre-emptive resolution of potentially business-impacting problems.
The initial deployment of monitoring tools didn't allow for true scalability, as each element manager reported via email to the ServiceDesk. Introducing a new element manager required additional staff to manage the increase in alert triage and manual incident creation — and meant retraining the ServiceDesk to understand the new alert format.
Introducing ECM allowed the team to abstract the ServiceDesk from the element managers and ensure all alerts were delivered in a standard form. This made it possible to add element managers without retraining the staff receiving the alerts.
The integration with their incident management tool via ECM's connector mostly automated incident creation, reducing the load on the ServiceDesk. The implementation of ECM had the desired effect of reducing the load on ServiceDesk staff, allowing the team to deliver cost-effective improvements to their capability. They now handle an estate in excess of 10,000 services with considerably reduced strain on staff and processes.
Previously, this firm treated every event arriving into its monitoring systems as an incident. That process was manageable for a while, but couldn't scale with growing business and increasing service-level demands. Thanks to ECM's history and correlation functionality, the team started generating value immediately: chronic issues that had been long masked became obvious within days, allowing them to dramatically cut down event volume — before they'd even trained operations staff on the platform.
Using ECM has allowed the team to set effective SLAs and provide automatic escalations to supervisors and management through SLA rules and RSS alert feeds — enabling a more proactive approach to service assurance, versus the traditional metrics-based reporting that normally drives service improvement.
The centralised console also enables the firm to leverage a shared level-one support organisation more effectively. Previously, each business unit was largely responsible for its own alerts; with a single, consolidated console, they now make far better use of a shared infrastructure operations team.
This agency had multi-vendor management systems — IBM, HP, and Juniper — implemented per project, with no common console for centralised global processing. Central consoles from any one of the existing management products would have been extremely expensive in licensing, support, and maintenance costs, and the time required to implement and deploy such a solution was also a significant concern.
With RightITnow ECM, the agency deployed a central event processing console against these existing legacy systems in record time. RightITnow provided a simple, cost-effective licensing model that allowed the team to operate within its allocated budget.
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