Configuring the Alerts Menu

February 18, 2015March 26, 2018 RightITnow System Configurability

The success of your IT operations depends on how quickly you can act on incoming events from your network infrastructure. For this it is imperative that you are able to configure your system to give you quick access to your most frequently used operations.

Configuring for immediate action

The RightITnow ECM enables you to create various custom actions to apply to incoming alerts. The alerts console menu can be customized to give you fast and immediate access to any of these actions.

Configuring for action efficiency

Creating a group of actions could enable you to set the severity of an alert, assign an owner and email that user about the new alert, just with two clicks. Any preferred group of actions is just at your fingertips via the alerts console menu.

Configuring for user efficiency

Administrators’ views need not be populated with actions used exclusively by the Operator staff. Focus on improving the efficiency of your individual users by creating context menus specific to the user roles or user groups in your system.

Managing Entities in ECM

February 18, 2015March 26, 2018 RightITnow System Configurability

Getting Your IT Ops Entities on a Single Pane of Glass

Attempting to deal with events from a large network infrastructure can be overwhelming, especially when the visualisation of your infrastructure is fragmented or incomplete. Efficient management of IT Operations requires you to focus your attention on the most important incoming events at any given time. For this, it is important to have a clear picture of the sources of these events.

Part of the role of RightITnow as a single pane of glass is to enable you to create a coherent and organised view of the entities you are dealing with, be they physical or virtual machines, applications or components.

Grouping and Mapping IT Ops Entities on a Single Pane of Glass

You can choose to group your entities geographically or by any logical grouping that suits your requirements. Among other advantages, this will enable you to focus exclusively on the events or alerts received from entities belonging under a particular group. You can also map your entity hierarchy relationships, for example, a physical server might host several virtual machines which are also event-generating entities in their own right, and this relationship appears in tree view within ECM.

Single Pane Enhancement of IT Operations Management of Entities via Entity Merging and Aliases

Events from the same entity may not necessarily be generated in a consistent manner and may appear to be coming from different sources. RightITnow enables you to correct such fragmentation by merging several apparent entities into a single actual entity with several aliases.

Single Pane Graphical Visualization of Your IT Ops Entities

RightITnow is consistently creating new features by which you can achieve a transparent view to your infrastructure. The more recent entity graph feature provides a graphical visualization of your infrastructure, thus facilitating the location of problem entities which require attention.

Mobile IT Ops

February 12, 2015December 11, 2017 RightITnow Mobile IT

Mobile IT Ops – Secure, Comprehensive, Integrated

With users increasingly relying on their mobile phones for everything ranging from news to work mail, it becomes imperative for IT Operations to offer a mobile solution so that IT Ops professionals can check status and address issues on the go. It is great to have a mobile IT Ops app, but it needs to really perform all the required tasks and functions to justify the space it takes on your smart phone. The hallmarks of a good mobile solution are:

Mobile IT Ops – Secure Authentication & Authorization

The operations staff should be able to perform their designated tasks while staying within bounds of their permissible views and operations.

Mobile IT Ops – Comprehensive view of the system

The app should provide the user with a comprehensive view of the system with sufficient information to act upon the information received.

Mobile IT Ops – Integration with ServiceNow^®, JIRA, Zennos, Nagios, and More

The solution should be well integrated with existing systems so that the operator can at once act accordingly – be it raising a ticket in ServiceNow^® or executing a script remotely.

Integration with ServiceNow®

January 29, 2015December 11, 2017 RightITnow Integration

Bridging the Gap Between IT Operations and ServiceNow^® Helpdesk Support

Disconnected IT Ops and ServiceNow^® Silos and the Frustrated End-User

Even though IT operations and Helpdesk support tend report to the CIO and work in the same organization, it is fairly common for these two groups to work as independent silos in total isolation and with a totally different set of tools and objectives. This greatly impacts the company’s ability to address actual customers issues. How many times have we heard of service disruption directly from an irate end-user despite the underlying causes of these issues having already been reported in IT Ops?

Reactive Mode ServiceNow^® and IT Ops Issue Management

In recent years, the ITSM market, led by companies like ServiceNow^®, has been deploying a new generation of helpdesk solutions in the Cloud. However, these solutions are still mainly focused on helping support personnel deal with customer issues in a reactive, conversation mode, rather than in an active coordinated and planned mode. Moreover, IT operations remains in reactive mode, overwhelmed by various standalone monitoring systems, processing millions of application-related events and IT infrastructure alarms, with no ability to categorize, correlate, and automatically act on these events.

2-Way Active Mode ServiceNow^® Helpdesk and IT Ops Issue Management

RightITnow ECM collects all the IT alerts into a single pane of glass and uses its categorization, correlation and integration features to provide the business context needed to resolve the issues, often automatically. This empowers your IT Operations and Service Desk staff to solve problems more quickly and efficiently. ECM’s native 2-way integration with ServiceNow^® automatically creates tickets in ServiceNow^® and populates these tickets with all the contextual information the support personnel would need from the application alarms. In return , IT operations personnel are constantly updated within ECM with ServiceNow^® all the related updates created in ServiceNow^®.

Collaborative IT Ops and ServiceNow^® Integration and the Happy End-User

RightITnow ECM’s contextual knowledge of underlying foundational events, correlation results and links back to performance data (say, from an original monitoring source) where applicable, all contribute to faster problem resolution. With RightITnow ECM and its native integration with ServiceNow^®, your IT Operations and Service Desk staff reduce the time spent reactively fire fighting and instead focus on acting on a manageable number of service impacting alerts. As a result, happy customers and end users gain from increased availability and uptime, and assured performance against their service level agreements.

SolarWinds Orion NPM

January 20, 2015October 24, 2017 RightITnow Integration

Enhance SolarWinds with Multi-Source Integration and Interoperability

Integrating SolarWinds to Multi-Source Single Pane Interoperability and Visibility

As your IT infrastructure grows and increases in complexity, monitoring becomes more challenging. Although SolarWinds Orion NPM can help gather and surface network latency issues, you still need to collect data from a number of other sources that are affecting this latency, and act on a wide variety of alerts to improve network performance. It is now possible to enjoy all the benefits of Orion NPM and leverage all the information and data you collect by deploying RightITnow ECM. Simply point ECM to your SolarWinds installation and within a few minutes, all SolarWinds events and alerts are readily available in ECM, along with those from other sources. Once all the data is available on ECM’s single pane of glass, you can use RightITnow ECMs filtering and automation features to resolve issues affecting your network performance.

Filtering the SolarWinds Data Flood on a Multi-Source Integrated Single Pane

Using SolarWinds Orion NPM without ECM, you are faced with a difficult choice: either invest more time, money and effort into processing all the reported events, or reduce monitoring and assume the risk of discovering problems only after the failures have occurred. ECM works against multiple Orion NPM instances and it maintains event and data integrity by continuously updating RightITnow ECM based on changes and updates in the Orion NPM database. The volume of alerts and events issued by Orion is then dramatically reduced by RightITnow ECM’s powerful categorization capabilities, which preserve only the meaningful alerts, the ones that could impact network performance. This SolarWinds-ECM integration saves you from having to invest additional resources into processing all the events reported by Orion NPM and eliminates the risk of disregarding important alerts and allowing small problems to escalate and cause network failures.

Automatic Multi-Source Resolution of SolarWinds Network Issues

The benefits of RightITnow do not stop at filtering the data flood: RightITnow ECM’s deep correlation feature resolves network issues by taking automatic actions on critical SolarWinds alerts, such as assigning those alerts to the relevant qualified operators, or sending emails to affected users, with no manual interaction from you.

Empowering SolarWinds Integration with Multi-Source Interoperability

ECM can correlate SolarWinds alerts with alerts you collect from other sources, such as Nagios,VMware, MS SCOM, Syslog and SNMP; allowing SolarWinds to interact and interoperate with these IT applications and more from a configurable menu in RightITnow ECM’s single pane of glass console. Take your SolarWinds Orion NPM productivity and efficiency to the next level, ease your workload and improve the performance of your team, with RightITnow ECM.