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Why Self-Service?

Monitoring Challenges

At a Glance

Any business looking to streamline their Enterprise Systems Management services and become smarter about organising configuration data, can benefit:

  • Enable rich and granular configuration
  • Exploit expert knowledge
  • Approve and maintain standards
  • Reduce implementation delays
  • Contain and control access to changes
  • Track configuration history
  • Manage configuration versions
  • Automate configuration

Implementing a successful Enterprise Monitoring solution presents a number of challenges. This begins with establishing the infrastructure and deploying agents. These tasks are quite rightly best left in the hands of the Systems Management team themselves.

However, this is just the start. What about deciding what should actually be monitored? This issue of service quality and granularity is perhaps the biggest challenge of all. This complex problem is often reduced to one of three approaches:

  • Monitor key components only
  • Deploy one-size fits all standards
  • Monitor everything with out of the box settings

All these approaches may quickly lead to a lack of trust in the solution because they can result in irrelevant alarms, missed alarms or false alarms.

Redistribution of Roles

Orb Data’s self-service approach solves this problem through the redistribution of roles between the Systems Management (ESM) team, their customers, operations and subject matter experts. Devolving responsibilities in this way improves the richness, relevance and accuracy of monitoring configuration, increases end-user awareness and involvement, and releases the ESM team to focus on service quality.

Presentation

If a self-service solution is implemented well many other significant benefits can be realised. ESM frontends are traditionally too heavyweight and esoteric for exposure to typical end-users. Orb Data SSP adds a presentation layer between the end-users and the ESM technology.

Some immediate benefits can be achieved with this presentation layer:

  • Simplification
  • User-friendliness
  • Access control

Separation

Separating the presentation layer also provides the opportunity to add some deeper and more fundamental benefits:

  • Independence from underlying technology
  • Central database of configuration
  • Comprehensive auditing
  • Version control
  • Rich reporting
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