Monitor the heartbeat of your critical business services.

Many organizations monitor the health of business services using infrastructure management tools. Infrastructure management tools monitor and report problems with the underlying hardware, software, and networks that support the services required by the business. In addition to management tools, most organizations have implemented service desk software to manage logging and troubleshooting with the underlying infrastructure. Often, infrastructure management and service desk/help desk groups operate as isolated departments. Typically, the systems used by these departments are not tightly coupled because integration requires a lot of effort and cost. We believe that it is essential that these groups and systems are fully integrated in order for the company to benefit from a unified and comprehensive service management approach.

Providing end-to-end service management means you need to be in control of all the factors that can influence your service. What many organizations tend to overlook are the alerts triggered by infrastructure management tools. These alerts can throw your service management planning into chaos.

Defining infrastructure alerts

Alerts have a direct impact on your level of service. It is important to measure IT performance in addressing these alerts and the impact it has on the services provided to the organization. Many types of alerts are entered into Incident Management. Since most organizations do not correctly identify alerts, they risk not being able to trace which incidents were created from management tools and which were created by IT staff or end users. Recognizing the source of the incident will help organize the services that IT provides and ensure that normal daily work is not affected.

The following are examples of the types of alerts from most management systems:

1. Alerts that require immediate attention.

2. Wake up alerts

3. Consciousness alerts

1. Alerts that require immediate attention

These alerts are the most important to your organization. For example, this could be a message saying that your server is down, possibly because a fan is not working (for example). If the server is running your organization’s critical applications, once identified, all appropriate resources should immediately address the issue.

2. Wake up alerts

Messages from your system to alert you that you need to act on something, that is less important but needs to be done.

3. Consciousness alerts

Messages that simply tell you how the systems are doing, what the status is, etc.

Typically, these alerts are handled based on different priorities and different SLAs, which will have a different impact on your organization’s service. And managing your organization’s service is something that should be supported by your service desk software solution.

Configuration and integration of service desk software with monitoring tools

The organization must ensure that when the management tool generates an alert, a ticket is immediately logged in the service desk software solution. The service desk software must be configured so that it can recognize the type of messages and automatically assign the ticket to the appropriate group or individual. Service thresholds and service rules can be defined to manage ticket resolution during its lifecycle.

Running reports and setting key performance indicators (KPIs) in relation to alerts and resolution time will help you instantly improve your service and stay in control of all aspects that affect your service, using a single solution front-end that’s already there: Your service desk

To provide end-to-end service management, you must integrate your service desk software with infrastructure management tools. One popular application is Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM). SCOM will be configured to monitor the infrastructure for specific alerts. When a configured alert occurs, the ‘event’ is sent to a central SCOM server, where a database including a history of alerts is maintained.

The ease of integration with popular software products has often been a contentious issue, however it has now been resolved.