In Austin, Texas, we need to do some serious preparation for the hot summer months. You get your air conditioning system serviced, check the pool for cracks, and make sure you have a plan in place for when one of our Texas-sized thunderstorms (and accompanying flooding) knocks out the power. Oh, and we also buy lots and lots of sunscreen and mosquito repellent!
Since summer is when most folks schedule their vacations, it’s likely you need have your own plan in place for covering IT monitoring while multiple team members are out. The type of monitoring solution you use will determine how successful you are at letting vacationers actually unplug from work for a week or two. Here are four ways that Unified Service Insight can help keep you on the beach/links/boat/ranch this summer:
#1 – Simplifies
Complex monitoring systems are more likely to break (and harder to fix) than simple ones. Framework-based monitoring is particularly brittle, with dozens of products and integrations in play. If one part breaks, your service delivery assurance capabilities are seriously undermined. If something needs to be fixed or customized, that’s going to mean calling in an expensive professional services team.
Unified Service Insight is a single solution built on a single code base that unifies all of your monitoring in a single console. While it might be impractical to rip and replace framework solutions in time for the vacation schedule to start, you can simplify in short order by instituting Unified Service Insight monitoring in the most critical areas of your network – or as a manager of managers for a monitoring “failsafe”.
#2 – Spreads the Information Wealth
Information silos are the number one reason you are going to get a call while you’re on vacation. To prevent this, make sure that there is a way for administrators to access monitoring across all areas of your infrastructure. That way, even if someone is unavailable, it’s easy to see if and how their systems may be impacting overall service performance. Unified Service Insight make it easy to drag and drop new infrastructure views into any administrator’s console – making everyone enough of a SME to keep business rolling.
#3 – Targets Problem Sources
If you are the superhero that jumps into the fray during every fire drill, that doesn’t bode well for a peaceful vacation. If there is an outage that can’t be resolved, are you going to get a call right when you are next in line to board the rollercoaster at Disneyworld? You need to have a monitoring solution that will help ANY administrator easily track down the most likely source of the problem. That means you need to be able to have:
- A complete enough view of the infrastructure and all its interdependencies
- An understanding of how services are delivered such that you can pinpoint the most likely culprit.
For most organizations this is a manual process, but with Unified Service Insight, each event contains the impact and root cause information required so that a single administrator can resolve the issue and get services back on track.
#4 – Builds in Flexibility
Likely, you’re not going to be rolling out a lot of new infrastructure during prime vacation months. That said, what if you’re climbing the Alps, and the marketing team decides they HAVE to roll out a new service immediately to respond to an unforeseen change in the market? Does your team have the monitoring tools needed to support this rapid rollout – without devouring the rest of your operations budget? Again, Unified Service Insight is flexible enough to extend quickly enough to meet business demand and cost-efficiently enough that you don’t need to worry about the bottom line while you’re gone.
Learn More
Want to learn more about how you can use Unified Service Insight from Zenoss to give IT administrators better control over monitoring every day?
- Watch a demo that gives you an overview of Zenoss and how Zenoss can help your more efficiently and cost-effectively monitor your environment.
- Read the Zenoss Service Dynamics: 4 Profiles in Unified Monitoring Success white paper to learn more about how some of our customers use Zenoss to improve their monitoring efficiency and productivity and avoid outages.
- Read the Zenoss Service Dynamics Architecture Overview to learn more about how Zenoss works.
- Request a free trial! See how you can use Zenoss more in your environment to more effectively and cost-effectively monitor and manage your environment using a single, unified monitoring view and unified monitoring processes.
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