Visualise the Service Health of your IT

Cloud Performance Monitoring Solutions

Thu, 11 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Grant Glading, Head of Sales and Marketing at Interlink Software on moving to the cloud without losing visibility of performance and service health.

Organisations are rapidly moving away from legacy systems. The race to the cloud continues.

Our customers often come to us with the question of how they can continue to watch over and ensure that cloud-based systems are performing optimally. The concern here is that in moving to the cloud they’re essentially relinquishing everything to their cloud hosting provider and losing visibility of performance and service health.

In short, the answer is that there’s nothing fundamentally different about how we approach monitoring the health of cloud-based environments to a “traditional” physical infrastructure. With our universal integration capability, it’s just another perspective on network connections and integrations.

In dynamic, rapidly changing cloud-based environments we can still help IT Ops detect unauthorised changes and optimise the scheduling of planned changes that might threaten business performance – adapt to both planned and unforeseen events, support the smooth release of new products and services.

Of cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Rackspace Cloud our products can ingest performance data, application metrics, perform log file analysis, look at user journeys, etc.

Across domains, we ‘layer on top’ of and assimilate events/metrics data from multiple third-party agents/tools (VMware’s vROps, BMC Software’s TrueSight, ServiceNow for example) – performing processing, rule-based analysis, topology/service driven correlation.

Other common integrations include Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) – taking in events sent from Amazon components to the Interlink platform, Azure-to-DB, a plug-in for Azure Application Insights and, generic HTTP, REST / SOAP integrations.

We’re monitoring cloud deployments from both the inside-out and the outside-in – serving up a full, holistic picture of service health via our service visualisation dashboards – providing top-down business impact insights so that IT Ops can act.

Organisations are also better placed to react rapidly to changes in cloud resources, administer the release of new products/services – supporting the promised benefits of making that shift to the cloud.

BRING YOUR CLOUD MONITORING CHALLENGES TO US – BOOK A DEMO HERE

Grant has approaching 30 years’ experience in systems management gained at Bank of America, MAXM Systems, Boole & Babbage, BMC Software, and Interlink Software. Grant leads direct sales, channel partners and marketing efforts for Interlink Software, having successfully sold into and account managed numerous Global 500 customers.

vROps is a trademark of VMware, Inc. TrueSight is a trademark of BMC Software, Inc. Azure Application Insights is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation. Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a trademark of Amazon Web Services, Inc. All trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Sourcing & Processing Data for 360-Degree Visualisation of Service Health

Tue, 14 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Mike Smith, Senior Software Consultant at Interlink Software discusses how bringing together a broader range of insights, metrics, availability and performance data can help avoid service interruption and aid IT/business alignment.

For us, aligning IT with the business has always been data-driven. It’s the power to deliver insight and understand the business impact of any potential service interruption.

We’ve been working to extend our reach and take in data from integrations with a wider range of management tools – achieving more of a 360-degree approach to visualising service health .

Manager of Managers (MoM) remains our cross-enterprise technical alert and event management hub – monitoring from the inside-out.

We’re putting increased emphasis on metrics to bring IT Ops a richer range of insights by which to view service health – from the outside-in.

We’re bringing in other important insights from performance, availability, end-user and security perspectives. Integrations to tools like DCRUM and AppDynamics for application delivery chain performance, SiteConfidence – testing user journeys externally through websites. We’re also looking at database queries for operational data from sources like SCOM and pulling data in from ITSM tools like ServiceNow.

What this allows organisations to do is to see the real-time impact of infrastructure events on customer experience and more efficiently allocate resource to the customer impacting issues – rather than dealing with the system that is shouting the loudest.

These inside-out / outside-in perspectives enable the monitoring of trends from different angles. Everything meets in the middle – correlating back to the MoM and the service model.

Using Data Manager, we’re processing metrics to identify deviations from a baseline – performing predictive calculations to display trending, creating threshold breach alerts so IT Ops can act to avoid issues.

Get in touch HERE to book a live demonstration.

Mike has 37 years’ experience in the infrastructure and network management field. Before joining us, he was Service Owner for all aspects of Enterprise / Network Management at SSE Enterprise Telecoms.

Back to the Future with Single Pane of Glass

Thu, 14 Jun 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Grant Glading, Head of Sales and Marketing at Interlink Software talks about lessons to be taken from IT monitoring history and Single Pane of Glass views …

As the saying goes ‘Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it’

I’ve been working for large organisations for a long time. Since the early 90s in fact. That’s the 1990s not the 1890s – cheeky!

In the 90s I saw the move from mainframe-centric computing to open systems and client/server computing. Along with this came the rapid accumulation of domain-specific monitoring and administration tools.

It’s information overload for the IT staff trying to monitor these tools individually. Joining the dots, understanding the health and well-being of the business services underpinned by the myriad interfaces and overlapping outputs.

This time around …

The tools du jour are the DevOps staples of Jenkins, Docker, Ansible, Nagios, Jira, Maven, etc., etc. I could go on ad nauseam. And yet, well into the 21st century, I’m seeing the very same patterns of behaviour emerge in large corporates as I witnessed back then.

There is no single, overarching view, consolidating all of the monitoring tools and discerning what they’re trying to tell us in all their glorious red, amber, green, RAG status widgets and dials.

Sure, REST-based web services APIs often help simplify integration. But the real imperative is to identify what all these events, metrics and exceptions mean in business terms?

This time you can be ready!

Luckily, organisations like the one I’m part of have been working with forward-thinking clients from a variety of industries, and are taking steps to avoid history repeating itself!

Last generation manager of managers (MoM) tools ingested events from a patchwork of tools and consoles adding some cursory de-duplication and prioritisation before painting a ‘sea of red’ alerts on their console.

The latest AIOps tooling from Interlink Software is unique in that it integrates with the underlying tools all the way from the data centre to the cloud at three different, but equally important levels:

1) Event and metric level (from your own monitoring tools)

2) Configuration level (the linkages or dependencies between objects in your environment)

3) User interface level (the underlying web interfaces of your existing monitoring tools and apps)

Making real the historically elusive Single Pane of Glass the benefit of this 3-level approach is that you can achieve delivery of consolidated monitoring events and metrics – in context, both in business and technical terms. And when only deep-dive to the native GUIs will do for triage – seamlessly drill down from SPoG view to your underlying tooling.

Grant Glading has approaching 30 years’ experience in systems management gained at Bank of America, MAXM Systems, Boole & Babbage, and BMC Software. Grant leads direct sales, channel partners and marketing efforts for Interlink Software, having successfully sold into and account managed numerous Global 500 customers.

GET IN TOUCH HERE TO REQUEST A DEMO

Getting Started with Single Pane of Glass Service Health Dashboards

Thu, 14 Jun 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Adam Smith, Senior Pre-Sales Engineer, Interlink Software, talks through the tried and trusted approach we take when implementing Single Pane of Glass Service Health Dashboards.

Adam Smith , Senior Pre-Sales Engineer, Interlink Software, talks through the tried and trusted approach we take when implementing Single Pane of Glass Service Health Dashboards.

Moving to Single Pane of Glass service health monitoring, getting away from reactive, technology/component-based service health monitoring to a proactive, predictive approach is a new way of working for most of our new customers. (Watch a brief video about how Nationwide Building Society did it HERE .)

Onboarding a new customer and deploying accurate, meaningful dashboards is NOT just about the technology. People make it happen!

And as a project lead it’s my job to work effectively with everyone involved and bring all the information together that we need to bring their dashboards to life.

Top-Down – Getting to Know Your Services

At the beginning of the journey, we spend a lot of time to engaging with the customer’s different teams, the people with the knowledge and expertise in the services and technology underpinning their services. After all the customer knows their environment more intimately than us.

We undertake Service Discovery and Service Modelling workshops with everyone from senior management, the service owners within the business, to those at the front-line of IT operations, technical people 2nd / 3rd line. All contribute to bringing the dashboards to realisation.

Customers have lots of different data and information in different places. We gradually build up a picture of everything that will feed in to and maintain the Service Models that will ultimately drive the dashboards.

We systematically define and document the following to fully understand the topology of the customer’s environment –

Service hierarchy – the infrastructure relationships and dependencies
Data sources and integrations (monitoring tools/Service Desk systems etc.)
Viewing and reporting requirements for operations and beyond
Backup and recovery considerations
Failure/degradation considerations and breakpoints
All the key metrics which represent the health of the service

Grand (Dashboard) Designs

Running dashboard design workshops is next up once we’ve got all the aforementioned outputs documented.

We’ll look at all the key data and metrics which need to be displayed in the dashboards and create a blueprint – aligned to what the dashboard users need to see – in order to understand the health of their services in a meaningful, business-centric format.

In at the deep end, we’ll perhaps start out by creating dashboards for the client’s most important, often most complex services. With a retail bank, it might be their online banking service. A retailer, it might be their logistics systems. A utilities sector client, their metering systems.

Enabling Self-sufficient Customers

Essentially everything I’ve described up there represents a hands-on, continuous dashboard creation training programme for the customer.

Once they’re up and running we typically leave the people who “own” the dashboards with all the knowledge and skills necessary to design, build and roll-out new dashboards (say for new services that come online) – as required (if they wish.)

About Adam

Adam has 12 years’ pre-sales and consulting experience – delivering and managing large scale IT Operations Management projects all over the world.

Let Us Show You …

Request a demonstration of Single Pane of Glass Service Health Dashboards HERE