The up.time IT Systems Management Blog

The 7 Critical Steps in Building a Successful Service Level Agreement

May 14th, 2013 Phil Didaskalou

As a vendor of Unified IT Systems Management software, uptime software offers the ability to create and manage Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for mission-critical services across an enterprise (IT SLA Management Software). This is an excellent process and tool for helping customers and service providers improve communications, manage expectations, clarify responsibilities and build the foundation for a long-term win-win relationship.SLA Management

Having spoken and worked with numerous organizations on establishing SLAs, some of the key steps involved in establishing a successful SLA are often glossed over or completely missed altogether. Very often service providers fall into the fatal trap of thinking that once they have procured an SLA management solution, all they have to do is implement it and then throw SLA reports “over the wall” to their customers­. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is clear goal setting, open communication and getting buy-in from two parties in the development stages of an SLA that will ultimately determine its success or failure.

Here are 7 critical steps to include in your SLA development process that will ensure you embark on your journey down the road to success:

  1. Document Needs, Priorities and Capabilities

    2. Customers and service providers both need to start by gathering information so that each party has a solid base from which to negotiate. Before a customer asks for a commitment from their service provider, they should carefully review and clarify in writing their service needs and priorities. In addition, before making any sort of commitment to a customer, a service provider should first examine their service history and determine the level of service they can realistically provide. The easiest way to do this is to utilize SLA monitoring and reporting software such as up.time, which not only allows you to measure SLA in production, but also allows you to create an SLA test and then back-test it to determine how well your IT group would have fared in delivering on it. In addition, service providers should assess current customer satisfaction in order to clearly understand customer concerns and establish a clean baseline for assessing service improvement.

  2. Communicate to Ensure Agreement about the Agreement

    3. This may seem obvious, but all too often, open and clear communication is lacking during the initial stage of the SLA development. Customers and service providers often have different views about the role and purpose of the SLA and what it can realistically accomplish. Both sets of views may be valid, yet different enough to cause a breakdown in SLA negotiations. Before any SLA development work is done, it is critical that both parties sit down face-to-face (please avoid email) and hold an open and honest discussion to ensure both parties have a basic level of agreement about the agreement. Any further SLA effort is likely to prove futile if this step is skipped.

  3. Establish and Enforce Ground Rules for Working Together

    4. This is another important but often overlooked step, where the SLA developers who are assigned to negotiate the SLA need to focus not on the agreement itself, but on the process by which both parties will work together to create the agreement. Topics of discussion should include the division of responsibility during SLA development, dates, scheduling constraints, and finally concerns about potential roadblocks. In addition, SLA developers should be candid in discussing their communication styles and documentation preferences. The benefit of this step is to identify upfront any potential conflicts or differences, so both parties are in a strong position to mitigate them during the process.

  4. Develop and Record the Agreement

    5. In this step, the customer and service provider create a structure for the SLA document. A discussion, a debate and a negotiation takes place in order to reach an agreement about the content of the agreement. This is not the entire SLA development process, but certainly a critical step to complete in order to move forward. The length of time it takes to create a draft agreement document will vary depending on the SLA developers’ experience with SLAs, their familiarity with the key services involved, the demands of their other day-to-day responsibilities (these days, this is a second or third job for most) and frankly, the state of current relations between the customer and the service provider.

  5. Meet, Discuss and Generate a Buy-In

    6. Once an SLA draft agreement has been created, both parties need to have the opportunity to review the draft, ask questions and offer suggestions to improve the agreement by ensuring it meets the mutual goals of both parties. Using this feedback, the SLA developers’ can then conduct further negotiations, gain the necessary approval and buy-in of both parties, and then finalize the SLA Agreement. To make such meetings more open and cordial, bringing coffee and donuts surely helps.

  6. Publish a List of Pre-Implementation Tasks before your SLA goes Live

    7. This step entails the identification and completion of tasks that must precede the implementation of an SLA. Such activities should include the development of SLA tracking mechanisms; establish reporting processes and training, deciding on how to communicate expectations to staff and lastly, identifying the roles for each individual.

  7. Manage and Maintain your New Agreement

Once your SLA is deployed it needs to be managed. If it is not measured or managed on a continuous basis then ultimately, all the efforts of both parties will have been wasted. This is a very critical step in your new SLA lifecycle. Management responsibilities should include providing a point of contact for problems related to the agreement (your SLA Referee), maintaining ongoing contact with the other party (pre-scheduled meetings), conducting service reviews, coordinating and implementing modifications to the SLA, and assessing and reporting on how both parties can further enhance their working relationship.

SLAs are very powerful business tools that will improve customer relationships and deliver significant ROI for your organization. Their success will also do wonders for your own career-so do it right. Think BIG and be BOLD!

To learn more about SLAs:

Watch our webinar » Creating IT SLAs: How to Remove the Complexity and Get Started

Read our white paper » The SLA Way to IT Success – Help IT Build Confidence and Credibility

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Know When It’s Time to Upgrade your Server Monitoring Software

May 14th, 2013 uptime Staff Contributor

As enterprises continue to expand their datacenters and computing networks, IT departments are faced with the task of managing these systems and their capacity demands. Unified server monitoring has become necessary for monitoring these ever-growing servers and datacenters and achieving greater transparency in the monitoring and reporting of system events.

However, a goldilocks-like dilemma evolves when the solution is either too big (ITSM) or too small (point tool solutions) to appropriately meet the IT department’s server monitoring and capacity management needs. In this blog, we will identify the most common pitfalls of IT systems management solutions and show you how you can find a server monitoring solution that’s just right.

  1. Monitoring the Wrong Data Do you use “agentless” or SNMP server monitoring? If so, you may be monitoring the wrong data. On the other hand, ITSM suites sometimes generate so much data that it is difficult to sort through and pinpoint important data points.

    2.  

  2. No Clear View of the Data Do you find that, more often than not, you’re alerted of problems by end users before they’re identified by your server monitoring software? Does your root-cause analysis often fail to turn up the underlying causes of problems? If your answer to either of these questions is “yes,” you need a server monitoring solution that provides a transparent and high level view of all of your systems, making it easier for you to pinpoint underperformance for more proactive troubleshooting.

    3.  

  3. Manual Server Monitoring Do you spend a significant amount of time each workweek engaging in manual scripting and server monitoring tasks? Do you manually monitor server backup systems or does your server monitoring program notify you when they are in use? If you are engaging in manual server monitoring, it’s time to enter the age of integrated server monitoring.

    4.  

  4. Complexity and Hidden Costs Is the “shelf ware” piling up at your IT department? Was your ITSM framework difficult to deploy? Have you spent more money on consulting for your ITSM than the original cost of the framework itself? If your ITSM framework is large, clunky and complicated, you may not be getting your money’s worth.

    5.  

  5. Frankenstein Tools On the other side of the spectrum, IT departments that don’t want to invest in expensive ITSM frameworks may attempt to meet their server monitoring needs by cobbling together a collection of freeware and point end tools. These lower end tools often require labor intensive custom scripting and rebuilding. It is also difficult if not impossible to integrate these tools into high level dashboards, making server monitoring a manual and time consuming task.

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If the problems that we’ve outlined in this blog post are problems that your IT department regularly encounters, it may be time to invest in new server monitoring software. In the age of mushrooming servers and cloud computing, it is imperative that you look for a fully unified server monitoring solution with a single dashboard view that unifies IT monitoring and capacity management into a single, unified package. To learn more about what you can do to streamline your server monitoring efforts, download white paper The 12 Pitfalls of IT Systems Management.

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3 Steps to Improve Application Monitoring in your IT Infrastructure

March 25th, 2013 Phil Didaskalou

Application MonitoringCloud computing and virtualization are known for helping organizations of all sizes gain IT efficiency, but they also add layers of complexity that often hurts application performance monitoring. That said, there are some easy and practical steps you can take in your business to ensure that you meet high levels of application performance, even within a complex hybrid data center.

If hardware and software are the backbone of a business IT infrastructure, the applications are its life-blood. Yet, most businesses endure slow applications or outages on a daily basis. In many cases, adding to the problem is finger pointing across IT teams to assess blame rather than moving on to actionable problem resolution. To help avoid costly failures, IT business leaders need to get their teams (infrastructure, network, application, virtualization, etc.) working from the same page by using a common tool. This brings a more holistic view of application performance monitoring to all the teams involved, providing full coverage of the entire stack regardless of platform, device or environment in question.

The most common problems associated with application monitoring stem from a variety of issues including:

  • Disjointed IT groups without common interests regarding application monitoring.
  • A lack of visibility across all systems and platforms, end-user reporting under-performing applications before a monitoring tool alerts IT.
  • Complex environments making it difficult to isolate problems quickly and efficiently.

The following three steps are ongoing (processes) activities that will help you, the IT professional, insert a layer of “smart monitoring” to achieve better application monitoring and intelligence.

The 3 Steps for Better Application Monitoring &  Intelligence:

  1. Increase Visibility. Implement a “smart monitoring” solution that deploys fast and delivers deep visibility across your entire application and infrastructure stack—including virtual, cloud and on-premise environments.
  2. Articulate the Relationship. Be sure to clearly define what systems are directly impacted by application performance and availability. End-users think of applications as “working, slow or out” and don’t care about the underlying infrastructure. It is imperative for IT to understand how a poorly performing application will affect each layer of the infrastructure in order to quickly troubleshoot and avoid a possible outage.
  3. Report, Discuss, Design. Reporting and communication are key facilitators to ensuring application performance success. IT managers need to align expectations with both application owners and users while identifying areas in need of additional budget or resources. Be prepared to approach each entity for discussion with hard numbers and data. Smart operational redesign based on reporting will become easier when based on real facts, as opposed to knee-jerk reaction. Eliminate single points of failure and gather the necessary resources to ensure reporting are done on the key performance metrics that business owners actually care about.

So the next time you find your team taking “heat” about application performance and trying to figure out what to do about it, plan a meeting with your peers once the dust settles and try building a better process around these three key process activities. Usually as technologists, we gravitate solely to the first step (implement a technology solution) and spend less time on steps two and three that are really the most important.

Good luck with your application performance and get it cranked up sky high!

If you’d like to learn more about application performance, join us for a free webinar on April 9th at 1PM EDT for “Simplify Monitoring Applications across a Hybrid Datacenter”. Register here » http://ow.ly/jdHr6

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Posted in Application Monitoring, IT Management | 2 Comments »

How to Empower IT Productivity + Optimize Cost-Efficiency

March 1st, 2013 uptime Staff Contributor

We recently posted about “Tips on how to choose an IT Systems Management solution that fits your budget“. While that post went into detail about the hidden costs you should be aware of, this post will take you on an overview of how to deliver consistent IT services at the lowest possible cost.

Productivity

First, let’s discuss productivity. In a Forrester poll of IT Executives on how to increase productivity, 64% pointed to end-to-end infrastructure monitoring to increase productivity. In this case, researchers agree that having a unified monitoring dashboard can help create a more highly productive and proactive team; catching outages and solving problems before they happen. Being proactive also lowers Mean-Time-To-Repair (MTTR), which is a critical KPI to measure IT productivity.

The same Forrester report goes on to explain that 55% of IT executives state that proper capacity management and planning is key to meet business demand. In other words, having total capacity visibility across the entire data center is essential to making smart business decisions. This includes total capacity visibility and reporting across physical, virtual, legacy and even cloud resources. Without visibility across these multiple environments, or the integrated reporting to roll up the capacity data, there is no control. Managing capacity is perhaps the first, and in most cases the biggest step, toward a more proactive IT environment. Capacity monitoring, alerting and reporting (across all platforms and environments) is how IT departments can recognize and fix problems before they happen.

  • Take Away: It’s important to look for IT capacity dashboards that can monitor, alert, and report across multiple platforms and environments to give IT a unified and accurate view of total capacity. That’s how IT starts moving from reactive to proactive and increases productivity dramatically.
  • Additional Resources: Six Essentials to Capacity Management

Cost

The second factor to consider is cost. Forrester reports that 68% of IT Executives say software and hardware and tool consolidation is the key to cost cutting. New tools can greatly reduce your annual software spend by decreasing the amount of monitoring point tools you have. Having too many points tools leads to wasted time and budget when constantly deploying, configuring, maintaining, updating and paying annual renewal fees. Not only that, but a unified dashboard for one, clear view of IT is nearly impossible with multiple tools or modules and leaves IT trying to cobble together a mix-mash of point tools. That leads to false alerts, conflicting stories, inaccurate data and headaches. Not a good combination.

Another notable stat is that the largest single spend of the IT budget at 43% is on IT staff and contractors. It’s obvious that wasting staff time is a critical error. Legacy or incorrect tools may be wasting up to 40% or more staff time which will surely burn through your budget. A huge waste of staff time is when IT groups are using separate, disparate monitoring tools, which leads to difficulty finding where problems reside (server team, network team, application team, etc) before the problem can start to be resolved. The result is increased mean-time-to-repair and more IT department blame game. A single, unified view of IT solves this problem by getting the IT departments working from the same data source and on the same page.

The last cost consideration is the inability to measure quality of service. 75% of IT Executives can not accurately measure quality of service. It’s obvious that IT needs to show value to the business. This is why it is critical to set and report on IT Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Find a tool that makes setting, monitoring and reporting on IT SLAs easy, and that can be deployed and reporting in hours.

  • Take Away: Multiple monitoring point tools and suites with too many modules are expensive and waste staff time. Consolidate tooling to make your IT more productive and save on budget.
  • Additional Resources: The Unified IT Dashboard
  • Take Away: Get started setting, monitoring and reporting on SLAs.  It can be an great way to prove the value of IT and departments can start small and get the quick wins first.
  • Additional Resources: The SLA Way to IT Success White Paper

Datacenter EfficiencyTying it all Together

The easiest way to initiate change is to find better IT tools for your teams use. If you are currently considering a unified IT Systems Management suite for your IT infrastructure, there is no better time than to start now. Look for a unified monitoring solution that will fit for your budget, meet your needs, solve your problems, and can scale to grow with your business. An easy-to-use solution with fast deployment and simple configuration will greatly assist with setup. Enabling IT with an intuitive ITSM suite that will get the job done will make IT more proactive in meeting SLAs, as well as helping solve immediate problems quickly and easily.

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Posted in Capacity Planning, IT Management, management, monitoring, Service Level Monitoring, sla, Virtualization | No Comments »

Stop the IT “Blame Game” and Get a Single Source of Truth!

February 22nd, 2013 Patrick Lui

My landlord just kicked me out.  Let me rephrase that.  My landlord just politely asked me to leave his property before my lease is up.  Thanks to him, my wife and I have been packing our stuff in preparation of our move.  In all honesty, my wife has been doing most of the packing.  I asked her to pack up all her belongings and kitchenware and I would do the rest.  Somehow, that message got lost and she packed my things too.  When I needed to look for my shoes and  couldn’t find them, I was upset.  I reiterated how I asked her to only pack her stuff but she said I never said her that.  Before I knew it, the blame game was in full effect.  It was her word versus mine.

These kind of things happen in IT infrastructure management too.  When you have more than one tool to monitor your environment and more than one data source for capacity planning, how do you know which one to trust?  The justification for IT environments to use a variety of monitoring tools is that their current set of tools cannot provide all the visibility they need.  For example, some tools are strictly for network monitoring.  Others might go really deep in Windows monitoring but light on everything else.  What’s worse is if there is an overlap in the metrics from each tool, so which one should you go with?  Different tools will gather metrics in different ways and at different time intervals.  One tool might catch a spike while another may not.  It is a full time job just to consolidate data and close information gaps to make sense of it all.

Here is where up.time is different.  up.time provides unified monitoring for all the silos within an IT infrastructure so you can have a true ‘single pane of glass’.  You don’t have to duct tape point tools together to make a homemade Swiss army knife.  up.time IS the swiss army knife and provides a unified and comprehensive view.  It makes capacity planning a breeze because it provides a single data source so you don’t have to try to make sense all the differing metrics!  You can eliminate the blame game (and headaches) in IT when you don’t have multiple tools telling you different things.  You don’t have to go to war with the network team arguing whose data is right when you have a standard tool providing a single view of the truth.  up.time is the solution that enables you to be the IT superstar.  Download up.time and give it a spin today!

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Posted in Application Monitoring, Capacity Planning, IT Management, IT operations, monitoring, Network Monitoring, Server Monitoring | No Comments »

Are Sysadmins Corporate Superheroes?

February 19th, 2013 Phil Didaskalou

Ever wonder who the superheroes are that make your company tick?

Are they the geniuses that live in your R&D labs designing and building the cool products you sell? Is it the creative marketing team that communicates with the entire planet 24/7 and lines up all kinds of potential buyers to your front door?  Or is it your hardworking sales and customer support teams that look after all your clients and grow your revenues in leaps and bounds year after year?

No doubt all these people are crucial to the success of your growing enterprise and when working creatively and in unison, will eventually produce profits that will make your shareholders drool. This is very true.

Another thing that’s true is that all these teams will fall apart fast and furiously without a dedicated and well oiled IT operation.

So…please allow me to introduce your unsung Corporate Superhero:

So what does your sysadmin do all day that is so important?

Well, pretty much everything that ultimately allows you to do anything at the office, on any given day. Day after day, sysadmins work frantically to install, upgrade and configure your information systems. Many sysadmins feel so underappreciated; the unsung heroes that they are, they often work crazy long hours (weekdays and weekends) to ensure everything works right just so the rest of us can actually get work done.

 

What does a sysadmin do exactly?

The short answer is, nearly everything when it comes to the technology behind your personal and business life. To demonstrate the scope of responsibilities attributed to sysadmins everywhere, here’s just a short list:

  • Server Installations
  • Network Configuration
  • Operating System Installs & Upgrades
  • Server Temperature Control
  • Firewall Set Up and Maintenance
  • Email Configuration and User Set Up
  • Data Backup and Restoration
  • The list goes on and on…

Sysadmins help users out when they need hardware and software support. Sysadmins monitor networks for problems. They plan and map out systems to discover more effective ways to manage your precious computing resources. They build infrastructures that are more resilient to today’s ever-changing, agile world; and in so doing; sysadmins reduce company cost, advance innovation and contribute to the overall growth of any given organization.

Pretty amazing isn’t it? What’s even more amazing is how many of these unsung IT heroes I’ve come across every week that still do not have enough of the basic software tools to do their jobs properly. This is what makes my job so satisfying at uptime software – building software to make sysadmins lives easier so they can get what they need done faster and go home a bit earlier every night.

So please do not forget your IT heroes or take them for granted….stop by your IT department on your way out tonight …and just say THANKS!

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Travel Woes and Root Cause Analysis

February 5th, 2013 Patrick Lui

So who likes to travel?  If we were to play Family Feud and name something that people like to do, I’m certain “travel” would be one of the top answers.  But how many of us like waiting to board a plane? How many of us like delays and spend unnecessary hours at the airport?  Right.  I didn’t think so.  So when I read in the news about the Toronto Pearson International Airport having a computer outage that led to significant delays, I can imagine how frustrating it would have been.  Being a Torontonian, I know our airport does not hold the title of being the busiest airport in the world.  Nonetheless, it was ranked (albeit 38th) in 2011.  Part of the news article said “technicians are not sure what caused the problem”, which is a scary thought.  Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident that only happens at Nav Canada; the company behind traffic control at the airport.

Root cause analysis is one of the holy grails in IT management.  If you are a system administrator who can pinpoint exactly why an outage happens, not only will you look like a superstar, your users/customers will love you for it.  How can you achieve that with up.time?  First of all, you need to have a unified dashboard so you can see things as they happen.  But just as important,  is getting alerts to the right person at the right time.  But once you get the alert, what’s next? You need to be able to monitor complex business services.

There are two key points to consider:

  1. First, you must have coverage for all the underlying components that make up your business services.  Whether it is OS, applications, or network and network devices, you must have visibility to everything in your infrastructure.
  2. Second, you need to be able to tie all the different components into your business services so that you can see the overall health of your services and exactly which component(s) is down.

The latter is vital if you want to perform root cause analysis. Having a tool (like up.time) that facilitates root cause analysis will make you the superstar (that you are), save you time in troubleshooting issues in your environment and get to the root cause of any outages with ease!  If you haven’t tried out up.time in your environment, you need to download it and take it for a spin!

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Posted in Application Monitoring, IT Management, Network Monitoring, Root Cause Analysis | No Comments »

What Everybody Ought to Know about Capacity Planning

January 17th, 2013 uptime Staff Contributor

Capacity Planning has been a “hot” topic of discussion amongst the IT community for a while now. We’ve gone through this topic in length on this blog, whitepapers and webinars (see related resources below). In our most recent blog post about IT capacity demands during peak seasonal periods, we established that correct capacity management is a gold mine; mis-managed capacity is the Titanic.

 

Is Capacity Planning Important to my datacenter?

Capacity PlanningCapacity Planning is essential in any IT data center to ensure the performance and availability of IT services and applications. Companies cannot succeed without the IT infrastructure they depend on so it is critical to balance capacity needs, while keeping costs in line.

Successful Capacity Management requires a unified view of your IT Environment. Far too many companies out there spend too much on additional capacity; meanwhile, they have the internal capacity readily available. This is due to lack of visibility into the critical capacity information needed to make the right decisions. This is particularly a problem in mixed vendor environments, multiple platforms and multiple data centers.

 

How do you get complete capacity visibility and reporting to implement effective capacity planning?

Effective capacity management starts with these basics:

  • Capacity PlanningGet accurate and granular capacity insight across all platforms and infrastructure (right down to the bare metal), so you can make high-level decisions and become more proactive
  • Find under-utilized capacity and re-allocate it to where it’s needed
  • Slow down spending on new equipment until existing servers are operating at over 60% and VMs are at a minimum of 90%
  • Get visibility and reporting that can monitor, measure and report on global capacity
  • Collect deep historical data in easy-to-view reports and charts to trend data and proactively
    forecast future capacity needs

 

 

If you are looking for a capacity management and reporting solution, the right tool should answer these critical questions:

  1. How much total capacity do we have?
  2. How much capacity are we currently using?
  3. When and where are we going to run out of capacity next

 

Ultimately, the right ITSM tool will need to empower IT to optimize performance, reliability and efficiency of the IT services it delivers to the business, and its clients, at the best cost. For IT departments with both physical and virtual infrastructures, capacity management will mean the difference between becoming the organization’s gold mine or it’s Titanic. Which do you want to be?

_____

Additional Resources:

Related Blog Posts

Capacity Planning: Do you Know your Virtualized Environment?

Key to Capacity Planning is Knowledge

The Do’s and Dont’s of Capacity Planning

Manage Capacity and Avoid Downtime During the Holiday Season

Related Whitepapers

The 6 Capacity Planning Essentials

Related Webinar

3 Simple Steps for Total Control of IT Capacity

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CES Roundup – What do Smartwatches have to do with ITSM?

January 15th, 2013 Joel Pereira

The CES (Consumer Electronics Show) was on last week and there was some pretty cool stuff being shown including flexible screens, auto-piloting cars, and many projects that started off on Kickstarter. One of these projects is the famous Pebble smartwatch.

Server Down Alert!

Smartwatches have always interested me, but until recently, technology was a big limiting factor of functionality. Now that the technology has caught up, we can start to see some cool things happening. Even while I’m waiting for my Kickstarter Pebble, I already have the MetaWatch Stata (another Kickstarter smartwatch) on my wrist. I can already get emails, texts, phone calls and calendar invites to my wrist and it’s a pretty cool feeling. Mentioning that I’ve just received an SMS and/or emails on my watch tends to make some people question if I’ve been to the future and back.

So what do these smartwatches and other technologies have to do with IT systems management? Essentially they’re just more tools for us to get things done! Having a watch on my wrist that not only tells the time (yes, it does that too), but it will now vibrate on my wrist so that I don’t miss an important phone call from a big client, or the outage email/SMS alerting me that one of the server nodes are down.

This also means that we’ll have to make sure we don’t get overloaded with too many notifications or else we’ll just start ignoring everything, which is also a problem. Finding that magic balance of getting just the right amount of information is something that up.time can help provide, for the IT side of things at least. If you’d like to read a little more about intelligent alerting, click here, or read a related post of avoiding the “sea of red” false alerting here.

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4 Tips on Choosing a Unified IT Monitoring Solution that Fits Your Budget

January 8th, 2013 uptime Staff Contributor

Before considering an IT Systems Management (ITSM) solution, it’s essential to understand what your team ‘needs’ rather than ‘wants’, which will trim down excess requirements and ultimately price. Furthermore, make sure the solution is a good fit for your budget, meets your needs, solves your problems and can scale to grow with your business.

Here are some tips and tricks you should keep in mind when evaluating an ITSM suite:

Licensing Costs

  • Per-element pricing (pay for servers/devices you want to monitor) provides most value. It’s easy to manage, scalable and cost-effective.
  • Look for licensing models that includes most, or all, of what you need in one price. For example, complete or unified solutions (without modules, application charges, management packs or upgrade reports) will provide all the functionality you need without the extra cost.

Deployment Costs

  • If buying a solution that requires deployment services, add 100% of the license cost for deployment.
  • The longer the time to deploy, the more complex the solution is to use. Find an ITSM suite that you can deploy quickly, with your own IT staff. This avoids large costs associated with services, margin for error, cost overruns, stressed out staff etc.

Maintenance Cost

  • Look for a maintenance model that fits your needs and be able to escalate to higher tiers of support without incurring extra costs.
  • Product upgrades should be free and annual fees should never be more than 20% of your licensee cost.
  • You shouldn’t need a full-time employee to maintain your ITSM suite – it should make your team more productive, not require additional staff.

Value to the Team

  • Provide value to the entire IT team across silos (VMware, Windows, UNIX, Application, and Network teams).
  • Create high performing IT teams by having everyone on the same page and working together by using an ITSM dashboard that can be used as a heads up display across multiple silos. This greatly reduces the costs associated with buying and maintaining multiple tool stacks.
  • Find a Unified Monitoring Tool that can satisfy the core needs of each silo and the cost savings will be substantial.

Lastly, consider an easy-to-use solution, as it will greatly assist with day-to-day use. This will encompass quick deployment, simple configuration, dashboard to root-cause analysis in seconds, auto-discovery of systems, proactive alerting and 3-click intelligent reporting. Enabling IT with an intuitive ITSM suite that will get the job done will make IT more proactive in meeting SLAs, as well as helping solve immediate problems quickly and easily.

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