Chapter 5: Turning Problems into Solutions

Creating Unified IT Monitoring and Management in Your Environment Don Jones sponsored by Creating Unified IT Monitoring and Management in Your Environment          Don Jones    Chapter 5: Turning Problems into Solutions ............................................................................................. 60  Closing the Loop: Connecting the Service Desk to Monitoring ..................................................... 60  Retaining Knowledge Means Faster Future Resolution .................................................................. 62  Knowledge Bases ......................................................................................................................................... 63  Tickets as Knowledge Base Articles .................................................................................................... 64  Unifying the Knowledge Base ................................................................................................................. 65  Making Tickets an Asset ........................................................................................................................... 69  Past Performance Is an Indication of Future Results ........................................................................ 69  It’s the Performance Database ............................................................................................................... 72  Summary .............................................................................................................................................................. 73  Coming Up Next… ............................................................................................................................................. 73      i Creating Unified IT Monitoring and Management in Your Environment          Don Jones    Copyright Statement © 2011 Realtime Publishers. 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If you have any questions about these terms, or if you would like information about licensing materials from Realtime Publishers, please contact us via e-mail at info@realtimepublishers.com.   ii Creating Unified IT Monitoring and Management in Your Environment          Don Jones    Chapter 5: Turning Problems into Solutions  The satirical news outlet The Onion recently ran a story related to the economy. In it, the  publication claimed that a special kind of scientist called a historian was advancing the  novel idea of looking at the past. “Sometimes,” one pseudo‐historian was quoted, “we can  look at how people tried to solve problems which are similar to those problems we are  having today. We can look and see how their solutions worked, and that can give us an idea  of whether or not the same solution will work for us.” Hah!  Although targeted at politicians who seem to keep making the same mistakes over and  over, The Onion’s jibe is pretty applicable to IT as well. “Look, if this same problem  happened 3 months ago, and we solved it then, perhaps we can solve it more quickly now.  What, exactly, did we do last time? Maybe doing the same thing again will have the same  effect that it did then!”  I’ll put it another way: Perhaps you have children, or at least know someone who does.  Ever tell a kid not to touch the hot pot that’s on the stove? Sure. Did they touch it? Of  course. How many times? Usually just once. That’s because human beings are designed to  learn primarily by making mistakes. Provided we remember the mistake, and that we  remember how to avoid it or solve it, we can do so in the future very quickly. Memory  becomes the key factor, and as we get older, stop touching hot pots and start playing with  computers at work, it sometimes gets harder to remember. This chapter is all about the  final aspect of unified management: Taking problems that we’ve solved, and turning those  into solutions for the future.  Closing the Loop: Connecting the Service Desk to Monitoring  Before we dive into the memory aspect of solving problems, we’ve first got to close the  operational loop in our unified monitoring toolset. Earlier in this book, we discussed that  one aspect of a unified management system is the ability to monitor devices and services,  such as a database server. When a problem condition is monitored, the monitoring system  creates an alert, which is typically shown on a console, and may involve notifying someone  via email or text message. A truly unified system may also open a problem ticket in the  organization’s IT ticket‐tracking system. The ticket enables management to track the  problem and its time to resolution. It also allows the ticket to be passed to different  personnel who collaborate to solve the problem. The ticket can even be pre‐populated with  information germane to the case, helping the person working the problem to get going  more quickly. Figure 5.1 illustrates this first step: The alert showing up in the console, and  the ticket being created from that.    60 Creating Unified IT Monitoring and Management in Your Environment          Don Jones      Figure 5.1: Getting an alert and opening a ticket.  Eventually, one hopes, the problem will be corrected. At that point, it’s common for the  person who completed it to close the ticket, marking it as completed.  But what about the alert?  Of course, the real‐time monitoring component of the system will realize that the problem  no longer exists—but that doesn’t necessarily get rid of the alert. Typically, you want alerts  left in‐place until the problem is confirmed as being handled, which means that in addition  to closing the ticket, you’ve also got to go in and clear the alert. This is actually pretty  common in organizations that don’t have a unified management system: Close the ticket in  one system, then log into the monitoring system and mark the alert as handled. In a truly  unified system, however, it would make sense for the closed ticket to also clear the  associated alert because the alert is what created the ticket in the first place. Figure 5.2  shows how this loop can be closed within a single system.