Chapter 3: Connecting Everyone to the IT Management Loop

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 3: Connecting Everyone to the IT Management Loop ........................................................... 29  Starting the Loop: Connecting Monitoring to the Service Desk ................................................... 30  Making Changes: How to Find a Change Management Window .................................................. 35  Communicating: How to Bring Users into the Loop .......................................................................... 37  SLAs: Setting and Meeting Realistic Expectations .............................................................................. 39  Tell Me What You Really Think ................................................................................................................... 41  When Everyone Doesn’t Need to See Everything: A Multi‐Tenant Approach ........................ 42  Call It a Private Management Cloud: Allocating Costs ...................................................................... 43  Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................................... 44  Coming Up Next… ............................................................................................................................................. 44    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 3: Connecting Everyone to the IT  Management Loop  IT management has for too long involved discrete, disconnected processes that often leave  key participants wondering what’s going on. Bringing everyone—users, managers, IT  professionals, and more—into the loop can create significant benefits as well as reduce the  tendency to fall back into discipline‐based silos. This is where the integration between  monitoring and service desk truly happens, and these concepts deliver the most critical,  central themes discussed throughout this book. It’s all about communication—ways to  better achieve communication as well as create opportunities for continuous improvement.  Users sometimes perceive their IT department as out‐of‐touch, ivory‐tower geeks with  poor people skills. Whether or not that’s true depends on the actual IT team members, but  the perception, fair or not, often exists. That’s because IT can too often be the last ones to  know about things that users perceive as problems. Sure, the server might me humming  along within specs, but the order‐entry application is incredibly slow. IT says that email is  working fine, but I’ve been waiting on an incoming purchase order for an hour—the email  system can’t possibly be working correctly!  IT has its own unique problems to deal with, and they sometimes involve a disconnect with  management. Finding windows in which to make approved changes, for example, can be  incredibly tricky. Simply coordinating the changes that are proposed, approved, under  development, ready for implementation, and so forth can be difficult. Many organizations  have adopted change management frameworks, such as those proposed by ITIL, that  outline specific processes for reviewing and approving changes. Physically coordinating  that process, however, can seem like herding cats. It’s even worse when IT has been  divided into silos: The database team might have a change scheduled for tonight, but that  change is going to conflict with the power supply changes being implemented by the data  center team. We need to get everyone on the same page.        29 Creating Unified IT Monitoring and Management in Your Environment          Don Jones    Starting the Loop: Connecting Monitoring to the Service Desk  Most organizations today have a ticket‐based system for coordinating IT activities. These  organizations also usually have monitoring systems in place to watch their IT systems and  alert them to any problems. Too few organizations, however, have connected these two  systems. Ideally, that’s what you want: A single, integrated IT management system that can  detect problems and then automatically open tickets for the appropriate individuals. If the  email server is down, the appropriate administrator should get a ticket. Those tickets, of  course, should include notifications via text message, email, or whatever other medium is  appropriate so that alerted individuals know they have an alert.  That auto‐assignment—you might even choose to call it auto‐routing—of tickets needs to  be pretty intelligent. Different systems, in different locations, at different times, all might  change how the ticket is created, thus changing who is assigned to work the problem.  Tickets should be as complete as possible, meaning as many fields as possible should be  automatically populated—you shouldn’t have to rely on a Help desk, or someone else, to fill  in the details. Those details might include the affected server’s information. Figure 3.1  shows what this kind of auto‐generated ticket might look like, with several key bits of  information pre‐populated by the system.    Figure 3.1: Automatically­generated tickets in response to alarms.