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Businesses mature and so too should the capabilities and support of
your IT Business Management system...evolving with your business.
Service Oriented Architecture + Workflows + Modularisation + Application Clustering Technology ensures we can improvise, adapt and overcome limitations in other systems. This allows
our ObserveIT™ suite to proactively meet business needs
seamlessly and deliver all cross-component interaction with a
well-defined interface that is technology independent.
Business processes are traditionally manual and can involve multiple systems (whether electronic or paper based). ObserveIT™ allows for the centralisation and management of business processes through a single user interface
by utilisation SWIM API Technology.
Customers can either utilise ObserveIT™ Core Management Modules or integrate their existing legacy applications by utilising the System Workflow Integration Module (“SWIM”) API.
SWIM enables Customers to integrate multiple legacy systems through a single user interface.
ObserveIT™ also allows for data transfer between legacy systems under strict business process controls to ensure complete synergy.
To truly set ObserveIT™ apart from other
products, ObserveIT™ is able to pin-point within your infrastructure
where to focus your capital to achieve the greatest return on
investment.
There are two parts to AIM.
For each “service” (eg: email, VoIP etc)
monitored by ObserveIT™ the total technical
costs of supporting your infrastructure are totalled by calculating;
- Potential loss of revenue caused by an outage
(see Business
Revenue Impact)
- The human resource cost associated with investigating
and supporting an
outage
Once calculated, a "Total Financial Service Cost"
report will be created for presenting to management.
Should you elect to
upgrade or improve the quality of services,
you or your Provider Agent,
can manually register in
ObserveIT™ the following;
- Cost of Hardware
- Cost of licenses
- Cost of Services eg: Design, Implement, Test
Once the required information has been registered
within the QoS report, a Return on
Investment
report is compiled, published
and
presented for
action.
The ROI report contains detailed analysis on the Service
Based Financial, QOS and resource optimisation calculations.
Resource optimisation is
based on the elimination of support calls as a result of the QoS
upgrade.
ObserveIT™ has an integrated Financial
Reporting
component enabling greater visibility
of associated costs within your environment.
ObserveIT™ enables
organisations
who have
a “shared corporate infrastructure” to on-charge services to
respective divisions or business units
within their organisation
allowing for a quicker Return on Investment (“ROI”).
Detailed financial reports can provide a detailed breakdown of costs such as;
- Actual resource costs associated with supporting outages
- External Provider Agent support costs
- Third party vendor licensing
- Business Revenue Impact
costs for each service / system managed by ObserveIT™
- Monthly Contract and SLA renewal report
- Monthly Maintenance renewal report
Configured within ObserveIT™ is the Business Revenue Impact Module (“BRI“). This module enables ObserveIT™ to calculate a Customers’ potential revenue loss due to a service outage.
Based on ITIL best practises, a pre-set (editable) value is assigned to a type of “device” eg: Workstation, Server, Switch etc. or “service” eg: Data, VoIP, email etc.
During an outage, ObserveIT™ utilises a unique “cubed algorithm” (unlike other systems that use a flat table matrix) to calculate potential revenue loss.
The BRI is generated during an outage and presented within an Incident Ticket. BRI’s are not enforced as they are indications only, however they can be invoked through
the Incident Ticket. If a BRI is invoked, it is managed as an escalation.
Traditionally SLA's are applied to nodes, devices, systems or
applications and are typically 24x7x4.
The major issue with this approach is that it does not accurately
reflect the value this system has within your organisation !
Organisations move, add and change not only staff
locations but also
systems, and it is imperative that SLA's are calculated in real-time as an outage occurs.
ObserveIT™ SLA Management calculations are based on the actual impact an
outage has to your organisation...what services, systems and users are
affected.
By understanding this impact, ObserveIT™ is able to present you with an accurate
impact assessment and will allocate the appropriate predefined SLA
accordingly.
ObserveIT™ can manage multiple SLA’s to ensure coverage across
multiple platforms, systems, services, vendors and business units.
Multiple instances of an SLA can be assigned to multiple devices
ensuring complete coverage.
A key design focus of Zions' products is to ensure ALL data remains
securely within your organisation.
Traditional solutions require data to be sent externally to
your Managed Services Vendor. ObserveIT™ Enterprise is hosted within your
organisation thus eliminating the need for any data to be sent
outside your organisation.
Our ObserveIT™ Provider product will only allow Provider Agents ("Agents") to view
information YOU have contractually agreed an Agent to manage.
ObserveIT™ Provider and ObserveIT™ Enterprise maintain individual
Contract and SLA Management modules to control the flow and access to
information between organisations. If an Agent wishes to view
information outside their realm of management, they must request
approval via a change control ticket within ObserveIT™.
ALL data captured by your locally installed ObserveIT™ Enterprise
enables a true "single view" of your environment.
You, the Customer, select which systems are monitored and managed by an
Agent. ObserveIT™ can be configured for an Agent to manage the Server Operating System (”OS”) but not
necessarily the business specific application operating on the server. This could be monitored and managed by an internal Application Development Team instead.
In the event of a server OS alert, the alert may be managed by an
Agent, however an FYI alert would also be sent to the Application Development Team.
Larger corporations with a presence in more than one location or country can configure ObserveIT™ to send alerts to regional support teams that may monitor systems on behalf of the company during agreed hours of operation.
An organisation can customise an ObserveIT™ workflow for each individual application, system or hardware component to notify a specific group
eg: network alerts are sent to the network team; server alerts to the server team; application alerts sent
to an application development team etc.
Operation Status Panels can be customised to each
operational support team enabling detailed visibility of their respective areas whilst
still presenting a “general view” of the overall environment.
ObserveIT™ maintains an integrated Service Desk allowing for complete end to end management of incidents, tickets and escalations. Automated tracking of all incidents’ ensures no tickets are “lost” and incident status is readily available to all users.
A Customer Contract contains preset licence allocations, applied discounts where applicable, key contacts, and contract term dates etc. This Contract is the parent commercial licence agreement between Zion and the Customer or the
Agent and the Customer. All Contract
are assigned a unique Contract Reference Code.
ObserveIT™ Change Control module centrally manages ALL changes within a customers IT infrastructure, leveraging from the Resource Management workflow process for approvals.
All updates or requests within ObserveIT™ are considered a
change and are managed to agreed change control processes.
Automated Change Impact Assessments
Utilising the unique cubed algorithm ObserveIT™
is able to calculate the impact a change has to your organisation, and
assigned the appropriate severity level and approval authorities.
licence management
Traditional licence management
Traditional licence purchasing requires payment for a continuous
12 month period. AS your needs change over time, so
too should licence flexibility.
ObserveIT™ approach to licence management
Licenses are purchased directly from Zion or your registered
Agent using ObserveIT™ Licence
Manager. Although discounts may apply
for licences purchased for a 12 month period, ObserveIT™ allows
you to purchase licenses on a monthly basis, allocating licenses as
required.
Traditional reporting
To support large organisations, a number of monitoring products are
required due to the complexity, diversity and uniqueness of an IT
infrastructure.
Reports generated under these circumstances may present fractured view
of your environment.
ObserveIT™ Approach to reporting
By leveraging ObserveIT™
SWIM technology ObserveIT™ presents a
single detailed view of your entire infrastructure from a central user
Interface.
The Monthly Summary Report (“MSR”) is automatically generated based on the information contained within ObserveIT™. Each system monitored by ObserveIT™ has an individual MSR eg: Server, Network, IPTel, Printer etc. The individual MSR’s are distributed to registered System Owners / Team Leaders, based on predefined resource ownership workflow policies, for comments pertaining to their respective systems
Once owners have completed their updates, the individual MSR’s are submitted for consolidation into the Monthly Executive Summary Report (“ESR”).
The compiled ESR is forwarded to the IT Manager / CIO for review, comments and approval for publishing in the Executive Monthly Report web page. Upon approving the ESR, a notification containing the ESR URL link is generated and sent to a predefined list of addresses.
Compliance audit requests are created within ObserveIT™ to be
reviewed against the selected “types” of systems. ObserveIT™
executes the audit in accordance to agreed frequency with the
results published in a Compliance Audit Report.
The Configuration Management within ObserveIT™ enables the automated capturing of configuration files to be stored in a secure encrypted location.
ObserveIT™ maintains an Asset Management system capturing all
information, including physical location, serial numbers, support
team, SLA and support contract information relating to a specific
device.
ObserveIT™ presents notifications when hardware or product contract
support is due for renewal.
Alert and Threshold Management receive alert notifications from various services and nodes based on preset values.
Each type of alert is analysed to determine the correct process of action.
ObserveIT™ checks all alerts against approved Change Controls to
confirm an outage is not the result of an authorised change.
To accommodate diversity within a customer’s environment, and to
ensure customers only pay for what they need, Zion has developed Metric
Packs specific to the types of systems that can be managed by
ObserveIT™ eg: Call Manager, MS Exchange Server, Cisco Switches, MS
SQL servers.
Metric packs enable Zion to rapidly deploy monitoring, reporting and
management capabilities to new products or systems released to market.
Metric packs provide the integration between the Core modules and the system or service managed
by ObserveIT™.
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hnology