For IT Professionals, it’s Us Against the World. Every Day.

Why sugarcoat it? If you’re an IT professional in this day and age, you feel like nobody notices you.

Until there’s a problem, that is. Then suddenly there you are, taking all the heat.

Thanks to you, the business hums along like a well-oiled machine. But behind the scenes, it’s often madness. You and your team are always running around like crazy, trying to keep the ship afloat. It’s your blood, sweat and tears that go into putting out the fires. Does anybody care?

Despite the chaos, you still need to somehow continue to evolve the ever-changing network infrastructure, stay current with new technologies and plan ahead for expansions and efficiencies. You need to continue to deliver on the promise of uptime and incremental improvements to the IT infrastructure. And of course, you have to do it in the face of increasing budget cuts and decreasing staffing resources.

Meanwhile, your end users continue to make more demands – and your leadership continues to lack an awareness of what you go through behind the scenes. So, if it feels like you’re being taken for granted – it’s because you are.

The Ongoing Battle

As you know, your business leaders don’t always understand IT. It’s a continuous battle to communicate to your executive team how you and your team do your job and what value you bring to the business.

When you walk past the CFO in the hallway, you know he’s thinking, “Hey, I wonder if this guy had anything to do with my email being slow this morning?” He’s also wondering, “Oh by the way…what exactly do you do?”

Armed with this understanding of a day in the life of an IT professional, on August 1st, Optanix released the mobile app for the Optanix Platform. Available with Release 5.4 of the Optanix Platform, the mobile app brings increased visibility to the status of environments monitored and managed with the Optanix Platform.

The mobile app helps to highlight the efforts that IT operations teams are taking to maintain the network. With the app, execs can quickly access the summary level details they need via configurable push notifications. Meanwhile, your IT team can use the app to stay informed of incidents and support activities as they happen.

The mobile app value proposition: Push notifications

When an issue occurs with IT service delivery, it’s not uncommon for execs to first notice the alarms raised and the multitude of users affected. This leads to the perception that the IT department is in some way running behind and reactive in nature.

To address this perception, the Optanix Mobile App provides a proactive, interactive and informative delivery mechanism. The ability to push notifications ahead of the downstream alarms is key to reassuring leadership and management that the IT department is already aware and in control of the situation.

Subscribers to the mobile app are immediately aware that an issue exists. They can interact directly via the app to drill into available information and check back on status and follow up activities.

The mobile app brings the strong management capabilities of the Optanix Platform to smart devices, providing untethered, on-the-go visibility into IT service levels and incidents in a safe and secure environment. Users, administrators and executives can conveniently open, update, monitor and search cases, as well as receive notifications, just as desktop users do.

The mobile app also leverages visualizations via dashboards that highlight the steady state of health and operations that go on behind the scenes in order to deliver IT services.

The Optanix Mobile App incident dashboard displays the ten entities with the most active cases

This ability to show the value of the IT team’s activities results in the improvement of the overall perception of what exactly it takes to maintain an infrastructure on a day-to-day basis – which is better than being noticed only when a problem gets escalated to the top.