No Matter What Your Business is, it’s Only as Effective as Your Supporting Infrastructure

First the bad news. As an IT stakeholder, you’ve been tasked with finding an IT operations management solution to keep pace with your company’s growth.

A quick Internet search reveals a crowded, complex market with specific solutions for different problems. How might these solutions impact you? Where do you start? Should you consider managed services or try to manage it yourself? And what is the best remedy for a headache?

Now some good news: we can provide you with a starting point and perhaps save you a bit of time. As a baseline, let’s look at the common business issues across the board. No matter what your business is, it’s only as effective as your supporting infrastructure.

Most of you can benefit from three core IT management capabilities:

1. The ability to capture the exact state of your monitored infrastructure rapidly and accurately
2. Technology that gets to the essence of infrastructure issues and their business impact – and suggests (or better yet, automates) remedial actions
3. The ability to integrate all of your various niche solutions

Capture the Exact State

Everyone in this space is bogged down by the tidal wave of events generated by the IT infrastructure. Millions of raw events and associated alerts inundate IT support teams with a continuous and oftentimes overwhelming volume/flood of data. Sorting through this ocean of data to get meaningful information is no easy task.

Capturing the state of the network is not unique in itself, but the way that it’s done in the Optanix Platform brings about orders of magnitude improvement when compared with other systems.

Optanix uses a patented approach to rapidly gauge the state of the infrastructure. As raw events are gathered from network elements, a “snapshot” is taken to determine changes in the network state.

This snapshot is essentially a picture of the network state at a particular point in time. By comparing consecutive snapshots, it’s possible to focus only on issues that appear in both snapshots. This immediately brings attention to the troublesome issues in the network that are persistent in the nature of their irregularities.

The result is an efficient, speedy way to cut through the noise and rapidly generate a picture that points to interesting data about problems in the network.

Gets to the Essence

Knowing the state of the network then enables the next stage: identifying the root cause.

What makes the Optanix Platform different is that it not only identifies the root cause, it provides a layer of additional information to facilitate remediation as well as gauge the impact on business services. This is collectively known as the “Clean Signal” within the Optanix Platform.

The Optanix Platform uses a variety of correlation and dependency analysis techniques to identify root cause. It intelligently troubleshoots issues and collects additional relevant information by carrying out additional tests.

The automated logic works through different failure scenarios until it identifies the exact reason for the service or infrastructure issue. The system verifies and validates the problem to ensure that valuable time is not wasted on fixing transient issues. State machine-based automated workflows are used to determine remedial actions.

The Optanix Platform provides the ability to group infrastructure elements as business service entities. This way, it is possible to understand the true nature of the impact to business services rather than just have a list of network devices that have issues.

The Clean Signal that is generated clearly points to 1) the source of the problem, 2) the remedial action and 3) the business services impacted. This drives down support costs and accelerates MTTR by automating time-consuming investigative work.

Using its powerful orchestration capabilities, the platform can perform a wide range of remedial actions, such as resetting servers, restarting applications and reconfiguring devices. Support staff can trigger these actions in response to issues, or the platform can trigger them automatically to provide zero-touch remediation of common infrastructure and service issues.

This dramatically shortens MTTR times, avoids IT staff having to manually access IT devices, and ensures that remediation actions are performed consistently and accurately.

Ability to Integrate

You know better than anyone that most IT management operations are based on cobbling together a variety of loosely integrated monitoring, diagnostic and ticket management tools. Often, these tools have overlapping functionality and workflows get labor intensive.

In addition to best-in-class performance when it comes to problem identification and remediation, the Optanix Platform provides case management, visualization and notification modules, resulting in a highly integrated and comprehensive solution. These features are not bolt-on, but integrated with one another from the ground up. This provides a cohesive and complementary set of capabilities that bring about efficiencies in the day-to-day operations of your IT organization.

The Optanix Advantage

With the Optanix Platform, IT customers experience major improvements in service availability and quality while dramatically lowering their operational costs. Typical results include 1,000,000:1 reductions in event volumes, 50% reductions in remediation times and first-time fix rates of more than 90%. Check out the video below to learn more: