IT Operations is responsible for the performance and availability of the IT infrastructure. While a number of network and systems management (NSM) tools are used to monitor and remediate performance and availability issues, often the practice of problem management or root-cause analysis is overlooked. The goal of problem management is to determine the underlying cause of performance and availability issues so they can be avoided in the future. Investigating logs is a crucial component of root-cause analysis. The benefits of the SenSage Problem Management Solution include:
- Improved system and application availability
- Reduction in recurring incidents
- Increased adherence to change management procedures
SenSage Problem Management has helped dozens of organizations improve system and application availability with the following features:
- Root-cause analysis - While traditional network and systems management (NSM) tools provide excellent information about detecting service interruptions, they usually lack the ability to provide the root-cause of the incident. Events that lead to incidents are most often found in log data that is unavailable to NSM systems. Additionally, many events that can lead to an outage, such as changes in Microsoft Active Directory, require correlating multiple events to determine the actual root cause.
- Change detection - IT professionals and industry analysts agree that the vast majority of service interruptions are caused not by a device failure but by changes made by humans. The best practices for production IT environments is to adhere to a strict change management policy requiring that all changes are approved and recorded. When incidents occur, IT professionals usually consult the change control log to determine if any changes were made to the system or application related to the incident. Unfortunately, many changes are not documented. SenSage for Problem Management can be used to search log data for records related to changes and also proactively create period change reports.
- Integrate with workflow systems - SenSage easily integrates with popular incident workflow systems such as BMC Remedy® and HP ServiceCenter© to insure that detected incidents are forwarded and further managed by the workflow system.