Delivering Service, Value and Efficiency with NetIQ AppManager and Aegis
Managed Services is a high revenue growth area for IT, but managed service providers can only meet client expectations in terms of higher revenues and more effective and efficient operations, if they have the tools to align service to each client's business. In this feature we look at how it has been possible to drive consistently high levels of client service through the use of NetIQ AppManagerTM and AegisTM.
Serving some 134 clients, Attenda required a management tool to provide a business-level understanding of clients' key business services, in order to maintain a consistent and reliable service. We wanted to run operations as efficiently as possible through the use of automation and to customise our services to the needs of each individual client.
With a combination of NetIQ AppManager and Aegis solutions, we can monitor application availability, server performance, Oracle & SQL server database capacity and performance, and web transaction user experience for our clients.
The biggest application management challenge is finding and resolving incidents before the client notices there is an issue. The sheer quantity of servers, applications, transactions and data volumes that the Attenda team monitors is huge, at around 2000 servers, requiring 178,000 monitoring checks per hour and generating 150,000,000 individual data points, with about 6,000,000 rows of data per day from NetIQ AppManager.
We achieve significant time savings in how we support clients' applications and data because of the way that Aegis integrates with AppManager and other critical monitoring tools. The support for third party tools means that Aegis can interact with and drive any other application or system that we use both now and in the future. One of the key features of Aegis is the way it correlates complex triggers from multiple systems, which is crucial to supporting our clients' systems and applications. Workflows are automated and streamlined, which minimises the need for user intervention.
NetIQ AppManager reports provide a basis for designing and measuring SLAs, proving the quality of the service we deliver to our clients. NetIQ AppManager is providing around 4,000 reports a day which are uploaded to the client portal for end user visibility.
We are extending the use of Aegis to facilitate the orchestration of multiple, automated tasks and customer specific assignments such as new service provisioning or disaster recovery invocation. We are also using Aegis to manage and orchestrate our VMware-based cloud computing platform, Attenda RTI, through automated provisioning, configuration and de-provisioning of virtual machines to support dynamic, on demand client service needs, and to increase operational scalability.
For our partners, through automating the most routine tasks, our support teams are freed up to work on more complex and valuable tasks, liaising with partner support teams to provide end- to- end business process support. Increased process automation has also enabled us to control operational support costs, whilst continuing to deliver a consistently high level of service to a growing client base.