Could ServiceNav be a support to measure and decide on future investments?
"ServiceNav allows us to anticipate power and disk space requirements so we can use that data to forecast budgets. After more than seven months of using the platform, we're starting to get some interesting historical data for forecasting purposes."
Regarding application supervision, have you defined the metrics yourself? Have you worked in collaboration with the business departments? Are there any internal service contracts?
The ISD teams are very familiar with the applications and therefore knew the metrics to be monitored when drawing up the "application supervision" specifications, in particular the most important indicators, namely: being aware upstream of a slowdown that degrades the quality of service for the ISD's clients.
"We're currently working on availability metrics using ServiceNav: defining the relationships between the different application blocks."
"At the moment the ISD has no commitment from business services or management regarding the availability of applications. With ServiceNav we will now be able to work on this aspect and market the work of the ISD."
" I'm using (infrastructure/operations manager) the ServiceNav app on my smartphone so I know in the morning if all the apps are up and running by 8am or if there's something to deal with. "
Have you created an application map in ServiceNav with the map?
"We first created an application vision map, then a more technical map, a summary map, which is displayed in the team office and allows you to see the status of the equipment and services at a glance."
And do you share this application mapping to business services via the URL provided by ServiceNav's Dashlink feature?
"We share it internally within the IT department, because even though we know that a shared service weather forecast results in fewer user support tickets - especially with the comments that can be added - we prefer not to burden business services, who are only waiting for guaranteed availability. We share the URL if that expectation is not met."
"However, as part of this sharing logic, the ServiceNav mobile application is installed on the smartphones of several members of the management committee, who can check in real time that the availability of the IS is guaranteed.
Was SaaS in your specifications?
"Initially there was no particular desire to move to SaaS, but the management of the platform is much simpler, which corresponds well to the current operating mode, ServiceNav can be accessed anywhere, and the time saved on upgrades and the platform's MCO is undeniable.
Has ServiceNav been able to prove itself in concrete cases?
"We've already detected code issues with ServiceNav and we've seen performance degradation, and we've been able to report this to the application teams before the user is impacted.
"We also detected problems with memory leaks on the application. The solution prevented incidents by reacting very quickly. We're able to prevent them thanks to ServiceNav!"
"The orange dot on the dashboard allows you to click on it and see what's causing the alert."
"The exploded view of the weather services with the outbuildings is the one I use the most."
What are the long-term goals with ServiceNav?
"The medium-term objective is to steer the SMI Mutual towards a catalogue of services and a notion of SLA between the IT department and the business lines".
What do you think of the ServiceNav support team?
"We are very satisfied with the support from ServiceNav's teams. They came in when we needed them. For example, we were recently struggling to integrate GLPI (= ticketing tool) with ServiceNav. The support came in and the problem was solved quickly."
Do you recommend ServiceNav?
"In a small team like ours, time is precious, we have to be efficient. With ServiceNav we gain in quality of service, visibility into the mutual's critical applications, the solution is packaged, easy to use, user friendly, shareable with non-IT users; for all this it is clearly a solution that I recommend".
"Also in terms of speed of deployment, less than 7 days to create 5 application meteorological forecasts, I've never seen such implementation times for IT supervision anywhere else than with ServiceNav; believe me, I've been in the business for many years.
We thank Arnaud DEMAY for his time spent answering our questions.