ITSM tools observation
The use of ITSM (IT Service Management) tools is established for almost all players in the IT world.
Some examples: EasyVista, GLPI, Akuiteo, Sage CRM, ...
The advantages of these products are major, in terms of the quality and efficiency of customer service, the historization of actions and the development of a knowledge base to accelerate diagnosis.
The final objective is always the same: to improve the quality of service, to reduce unavailability -> to satisfy the end-users and allow them to work in the best conditions.
The natural limitation of ITSM tools
By their nature, ITSM tools address problems in hindsightThis is when they occur.
Indeed, the beginning of the processing is marked by the creation of the ticket/incident, most of the time following a feedback from the user, who observes a dysfunction.
Although essential, dealing with problems when they occur is not/no longer sufficient, in an increasingly demanding context in terms of availability of critical applications and equipment, and of users often under pressure.
That's where an IT monitoring software solution comes in.
Supervision means anticipating
A strong added value of any supervision tool is its capacity, via adapted control points and relevant thresholds, to anticipate incidents.
By nature, monitoring controls are close to the equipment and applications and detect any abnormal behavior in near real time.
The examples are endless: disk close to saturation, strong increase of the CPU load, slow access to a URL, backup task in error, ...
Supervising means detecting these behaviors and treating them appropriately before the user encounters a problem.
An ERP of services to govern them all
Based on these observations, the place of supervision in the support process appears natural and the whole can be seen as a real ERP servicesThis is based on two tools: ITSM and supervision.
Placed upstream of the ITSM tool, the supervision tool allows :
- Detection of minor alerts (warnings) and launch of preventive actions: increase disk space, replace a component, communicate with users about upcoming maintenance
- Detection of critical alerts and their reactive treatment, before the first customer call is received. This is further facilitated by a creation of ticket on acknowledgementoffered by ServiceNav and compatible with many many tools on the market.
Placed downstream of the ITSM tool, it becomes possible to :
- Analyze the status/metrics history of an item, to facilitate support diagnosis and event correlation
- View the history of tickets on an item, and the status of the current ticket, directly from the ITSM, in order to evaluate the failure rate of this item
