To learn how to evolve your architecture and automate more effectively the world of disparate data sources and tools, please contact CirrusPoint for an overview and educational session on how to accelerate your goals for ITSM, Infrastructure/Cloud Monitoring, and becoming proactive with business impact.  CirrusPoint also recommends checking out external readings and coverage on CirrusPoint such as the Forrester Vendor Landscape report released and titled “Cognitive Operations: The AI Version of IT Operations Management and Application Performance Management”.  There are also several recorded sessions that you can register for.

Contact CirrusPoint to learn more about our solutions and customer use cases.

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Change visibility and having end-to-end transparency into the associations and dependencies across infrastructure and assets is essential to the success of any CMDB.  One of the biggest challenges is identifying the potential downstream impact of change prior to making it, and then being able to contact the right people or department owners.   A consolidated and “active” source of truth is what’s needed.

CirrusPoint has created a platform to simplify the process of getting answers to “what might be impacted?” and “who do I need to coordinate with?”.   To support building a proactive culture, Change Management must be efficient along with having corporate-wide dashboards that promote a shared sense of accountability and understanding of business impact.

Contact CirrusPoint to learn how to be more automated and effective with Change Management and Business Impact Prevention.

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As organizations continue to transform and orchestrate, the challenges remain in trying to use data for making proactive decisions.

Too often the data produced by all the tools is disconnected from actionable meaning and difficult to analyze for any sort of business impact or root-cause analysis.  Essentially, it’s just a lot of noise.  It becomes difficult to correlate the data and associate it to customer impact.  The ability to proactively plan and prevent is elusive while teams wait for IT and Operations to uncover actionable outcomes in a timely manner.

CirrusPoint solves this with a better approach to event management and data orchestration that’s highly automated and accurate. A single-pane-of-glass dashboard provides deep insights into many aspects of IT while offering a more reliable approach to identifying Root-Cause and associated Business Impact.

Introducing the ServiceDashboard

The CirrusPoint ServiceDashboard offers a holistic perspective on business impact and a real-time status on availability, performance, health, and SLA’s across IT infrastructure, applications, and cloud assets. With CirrusPoint, KPI Reporting becomes more credible, consolidated, and enabling for making better decisions.

ServiceDashboard is a proactive monitoring solution with real-time anomaly detection and capacity, performance, and predictive analysis.  The solution allows you to monitor assets more proactively and discover/track inventory with precision and accuracy.

CirrusPoint is your Partner for Transformation

CirrusPoint experts have many years of experience helping businesses reach transformation goals fast and efficiently.

The CirrusPoint approach produces ROI quickly by reducing incidents, improving customer experience, becoming smart about data, and reducing operational costs.  Enable success in transformation by contacting CirrusPoint today.

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Proactive Operational Response  

Business dashboard solutions should enable operational teams with real-time data and response to important issues that are impacting service delivery. This includes the ability to send proactive and automated notifications to mobile devices and interactive dashboards. By enabling cross-functional teams to learn about real-time changes in the performance trend will help reduce and prevent major incidents from occurring.   Having real-time data along with historical trends which are accessible from the same platform can help Operations teams can better prioritize response and reduce tickets and MTTR.

Access to problems, not just symptoms 

KPI dashboards must have the intelligence built in to determine and separate actionable “ticket-worthy” data from all the many symptoms being generated across the enterprise.  Too much noise exists with the ITSM platforms today and that extra noise has a major impact on operations and also the credibility of reporting and the tools used to provide data.  The users will eventually only trust (and use) solutions that prove to be accurate and reliable. They also want to be able to correlate data across boundaries and have the ability to eliminate the symptoms before creating alarms and tickets in their ITSM platforms.

Combine Top-Down Reporting with Bottom-Up – a winning strategy

Single-pane-of-glass dashboards and KPI solutions will have the most impact if able to view both the logical and physical aspects of business & technology.  Technical staff may need to search for things by device, circuit, capacity, or performance whereas other parts of the business may just want the top-down logical view of how their service or location is being impacted and what the root-cause is.  The benefit of viewing data from multiple perspectives aids in building a collaborative culture more organically due to the sense of transparency created across global dependencies and users.  Everyone needs to be informed equally for “proactive” to work!

Integration, Automation and Abstraction Layer 

Integration and easiness of integration are major considerations for building a centralized KPI Dashboard for different lines of business. A consolidated approach requires the ability to bring in useful data from disparate sources more easily and aligned it to a semantic-based data model in effort to correlate and analyze information more effectively.  Also, the flow and analysis of data should be looked at more closely and automated with the right approach.

CirrusPoint can help!   

There are more tools now than ever and the complexities have only grown; especially with all the new transformational initiatives surrounding AI, Cloud, Machine Learning, Data Analytics, etc…  Having visibility across all assets and services is not only useful for making quick and accurate decisions, it’s required today for keeping corporate leadership informed on customer impact, cost, and with service delivery trends.

CirrusPoint helps organizations looking for a better way to track the overall quality of service, manage hybrid assets, and monitor the KPIs in real-time.  Having a fully integrated KPI dashboard and robust set of enterprise monitoring tools available from CirrusPoint, can help you can orchestrate ITSM on a global scale.

Let CirrusPoint streamline your enterprise architecture and simplify operations

Developed from the need for comprehensive end-to-end reporting across networks, critical systems, and corporate applications, CirrusPoint has been helping organizations accelerate transformation efforts and connect more holistically with what’s going on across IT, Operations, and with the services being provided to customers.

 Contact CirrusPoint to take visibility to the next level.

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CirrusPoint’s ServiceDashboard is a highly scalable enterprise solution that can be used for a variety of business objectives.

Integrated SaaS Solution & Ready-to-Use Reporting

There are a lot of metrics to keep track of when you are an enterprise executive for a large organization… Where’s the root-cause impact and the cost impact of not being fast to find the problem?  Who’s accountable?  How do I plan and prepare for capacity, performance, and change while avoiding security risk?  What is the real picture of the technology footprint and what do I really have for inventory and assets?   These are common questions today that are often difficult to answer.  CirrusPoint solves this.

Having a centralized perspective on business impact that’s easy to use/interpret is how to become more proactive as an organization.   CirrusPoint provides a wide-range of coverage across IT along with enterprise monitoring and end-to-end reporting for multi-cloud enterprise environment including reporting on network, voice, virtual, infrastructure, and mission-critical applications.

Having real-time data along with historical information enables organizations to analyze, prepare, and correct service performance issues as they surface and create business impact.  ServiceDashboard also provides insights into the handling of tickets within the ITSM system and on the management of customer facing incidents in effort to improve customer response and resolution times.

A Cross-Platform & Multi-Cloud Solution

ServiceDashboard is compatible in a multi-cloud environment and monitors and reports across a massive library of vendor devices and applications. Solutions from CirrusPoint are pre-integrated with most of the commonly used enterprise tools and data sources.  CirrusPoint fills the gap for providing the AI needed to to correlate and automate Root-Cause Analysis (RCA).

The solution was designed to replace or enhance domain-specific tools including Netcool, Spunk, and Solarwinds among many others.    ServiceDashboard is used as a precursor to creating tickets in solutions like ServiceNow, Remedy, Jira, by identifying the root-cause ahead of creating incidents.  ServiceDashboard provides the real-time business impact analysis needed to prioritize response, dispatch, and outbound notification.  The cost savings and ROI is quick and clearly recognizable when using CirrusPoint.

Proven and Measurable Results

With CirrusPoint, orchestration becomes validated and operations can be measured.  ServiceDashboard completes the architecture by measuring and reporting on the operational quality of service being delivered to end users and customers.  ServiceDashboard is a proven industry platform that reports more accurately and timely than any ITSM-based ticking solution since it brings automated intelligence into the picture prior to creating tickets.  The reports distributed to business leaders are now super reliable and more credible than any other source.

Organizational improvements are recognized and validated by having a reduced number of incidents in operations, better executive oversight for planning, and a better customer experience.   CirrusPoint makes it easy for your organization to experience our solution with a trial deployment.   Keep your business running at peak performance and contact us to get started on a solution trial today.

Contact CirrusPoint

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The complexities have only increased with the addition of IoT devices, edge computing, and having shared virtual systems being used across global sites.   With the mass migration to the cloud, visibility has suffered quite a bit (along with accountability) and at many levels across the enterprise making it harder to isolate at risk conditions, root-cause issues, and business impacting problems.  With the added skills gap and the talent drain, how can you possibly manage?   Accountability often becomes the focus of everything during times of improvement, “transformation”, and missed project deadlines.

There is however automated capabilities that are available today that helps organizations become better at planning, predicting, and preventing things that impact the business.  The enterprise still struggles however to improve things like operational response, change management, and proactive collaboration.  The demands on corporate culture will continue to grow and these new approaches will require new ways to interact with our business partners, customers, and stakeholders.

Today, IT and Operations is either becoming a larger part of the business or being outsourced.  Regardless of where it is, the operational state continues to deteriorate and under-perform when it comes to handling and preventing incidents.  The impact of this is often felt at the business layer though the lack of visibility with decision making, reputation, and operational costs.

The truth is that organizations have been hitting the repeat button over and over again with only slightly different results each time.  They select new tools that are supposed to simply complexity, but end up providing the same result each time.  It’s not easy to turn the big ship, but if you have the right “approach”, it can be done naturally without force and at an accelerated pace.

There are many challenges that need to be solved, and the forecast for IT Service Management looks pretty weak for organizations that are not willing to look at new approaches to solving long time problems.

To help guide the efforts, the team at CirrusPoint has provided a few points below to assist those looking to transform and improve culture and collaboration with innovation and a modern approach.

The CirrusPoint Approach isn’t based on product or services alone, but on decades of experiences helping clients reach their goals and are essential for enabling success.  Hopefully this post provide some valuable insight and don’t hesitate to contact CirrusPoint if you would like to explore our approach and enterprise solutions further.

Be Smart about AI

There’s so much talk about “AI” but what the heck does it really mean, especially for IT and Operations?    AI can be used in IT Service Management for things like reducing operational costs and improving operational service and incident repair times.

For CirrusPoint, AI is the “Automated Intelligence” that’s needed to pinpoint a root-cause problem among the many symptoms reported.  AI helps isolate anomalies in performance trends and enables organizations to be more proactive.  AI is also used for running self-healing actions for automatically fixing problems and then providing proactive notifications.  Even more so, it’s about being able to spot and “sense” situations that are brewing up and provide early warning so we can get ahead.  There are many aspects of AI, but how you select and apply it depends on whether your organization is really willing to be innovative and move past the current reactive processes. There is tremendous value in using AI to improve the operational state and the quality of the service provided to customers.

One way for a “quick-win” with AI is to apply it to enterprise monitoring and event management.  Doing so allows you to automate the detection of root-cause events and correlate/differentiate problems from symptoms.  If your organization is still writing rules or matching events for network management then your most likely behind on the innovation curve.  Writing rules and matching events is a thing of the past and should be replaced with more automated approaches that are supported by discovery and analysis.

Orchestration goes beyond just collecting and manipulating data

Just think about how many tools and screens people to look at each day.  Where exactly is the starting point for solving problems?  How do you centrally correlate all the many sources of data, quickly?  What is the common real-time source of truth across the organization?

These are all questions that need to be answered with due diligence.  Integration solves some of the challenges however we must integrate appropriately and orchestrate data in the right direction so we can increase the range-of-use for information and reporting.  Organizations need to have a complete picture of what the business of IT looks like and how data should be used.

Orchestration goes beyond collecting and consolidating or just sticking all your events to a ticketing system.  It involves things like auto-discovery, automated analysis, and self-service reporting.  These are the things that can help improve operational effectiveness and start to dissolve the reactive mode that exists widely today.

It’s really about prevention

With all the new complexities being introduced, it will be difficult to “prevent” if we continue to work in isolated silos and align staff by product vendors or technology capability.   Orchestration is not only about bringing data, tools, and event sources together – it’s about bringing people together in real-time to share common perspective on how they operate and prevent, and how they depend on each other for service assurance.

Lighten up on the ticketing system infatuation

There’s a lot of excitement since moving ITSM to the cloud, however the ticketing system is a reactive system and it will always be since it is used primarily after issues have already occurred.  If the ticketing system is viewed as the holy grail for centralization, then organizational teams will continue to be in reactive mode waiting for the next thing to break instead of preventing it from breaking.  Too often, the central allure of a CMDB, data lake, or the cool ITOM platform feels promising, however achieving success and establishing any sort of prevention-focused behavior will require an intelligent and real-time source of reporting that the ticketing system cannot provide.

Find Some Business Meaning

We talk a lot about connecting IT with the business, but what does that really mean?  Where does the business go to understand the current status of IT and the impact on business?  We need to view IT based on the business services being consumed and supported.  Most of the sources currently used for ITSM reporting lack any real business meaning to allow executive leaders to plan and assess risk or impact.  Ensuring future and lasting success will require the ability to bring logical assets/entities together for reporting.

The security and monitoring tools used today spit out tons of costly machine data, but what does it mean to the business, and how does it impact the operational state?  

Organization need to focus on how to logically align data, assets, and transactions in their environment so they can get ahead of issues and customer impact.  Using analytics more efficiently to assess the active business impact will help make better real-time decisions.  Correlating business logic also helps operations get out of the mode of fixing things that may have no real impact.  Also, it becomes easier to prioritize when IT knows who might be impacted.  There’s lots to be gained by knowing what part of the business is impacted and what resource(s) to engage with incident remediation.  The many costly all-hands calls can be avoided.

A final thought…

Regardless of whether assets are on-prem or in the cloud, corporate leadership must commit to having a transparency over IT that everyone can access.  Moving forward requires executive innovators and an organizational leader to drive and sponsor innovation.

Best of luck with your transformation!  The future looks bright!

For further information feel free to contact CirrusPoint by email (solutions@cirruspoint.com) or by phone +1 800-403-6596. 

Finding success in the future will require executive innovators who are decisive and able to step up and embrace new solutions, capabilities, and approaches that will help grow their business and offer protection over corporate roles (in the form of “results”).

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