The trading system is down.  It’s up.  Is it up?  What happened?  Who fixed it?  Who didn’t?

The necessity for real-time visibility (who is working issues) and historic visibility (audit trail) in IT is often touted and just as often overlooked.  Each system and application within IT uses its own reporting tools, leaving no clear way to track everything that has taken place to resolve an incident. The Operations Center will make call outs and send notifications.  Seemingly doing the right thing.  But how do we know who touched an event, what they did and when it was restored?

The engineer will take an action in HP OMU, then another in BMC Remedy, then move on to another system, all to address a single problem.  Everything makes sense at the time, but looking back it’s nearly impossible to understand who did what when.

Lacking a comprehensive audit trail and real-time visibility into the process can cause other problems, as well.  For example, one customer I work with is among the largest grocery chains in the United States, with over 3,500 stores nationwide.  Whenever a product recall occurred, each store had to be manually contacted to remove the defective product from its shelves.  This manual process was agonizingly slow, but more importantly, it left no audit trail.  If the company was sued because someone purchased dangerous food, they would have no way to prove that they had been in the process of removing the tainted products.  Bad yogurt is a big deal.  It’s an incident and it has to be efficiently managed.  Our customer was able to save $8 million by automating this process. 

Also, don’t forget to register for next week’s webinar: Four Best Practices to Increase the Relevance of IT Across the Business.  In today’s market, IT organizations are struggling with how to automate repeatable tasks, measure and optimize processes, enable accountability and increase their contribution to the overall business. In this webinar, you'll find out how to implement four best practices to enable your IT organization to be viewed as a key contributor to the success of the core business as well as your customer's customer.
Wednesday, February 24th, 8:00am PDT:  Register Now
 

Guest Post by Desi DosSantos
VP of Product Strategy at AlarmPoint

AlarmPoint has just released FREE AlarmPoint Express and Mobile Gateway for HP NNMi 8.13. Much like our other integrations, AlarmPoint Express will work to streamline notifications coming from NNMi in order to direct each IT event to an individual who can take immediate action, rather than a whole department. So, you might ask, what’s new about this HP NNMi Integration? Well, one of the key new features is the Mobile Gateway integration. What’s cool about it is that if you have a browser-based device, like an iPhone, Blackberry, Treo, Palm, Droid or Windows Mobile device, you now have a remote control to work with NNMi. And there is no software installed on the device at all! Yes, just like the remote control for your TV or DVR, except this remote can be anywhere in the world as long as you have a cell signal.

So let’s walk through a typical scenario. You are walking through the grocery store, minding your own business, and your Blackberry starts buzzing. When you look at the screen, it’s AlarmPoint sending you a text message or an email. So you look at the message, and it’s a critical event on a system forwarded from HP NNMi. You have a set of typical responses that will allow you to stop further notifications, so you acknowledge the incident. AlarmPoint then marks the incident on the NNMi console as “In Progress”, and annotates that you have taken ownership.

So what do you do next? Well, you need to fix the problem. However you’re curious what other incidents are going on in NNMi. On your BlackBerry, you utilize the AlarmPoint Mobile Gateway in order to view all of the color-coded incidents on the HP NNMi console.  Yes, you are still standing in the grocery store, and you are now looking at the console as if you were standing in the computer room.

So what can you do now? Well, what would you like to do?

• Change the priority on the incident
• Change the Lifecycle state
• Assign the incident
• View all of the Source Node or Source Object information
• Read or add annotations in the Notes field for an incident
• Query for other incidents and view/modify them
• View Service Impact incidents
• iew your assigned incidents and more.

So, how much does AlarmPoint Express for HP NNMi 8.13 cost? Absolutely nothing. Through a special arrangement between AlarmPoint and HP, customers with NNMi 8.13 can go to the following URL, register, download, and install AlarmPoint Express for free. Express will handle up to 10 users for notifications, and 2 users for the Mobile Gateway.

www.alarmpoint.com/freeexpress

Dear concerned Executives,
 
In the latest secret CXO newsletter and coupon book, many of you shared your fears about staying afloat in these trying times. I understand how you feel – the world can be a scary place when everyone starts hoarding their cash and snarling when you suggest you might like some of it.
 
More and more, it seems like the question of “will you give me a large sum of money for my product?” will be met with an unequivocal “no” and possibly some hysterical laughter.  I’m here to tell you that that’s a complete misconception.

The key to selling in this climate is to help enterprises become more agile and competitive by delivering real value to their business.  Isn’t that our job anyway?  Ah, a return to the renaissance of providing value.  Your customers, especially if you’re doing any business-to-business work, are looking to cut costs and probably reallocate staff.  When times are tough, they want to be tougher, leaner and faster. They’ll buy your product if you can understand their business and provide a real return on the investment of resources and risk.

The products I’m working on can do that: they make an organization more efficient and intentional.  Alert Management is often the missing link for businesses that want to do more with less. So to be successful in this economy, do what I do: find the place in your customer’s business that’s struggling and help them shore it up.  If someone finds a way to do that for my organization, I’ll buy their product in a heartbeat – it’s worth it to me to keep my business strong and efficient in the long run.

So that’s my advice, everyone.  Good luck, we’ll be stronger for it! 

Sincerely,
Troy