When IT services are interrupted, IT Professionals are expected to take the necessary actions to restore services as quickly as possible. The cost of downtime can be directly linked to how long it takes to restore the services and time is money. However, a significant amount of time is spent:
Advanced 365 Monitoring delivers organisations extensible and scalable enterprise-class service monitoring and management by providing:
This combination of service elements improves the availability, manageability and scalability of customer IT environments whilst passing the responsibility for operating the monitoring environment to Advanced 365 via a single Service Level Agreement.
Advanced 365 Monitoring can be deployed on environments within the Advanced 365 data centre environment, on premise at a customer site, or on the Cloud for application management and reporting. The Advanced 365 core monitoring infrastructure is located within two Advanced 365 data centres in a geographically diverse configuration for maximum resilience. Where the solution is deployed as an on premise solution within a customer’s own data centre, local data collection appliances are located within the customer environment to allow secure connections into customer environments and to protect against connectivity failure.
Advanced 365 Monitoring has three options to allow customers to build a solution that meets their specific criteria from a set of pre-defined components. These three options are all available for customers either within the Advanced 365 data centre environment or on premise at the customer’s own data centre.
The Detect service is designed for organisations that simply want to be notified when elements in their environment breach a threshold or fail. This service will monitor an agreed number of devices and applications against pre-defined alert detection thresholds. Staff nominated to receive the alert will be informed via email or SMS. Historical reporting on the alerts generated is provided on a monthly basis.
The Detect and Respond service is designed for organisations who want alerts responded to and issues addressed within an agreed Service Level Agreement. We will respond to alerts and remediate any issues within the supported environment. Alerts can also be received by the customer as well for informational and tracking purposes.
We will respond to critical alerts against a response driven SLA and to informational alerts on a scheduled basis. The response SLA will be agreed with the customer when the service is initiated.
At the end of each month a report showing historical alerts and the responses will be produced and electronically delivered to the customer. These reports will be summarised and discussed with the customer at their periodic Service Delivery Reviews.
The Detect, Respond and Plan service is designed for organisations who not only wish to understand the direct cause of any alerts but to be able to review the underlying performance of their systems. This service provides customers with alert response as described in the Detect and Respond service but also provides for a more detailed analysis of the root cause of any incidents.
Detailed trending data will be extracted and reviewed by Advanced 365 and discussed with clients in a one day Quarterly Strategic Review Workshop. Typical subjects for discussion in such workshops are server consolidation, storage planning, network performance reviews and application performance reviews. These workshops allow customers to review the overall performance of their infrastructure and plan changes to allow them to extract maximum performance and value from their IT investment.
Workshops allow customers to review the overall performance of their infrastructure and plan changes to allow them to extract maximum performance and value from their IT investment.
Advanced 365 Monitoring retains all the gathered monitoring data within a Data Warehouse. The core environment also includes a dedicated Reporting Server that allows this data to be accessed and a wide variety of reports produced for customers. Reports can be produced on any of the information within the database, either as a standard report or as a custom report. Ad hoc user created reports can also be produced.
For the Detect and Detect and Respond offerings, we have created a number of standard reports that are available to customers on a self service basis via the web based Monitoring Portal. Customers are also provided with the ability to create their own reports through the portal as well.
The Detect, Respond and Plan offering contains a wider range of reporting, including trending analysis to allow customers to understand their current environment as well as obtaining valuable information of expected future performance of their environments. For customers using this service, the trending data is reviewed regularly by an Advanced 365 Technical Consultant and a commentary appended to the reports which forms the basis of the information discussed in the Quarterly Strategic Review Workshops.
The Advanced 365 Monitoring platform has been built on world class technology and deployed into our own resilient data centres, allowing us to offer our customers up to 99.999% availability SLAs for the service.
The core of the service is built on Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager (SCOM) which is used as the Manager of Managers into which carefully selected best of breed monitoring tools pass information through either XML or SNMP. The SCOM environment is fully clustered and operated on a highly resilient virtualised platform, allowing us to scale the underlying hardware independently of the service.
Data is collected through the SCOM environment and stored in a Microsoft SQL Server 2005 database which is configured in a high availability cluster. As with the SCOM environment, the SQL Server environment is built within a virtualised environment to allow software independent hardware scalability, thus allowing us to develop and expand the systems without any operational impact.
All the collected data is located on a world class Storage Area Network (SAN) which is also replicated between data centres to provide a highly available and resilient solution. The data and systems are all backed up using our own Managed Backup solution which allows any element of the system to be recovered rapidly from the disk based backup and restore environment.
The monitoring environment is fully managed, patched and virus protected at all levels.
When monitoring is undertaken On Premise at a customer site or via a Private Cloud hosted outside the Advanced 365 data centre, a local Gateway Server is deployed into the customer environment. This server performs the dual role of establishing a secure, certificate based connection into the customer’s operating environment and acting as a local cache for data collected during the monitoring activities. This approach allows us to connect into customer environments securely and gather monitoring information with minimal impact on customer production environments.
A Gateway Server is also deployed for each customer in the data centre to establish a secure, certificate based connection into the customer production environment.
For Public Cloud environments the monitoring infrastructure is directly linked to the applications and service provides an enterprise wide view of how these applications, such as CRM, document management and business intelligence, are performing and how that performance is affecting end-users. As a result, customers can quantify the effect of performance problems and any issues can be addressed to ensure business efficiency is maximised.
The Advanced 365 Monitoring environment itself is monitored by a secondary monitoring environment to ensure the health and efficiency of the core monitoring systems. This secondary monitoring environment is built on a separate hardware platform and operated independently of the core monitoring systems.
Within our data centre environment the monitoring service is deployed across our dedicated Management LAN which is fully secured from customer Production LANs. Connections from customer sites are connected into the Management LAN through perimeter firewalls to ensure data is as secure and protected as possible.
