Verticals
Packages
|
Monolith Solutions for Enterprises
Monolith Software is targeted at organizations whose business success relies on their technology infrastructure being up, operational and performing at acceptable levels. If your organization has a NOC (Network Operations Center) or a 24x7 support organization, then Monolith is a fit for your business.
Most of the organization's that we work with are focused on providing high availability for their applications and IT infrastructures. This is often verbalized as trying to maintain a five 9's environment - 99.999%. This translates to a system being unavailable for less than about 5 minutes out of every year, a truly high standard. The challenge is IT Infrastructures are becoming increasingly complex.
Thus getting very high availability depends on many things:
|
Minimizing the number of failures, typically by eliminating the faults that cause them.
Quickly detecting and accurately diagnosing the failures that do occur.
Having spare capacity to allow recovery to be performed.
Having recovery actions that can be rapidly completed.
|
The challenge that enterprises face is that End-to-End Management is complex and spans across many different technology domains. Managing your IT System requires a lot of different moving parts. This requires many different specialized tools for the various technology disciplines within your infrastructure.
It is common to find different specialized tools in each of these different technology domains. More times than not there are multiple different tools used in each area when you consider fault, availability, performance and diagnostic tools that each domain typically utilizes.
When problems arise it is often extremely difficult to quick diagnose and remediate the issues. Each group uses it's separate tools. This requires looking at many different consoles and trying to manually correlate the root cause of the issue. This is time consuming and resource intensive.
Even more challenging is the integration complexity required with this approach. Each tool needs to be configured individually in order to support notifications and ticketing integration. This becomes highly unmanageable extremely quickly.
This current approach is an integration nightmare. There are way to many integration points to build and it is next to impossible to maintain. Equally frustrating is the lack of intelligent notifications. Most solutions can send out a page or email, but they do not differentiate between critical assets and less important ones. This results in the Chick Little Syndrome whereby people start ignoring the notifications because they are often found to be unimportant.
Monolith is finding that Enterprises are looking for a more intelligent solution. Each group or domain needs to be able to notify, escalate, open tickets and acknowledge issues based upon type of problem, resource availability, shifts, and on-call schedules. The key questions to ask are:
|
Where is the most logical place to build these key integration points?
How do you minimize the maintenance burden of keeping this up to date?
Where do you gain the most control and flexibility?
|
Through years of experience working in and consulting to NOCs Monolith has developed a solution that addresses these complexities. We have developed a three step process to help Enterprises tackle this challenging operational issue.
Step One - Consolidate Event Collection
The key foundation to addressing this challenge is one, centralized event engine. This provides one key integration point for notifications, escalations, ticketing integration, and CMDB / asset management integrations. In order to meet the needs or large organizations the event engine must:
|
Be highly scalable (10's to 100's of millions of events per day)
Be user friendly
Perform de-duplication and correlation
Have extensive filtering and searching capabilities
|
Step Two - Categorization is Key
The system needs to be flexible to meet the needs of different support structures within an organization. We often find that support structures vary per technology group within a company. The solution must be capable of support different support staff, policies, and escalation trees for each group (e.g. LAN/WAN, Servers, Storage, Apps).
Most often we find that vendors classify events based upon severity levels. This is not enough. We can take the same exact event, coming from two different devices that are the same exact type of device. The question is, should these two events be treated the same? The answer is, it depends. Suppose one of the devices is your production Ethernet switch supporting your core servers and the other is the same type of switch sitting in your lab. The system needs to be able to accommodate these types of situations. Most systems cannot support this simple concept.
Event classification and customizable filters are also critical. It is not enough to get all of the events into one system. The system needs to be able to be easily configurable to provide meaningful filtered displays. A support group that is only responsible for Linux servers should only presented with events from Linux servers. The group responsible for the WAN should not have to wade through all of the events to find the issues that they are responsible for.
Step Three - Operationalizing the System
The first step is getting all of the events into a common engine that can be used across the organization. The second step is being able to categorize and present all of the information coming into the system in a manner that supports the structure of your organization. The last step is being able to take this information The last step is taking this information and using it to streamline your operations and to drive efficiency into the problem resolution process. This has the benefit of reducing both Mean Time to Response and Mean Time to Resolution . key operational metrics used around the world.
This is accomplished by leveraging this centralized engine in a way that supports your organization. This is accomplished by providing:
|
Asset classification
Event typing
Escalation & notification
Centralized ticketing / service desk integration (bi-directional)
Automated actions and command execution
|
The Monolith Software's mSuite ITM solution addresses all three of these steps to create a system that is the centerpiece of your Operations Center. Enterprises have tried building custom integrations for years to achieve this objective. Monolith takes all of the time and labor associated with creating a system such as this and delivers it in a comprehensive solution set that can deliver value from Day One. Please feel free to contact us for a demonstration of our capabilities.
|
|
