Fast Steps to Service Delivery Quality

It’s little wonder that delivering good service quality is a challenge. Tools are complex and reside in departmental silos, and networks are living organisms that change daily. That complicates problem resolution and propels organizations to try and master incident, problem, change, and configuration management via best practices such as ITIL.

It’s no secret that that’s a big undertaking, including building the configuration management database (CMDB) that’s at the heart of the job. There are plenty of vendors touting full-fledged CMDB offerings, including companies long known for their network and systems management solutions, such as BMC, IBM, HP and CA.

ScienceLogic says it's taking a different approach: helping organizations tackle key challenges around problem, incident, configuration and service level management in a more practical way, noting that many businesses don’t have a couple of years to spend breaking down silos to become more efficient at service delivery.

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Its product isn’t a direct competitor to the Big Four’s CMDB tools, but the company likes to think its EM7 IT Management System appliance will help businesses quickly (as in a matter of days) make a big dent in 80% of the service delivery problems besetting their day-to-day operations.

Whether it’s integrating the service desk to event management, or focusing on notification management to the console to give IT pros the views into events that relate to their job function, “those are the components of ITIL and CMDB that we focus on,” says president and CEO David Link.

The EM7 appliance enables companies to have both a single data store that captures all the required information that users will need to figure out root causes of problems, yet doles out particular slices of data only to the individual who needs it.

“There are some very practical ways to approach the problems and that’s where we get started, and hope the end result makes it a heck of a lot easier to get to the last 20%, which takes the longest,”Link says.

Secure Linux Kernel

The turnkey appliance, which provides a hardened OS on a secure Linux kernel, sits behind a company’s firewall. Companies kick off its use with a dynamic auto-discovery process that finds out what hardware is running across the network, and then proceeds to gather more intelligence about each piece, such as what software, services and processes it is running or what configurations are on the device.

“These are the things that cost IT time because they are often not automated or updated frequently or configured properly,” Link says.

The EM7 can also perform compares and create events when certain configuration aspects are changed. Every night it does a rediscovery, generally finding something that someone has installed on the network that, unknown and unaccounted for, might be the mystery cause of security breaches or other problems, he adds.