IT Asset Management Tools are a must!
Incidents in your IT environment happen every day. Some are minor issues impacting a single user or a small group while larger incidents can impact an entire business function or your entire company. The goal of your Incident Management processes is to minimize the impact of the event on your users and your company – restoring normal activities as quickly as possible. IT Asset Management Tools and Visualization capabilities can be a powerful tool to help your IT Service Management teams accomplish this goal.
Imagine if your IT environment were a highway system – an interconnected set of pathways, intersections and destinations on which and to which people are traveling. Each user request or transactions is like a vehicle traveling a highway system.
When the system is working well, traffic flows smoothly and users are able to be productive and have a positive IT experience. When an event occurs, however, that causes a disruption in part of the system, users can become frustrated. This is the result of an IT incident. IT Asset Management Tools are key to your IT health and ecosystem.
It’s essentially immaterial whether the incident occurs in a part of your network that is a route on the highway, servers that provide content or linkages to resources or application incidents – what users know is that they can’t “travel” to their destination and their productivity is impacted.
If it is a busy time of the day for your business, then entire groups of business users, suppliers and/or customers could be impacted. The challenge for your IT Service Management (ITSM) staff is to determine how to resolve the incident, but also keep the users informed and as productive as possible while the technical issue is being addressed.
Infrastructure visualization capabilities, such as those in Virima, can benefit your IT service management staff in many ways by transforming your Configuration Management Database (CMDB) and monitoring data into easy-to-understand infrastructure maps.
When an event occurs that causes an incident, staff members are able to see where the component is having difficulty and the component’s connections with the broader IT ecosystem. This visibility enables incident managers to identify the location of the problem and who/what is affected.
This information can be very helpful to assess impacts of the issue, determine a course of action and how to prevent similar issues during the future. In some cases, this information can be leveraged to find alternate resources and direct users there and mitigate the business impact of the incident.
Without visualization, your ITSM staff members would find themselves in a similar situation to commuters stuck in traffic without a navigation app. They would have to rely on experience and guessing to determine what resources connect users to their destinations and the extent of the backup the incident created. That doesn’t seem very efficient (it isn’t) and neither company leaders nor your users would be happy knowing that the IT experts on which they rely to maintain systems are making guesses in the dark.
Thankfully, we don’t live in a time when trial and error is the only option – we live in a time when IT Asset Management Tools and visualization capabilities, such as those from Virima, are available to help ensure your IT staff can see what is occurring, assess the impacts of issues effectively and keep your business up and running.
To learn more about IT Asset Management Tools and the visualization capabilities of Virima and how it can help transform cryptic IT configuration data into valuable insights for your IT staff, visit www.virima.com.
