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Originally published at Internet.com 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.
According to ScienceLogic, the appliance can receive information from multiple types of data sources, and distribute the collected information it builds into its version of a data store out to external sources via XML or other connectors for federation to other systems. While the company says its product integrates with existing point and framework solutions, it also says that it often winds up replacing a handful of point solutions in most of its installations.
By the end of March ScienceLogic expects to make generally available the next version of the EM7. Version 4.2 will extend the solution to capture very specific information from any database, Link says. It will operate in an agentless fashion to speed deployment, and enable organizations to build dashboard and granular views of operations for executives who want to know what's happening to the databases behind their back-office and other critical applications.
"This is not just about availability and performance, but esoteric ideas like grabbing a file or record within a field of a table, pulling it into EM7 and populating a set of events, alarms and alerts," says Link. "This is truly a federated model of a CMDB where you get information from third-party sources and pull it back to a central repository."
Today, for example, Microsoft enables businesses to query a SQL database to find out how much total table space is available and how much is used, but it doesn't specify the percentage of table space available, which is a key data point for avoiding a failure that disrupts services.
With the new feature in EM7, organizations can take existing values, and perform arithmetic calculations against them to create new, graphable values that they can alarm against, or describe however they wish.
Says Link, "We can calculate values based on raw data from the manufacturer that sometimes doesn't make intuitive sense and present it in a way that is most useful to the customers."
Author: Jennifer Zaino
Read article at Internet.com site