Align Monitoring and ITSM Through Integration

The current infrastructure landscape

Modern DevOps is more complex to handle manually and therefore needs some automation. In a typical IT setup, you have multiple servers that run containerized applications. There are hundreds of different processes running on that same infrastructure, where everything is connected. Maintaining such infrastructure and making sure it runs smoothly, without system downtime, is quite challenging.

Imagine having such a complex infrastructure with lots of servers, distributed over many locations and you having no insights of what is happening on application level. There may be errors, incidents, system downtime without you even knowing. This is a typical case which some enterprises were facing. The more servers they have  the more complex it becomes to manage them.

Imagine you have a server, which ran out of memory. If there is a database connected to this server it cannot store any more information. If this database is in turn connected to another application, which is hosted on a different server this can also cause its downtime. It will be very hard to quickly identify these problems without having a monitoring solution in place. Luckily these have been around for quite some time now and most organizations have already adopted them.

Monitoring solutions such as Micro Focus, Dynatrace, Prometheus, SolarWinds and more, come to the rescue and help businesses manage their operations more effectively. However, having a monitoring solution in place is not the end of the story.

Why do you need to align Monitoring with IT Service Management?

Buying monitoring software doesn't solve the entire equation. When choosing your monitoring solution, you need to carefully consider whether it can be easily integrated with your ITSM one. Only when you connect these two you will be able to benefit from the full capabilities of both monitoring and ITSM.

Having Monitoring and ITSM is important but integrating them is crucial for your business operations and end-users.

We identified three direct benefits of integrating your Monitoring and IT Service Management software and in this article, we will quickly go through them.

#1. Having full visibility over your operations in real-time

In a perfect world your applications will work flawlessly, without causing system downtime. In reality however, this is rarely possible. Infrastructure engineers and IT system administrators share a common goal  keep systems running and solve incidents and problems as quickly as possible. Another objective, which may be less important to some, but shouldn't be neglected is having everything documented.

Imagine your monitoring solution detects an incident in one of your servers (system downtime, lack of memory etc.). Having an integration between monitoring and ITSM will enable you to synchronize all information between the two systems in real-time. This way your service desk staff will be aware of the problem and will know how to respond to customer inquiries in a more relevant manner. If your ITSM team isnt aware of this, they will need to contact the monitoring team and find out what is going on, prior responding to users questions. This is a rather heavy and slow process, prone to lots of human errors. Connecting Monitoring and ITSM will not only make your cross-team collaboration better, but also keep end-users well-informed.

Another scenario worth mentioning is having access to historical data from your systems performance. If you want to have a reliable full overview on your infrastructure and operations  you need information from both monitoring and ITSM. This way you will have information about how many tickets were open due to system errors and how long did it take to close them. You will also be able to spot repeating issues, which may need more attention. Having data from monitoring directly correlated to ITSM makes reports easier to understand and managers more able to track system operations.

#2. Fewer system downtime & better team collaboration

When you keep track of tickets, which arrive as a result of server failures, the DevOps teams will have a better overview on what crashes regularly and pay more attention when fixing such issues to avoid their frequent occurrence. This will not only decrease the number of issues and incidents, but also drastically shorten your potential system downtime.

Another great benefit of integrating Monitoring and ITSM is enhancing cross-team collaboration. Instead of people from different teams, locations and countries syncing information over email, chat or phone, the information (assignee, comments, attachments and more custom fields) can be directly transferred between systems in real-time. This way it would be a lot easier to check on what is causing the issue and how severe is the problem.

#3. Going one step further  integrating Monitoring  ITSM and DevOps

The key to having a well-functioning and aligned IT ecosystem is synchronizing all data between systems in real-time. This way you can have an accurate real-time overview of your system performance. Connecting your Monitoring and ITSM is a good start, but if you want to be one step ahead you can sync Monitoring, ITSM and DevOps.

This way you will close the entire chain and make sure your teams are in full alignment. When your monitoring tool detects a server issue, the ITSM system receives a ticket which is automatically transferred to your DevOps team. Once the software engineers resolve the problem, the ITSM ticket is closed and your Monitoring people are aware of this.

This type of multisystem integration will make IT Operations smoother, enable you to accelerate your business quickly and keep end-users happy. It is definitely worth the shot.

Looking forward

The world of IT is one of the most dynamic ones. In order to keep up with its growth and respond with innovations, you need to automate repetitive tasks and focus on expanding your portfolio of solutions or services. Smart automation is not a new trend, yet many companies often neglect its potential and tend to overlook how it can optimize their operations.

ZigiOps was created to solve the operational inefficiency question by enabling both technical and non-technical people to connect their systems in less than 5 minutes. ZigiOps offers infinite opportunities for customizations of your integrations. Our product resolves all customer use cases to help companies enhance their operations.