IT service management is an essential today when most enterprises and small businesses are looking at providing timely deliverables to clients in diverse areas and industries. For most businesses, IT services management is synonymous with customer service and hence, a trouble point. However, it need not be that way. IT services, when managed efficiently, allow for better service delivery as well as reliable processes and operations.
IT service management implementation also helps streamline your IT functions such that processes are better optimized and more value-for-money.
Benefits of IT service management: There are several measurable benefits to deploying IT services within your business, including adding to the profitability of your business.
- Measurably reduce costs involved in running and maintaining your IT services and optimize existing resources through systematic streamlining
- Align your IT services with business needs and expectations with the help of management best practices
- Improve and add to the overall value proposition of your business towards your customer
- Improve overall business productivity through aligned goals and better understanding, company-wide
The future
If you are an enterprise or a small business currently, understand that this will not remain the case forever. In fact, most small businesses grow at a fast pace and may outpace the forecasts made in the beginning. IT services management can help you provide better services through better understanding of infrastructural capabilities and customer expectation and needs. Your IT services management can create strong foundation on which your business growth needs can continue to be met, regardless of changes in size of the business. Better still, it will allow your platforms to be ready for surges in growth without slacking either in client deliverables or customer services.
You use a lot of different web apps, so your system would need different monitoring tool to do justice to each of the apps. Right? Wrong. A single tool can do a good job of monitoring your system just as well, if it is designed effectively.
How do you define a single and yet effective monitoring tool for all the apps within your system?
Monitoring tools should be able to provide you with information in a form that is easy to understand; they should provide information about the performance of your systems and raise flags, if needed.
Monitoring simplified: Your system monitoring tool should not be too complex to deploy. It should combine ease of use and simplicity along with the ability to monitor key areas within the system. Ease of use together with ease of visibility when reading reports can be a vital factor in the efficacy of your monitoring tool. Reports can be in the form of graphs denoting statistics; for elements like transactions within a given time frame, percentages and graphs can provide data quickly and in a form that is easy to read. Remember, system monitoring can include both, overall performance reports and deeper, detailed reports.
Ease of access: System monitoring tools that come with customized dashboards or access can help you set performance metrics and customize the tool to meet your needs. Ideally, you should also be able to see various components within your application and how they interact with each other.
This is better managed without the use of complicated codes or interfaces. Choose a monitoring tool that allows you a simple interface as well as set monitoring parameters for your system.
Follow key actions, business transactions, SLA compliance: Your monitoring tool must track and report on the key transactions and adherence to SLA, apart from monitoring the entire system. This can raise alerts at the right time, without allowing the user experience to be disrupted.
Application performance could be gauged in terms of its ease of use, and the user experience affords. However, there are other components within performance of an application that may be more preferred above others.
Application performance needs to be studied in context of the transaction that the application is being used for. Performance can be outlined in terms of business requirement. These can include essentials such as number of users expected, response time, end-user experience, working together with other applications, etc.
Designed for the Cloud
Most small businesses are turning to the Cloud for the advantages it offers. You may need to ensure that your application performance will not be affected by working in the Cloud. Cloud apps need different infrastructure and you may need to check whether it is in place or not; pay special attention to tier dependencies in the case of complex apps.
Check infrastructure and application interplay
The performance of your application is dependent on both, the platform it runs on, as well as the infrastructure supporting the platform. If you want optimum performance, you must not forget storage capacity; without adequate storage, it is nearly impossible to have an application performing at its peak.
End-user experience
For applications involved in active transactions, it is worthwhile to check out the end-user experience as well. Applications designed around the transaction they are supposed to carry out, have a better chance of delivering on expectation regarding performance. This is especially true in the face of new technologies that are constantly emerging.
Application performance monitoring is done as much to ensure optimal performance, as to ensure service assurance. At a time when customers take to social media to air grievances, ensuring application performance is critical for businesses. Fortunately, timely monitoring can help ensure optimal application performance.
Several elements form the basis for successful application performance, especially in customer-centric businesses.
- Effective operations, keeping in mind the customer experience
- Effective management of the customer experience of the application and its performance
- Timely troubleshooting as and when needed
- Simplify your own IT management and help you streamline the function, with the least amount of hassles and low costs
How well your applications perform, and what is their contribution to the user experience will play a huge role in determining the trust your customers place in your business. Thus, application performance automatically impacts business and profitability.
How to ensure service assurance?
Choosing a performance monitoring tool for your applications can be one of the first steps. Comprehensive and real-time monitoring could help you keep track of the way in which your applications are performing. Monitor and watch out for the following factors:
- Complexity: Too much complexity can be troublesome. However, in case it cannot be helped, your monitoring tool needs to be able to cut through all of it to be able to review comprehensively and also spot hidden issues
- Reporting: To be totally effective, monitoring tools need to be able to spot the issue, analyze it, and be able to report on it. The reporting should be timely; it needs you to be able to resolve it and firefight, if needed
- A comprehensive monitoring tool will allow you adequate time to resolve the problem before it reaches shut-down stage
Transaction monitoring takes importance in the face of compliance with service terms and business delivery matters. Without timely tracking, it is difficult to gauge whether transactions are meeting business needs or not. Depending on the application, transaction monitoring could be closely tied-in with end-user expectations and ultimately, customer loyalty.
How does regular transaction monitoring help?
Ideally, transaction monitoring should be comprehensive, covering all aspects of application function and operations. When done proactively, transaction monitoring allows for several advantages including:
- Discovering issues related to transactions before they snowball into major problems
- Being able to raise alarms and alerts effectively, pointing to the cause of the issue, so it can be nailed effectively
- Depending on your application and if you choose a comprehensive transaction monitoring tool, it can review transactions across your entire IT infrastructure
- Transaction monitoring can also help pinpoint problem to the exact technical level where they are appearing
- You can also configure your monitoring tool to provide you with specific information; this can be facilitated with the help of a dashboard
Benefits of regular transaction monitoring
- Improves real time experience and availability- preventz accidents and unexpected problems and outages
- Increases detection of unaccounted for or 'missing' transactions
- Improves time taken in resolving issues
- Ensures compliance with defined terms and conditions
- Reduces costs measurably; through timely detection of problems
If your business is associated with finance, you must have transaction monitoring in place to prevent crimes and fraud. Regular transaction monitoring can also become part of your risk management solutions.
