BSM Views

70 percent of incidents are reported by users before IT knows what’s going on. It doesn’t have to be this way. Organizations are often plagued with multiple monitoring systems generating too many events, and too much noise to deal with effectively.  Critical events get missed in the mess, and don’t recieve the priority they deserve. Recently I came across a great demonstration of getting proactive with infrastructure events. On BMC TV, check out the Service Assurance Demo with Ron Coleman.  This is a tight, well organized demo that shows how to get effective and automated with infrastructure issues for fast effective response.

Some of the organizations I work with, when asked about Service Level Management often give one of two answers 1) We will get to it after Incident, Change and Problem, or 2) We need to map out the process before trying any service level management out.   In a nut shell, it is something they are putting off and in some cases don’t really want to get involved in.   Service Level Management does not have to be this way.

ITIL says that Service Level Management is an ongoing process where companies should get their feet wet in a controlled fashion, not wait a complete process to be developed.   With Service Level Management, this approach can be easily taken, building metrics, base lining operations to understand operations, and then eventually implementing OLA/SLA’s and notification/escalation workflow to proactively manage operations. Create shadow SLA’s, with escalations and notifications that get sent to a default destination email address like slm@company.com. These notifications and escalations get corralled, but still provide a good view into how the support team is performing relative to the test SLAs set.