{"id":4113,"date":"2015-06-09T17:13:00","date_gmt":"2015-06-09T15:13:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2016-12-09T16:22:28","modified_gmt":"2016-12-09T15:22:28","slug":"getting-microsoft-system-center-fit-for-247-it-operations-with-on-call-teams-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.derdack.com\/de\/getting-microsoft-system-center-fit-for-247-it-operations-with-on-call-teams-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting Microsoft System Center fit for 24\/7 IT operations with on-call teams"},"content":{"rendered":"

Are you looking at cutting costs by moving from a 24\/7 staffed NOC to working with on-call teams? Are you in need of reliably alerting your people after business hours and on public holiday? If you have already on-call teams – are your people receiving too many alerts at night? Or are they in danger of sleeping through critical alerts?<\/em><\/p>\n

Typical 24\/7 operations create very specific demands. In the 9×5 office hours everybody has access to the computer console and everybody has access to a service manager portal. Email might be a sufficient notification tool. But when you’re at home or on call, e.g. at the supermarket, is a completely different situation. You can\u2019t just open your notebook at the yogurt shelf.<\/p>\n

Get rid of your NOC!<\/strong>
\nThere’s a general trend that companies move away from 24\/7 staffing of network operations center onto a 9 by 5 regime plus on call duties because it’s a loss it’s a lot cheaper.\u00a0 And of course, it is less painful for their staff. At least they can sleep in their bed until something serious happens instead of sitting at the NOC, getting bored while waiting for red dots blinking.<\/p>\n

Still, being on call is a job nobody likes. And people on duty need to respond ASAP to any critical incident regardless of their week-end plans.<\/p>\n

What on-call team operations involve<\/strong>
\nRelated to this come very specific needs. The first is planning. Many companies plan on-call duties using Microsoft Excel or some kind of standalone planning tool, maybe an ERP system. But in order to automate on-call alert notifications you need have a notification system with access to on-call planning information. It needs to know who is on call when something happens so it can deliver the alert messages to the right person or team. And planning has to be convenient, ideally it takes a couple of minutes to plan a month. Secondly, you need 100% reliable notifications because nobody is at the NOC or in your datacenter anymore. The on-call person needs to wake up!\u00a0 And reliability needs to go beyond making sure that a text message is received on the phone. It is about ensuring a response. From the on call person perspective it’s also much about cutting through the noise. As a person on duty, you don’t want those minor alerts from SCOM to wake you up nor do you want to receive them 100 times in a row. Even if a major incident happens you don’t want to get one hundred phone calls or text messages telling you about all affected systems. And finally, an on-call person should be able to act and remedy a problem without console access, e.g. by just a few taps on a smartphone screen. These are just a few needs that are relevant in relation to on-call duties.<\/p>\n

Now, this is for System Center<\/strong>
\nThis is the area where Enterprise Alert\u00ae perfectly complements Microsoft System Center as an advanced out-of-the box solution. As an example – best practice for waking people up at night or getting someone\u2019s attention at the supermarket is a combination of text and repetitive voice calls. Enterprise Alert\u00ae can combine a multitude of notification channels (broadcast or sequence) and it not only tracks delivery of alerts but also makes sure somebody acknowledges, e.g. by texting back or using the mobile app. If critical alerts are missed, Enterprise Alert\u00ae automatically escalates to an on-call backup person, through the entire team or up to a manager on duty. At the same time, team manager can always use the app to see what\u2019s going on in their service teams.
\nBecause of the advanced and unique 2-way integration with System Center all alert acknowledgements, status changes and annotations will always be synchronized across the entire stack, from the mobile app over Enterprise Alert to Operations Manager or Service Manager. In a typical SCOM alerting scenario, Enterprise Alert\u00ae will also delay alert notifications and wait for auto-recovery. And it will filter for duplicates or similar alerts. A highly powerful extension that Enterprise Alert\u00ae provides are \u201canywhere\u201d actions that put SCO runbooks directly on your smartphone. This turns your mobile device into anywhere troubleshooting tool.<\/p>\n

In a nutshell, Enterprise Alert\u00ae provides the following range of features to System Center:<\/p>\n