Welcome to the Q2 edition of IT-Conductor's latest SOAP (Service Orchestration and Automation Platform) features. This edition showcases essential operational tools you can leverage for enhanced network monitoring and optimized shift scheduling. Gain real-time insights into the health and performance of your critical network components, ensuring smooth operations. Rediscover the power of the built-in shift scheduling tool, designed to streamline your team's workload management. We're confident these features will empower you to elevate your service management and operations.
1. Linux Network Interface Monitoring
IT-Conductor Linux Network Interface Monitoring provides real-time visibility into network interface status, errors, throughput, remote host ping statistics, and more. This empowers you to identify network issues without requiring a full-fledged network monitoring infrastructure. Proactive monitoring helps minimize network-related downtime and plays a vital role in identifying network performance degradation. This latest feature lets you monitor the network load for each LAN interface on your Linux servers. You can also access information on the packet count over each specific interface within a time interval, providing insights into the network load on a specific interface.
Network traffic metrics, including transmit and receive data for each interface, can be included in a daily server report delivered to network administrators. This report shows network utilization for each interface throughout the day at specified intervals, providing insights into time periods with traffic spikes.
Figure 1: Linux Host Monitoring
When you add your Linux host to IT-Conductor for monitoring, the basic network interface monitoring is activated out-of-the-box. By default, the Interface status, details, and IP addresses are pulled, while Status monitoring can be configured as required.
Figure 2: Network Interface Monitoring
There’s also provision for extended network interface monitoring via remote host ping monitoring. IT-Conductor can also collect network interface statistics and report on them as needed.
Figure 3: Remote Host Ping Monitoring
This feature also comes with a Packet Loss monitor, which aggregates all ping result records and alerts on each host with a loss value above the set threshold. Clicking on the datapoint (green circle on the chart line) shows the ping result records for the interval. The effective thresholds and alert preference can be adjusted as required, and the same approach is adopted for the Response Time monitors.
Figure 4: Packet Loss Monitoring
2. Shift/On-Call Scheduling
Last quarter, we introduced the Shift/On-call Scheduling feature, ensuring efficient rotation of engineers responsible for system maintenance and customer support. Following feedback from early customer usage, we're excited to highlight improved capabilities this quarter.
IT-Conductor Shift/On-call scheduling features include:
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Flexible shifts and rotations definitions:
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Multiple Shifts per organization
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Shifts support multiple Rotation schedules
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Custom on-call times for month and weekdays
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Integrated with Time-off schedules:
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Time-off requests and other calendar events are considered when scheduling on-call shifts.
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Fully integrated into IT-Conductor notification architecture:
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Use shifts transparently as notification targets in subscriptions, etc.
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Shifts can be used as recipients for reports and execution logs, whereby only the active person on-call would receive the notification.
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Figure 5: Shift Management
Shifts consider time zones and allow shift swaps to accommodate workers with impromptu emergencies or appointments.
On-Call Scheduling automatically assigns on-call duties to team members in a rotating fashion. This automated process reduces administrative burden and enables incident managers to allocate qualified resources to address customer issues promptly.
You can use your organization's calendar view to manage all scheduled events, including time off, scheduled maintenance activities, On-call assignments, etc. You also have the option to use your personal calendar to view your on-call assignments and other events. You can navigate the shift back and forth in time and access individual on-call assignments by clicking on the colored bars.
Figure 6: Organization Calendar View
Significance of On-Call Scheduling
IT organizations delivering critical, always-on infrastructure rely on groups of engineers in different time zones to serve as the first line of defense against outages and performance issues. These engineers typically follow a rotating schedule where each person serves as the primary contact during their business hours on specific days of the week. The size of the group and the IT environment determine the frequency of this rotation.
Implementing an on-call scheduling process is critical for ensuring round-the-clock customer support coverage and promptly attending to customer issues as they arise.
Benefits of On-Call Scheduling with IT-Conductor
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Enhanced team transparency fosters greater accountability
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Ease of setup and management
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Better service health awareness and prompt resolution of incidents
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Reliable 24/7/365 customer support
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Efficient use of on-call staff's time
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Simplified and automated shift process and administration
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Improved mean time to resolve (MTTR) customer issues
These benefits collectively lead to reduced service disruptions, reduced revenue loss, decreased customer churn, and improved service reliability.
News
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🎧 Listen on Youtube: Tekitok Podcast | Episode 19: A Deep Dive Into Azure's Zero Trust Security Model
🎧 Listen on Spotify: Tekitok Podcast | Episode 19: A Deep Dive Into Azure's Zero Trust Security Model
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🎧 Listen on Spotify: Tekitok Podcast | Episode 20: Exploring Azure's Zero Trust Security - Storage Encryption
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Our latest Tekitok podcast episode, recorded live at SAP Insider 2024, is now available! Join Linh for a conversation with Nitin Singh and Gerry McCool from SAP Signavio as they explore the exciting features and advancements of the Signavio platform and discover how business processes can empower companies and SAP users to drive business success.
Tune in now for valuable insights into the future of business processes and technology!
🎧 YouTube - Tekitok Podcast | Episode 18: SAP Signavio - A Conversation with Gerry McCool & Nitin Singh
🎧 Spotify - Tekitok Podcast | Episode 18: SAP Signavio - A Conversation with Gerry McCool & Nitin Singh
