Service Management

Is Your IT Environment Healthy?

by Kip Ng

Operating an IT system nowadays is a no doubt daunting task. As a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer (PFE), I have the honor of working with different customers of different sizes in different industries. I fully understand how overwhelming things can get. What I find it interesting is that while many companies are working towards adhering [...]

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Extending the Cross Platform Monitoring Agent in Operations Manager 2007 R2

by Neil Harrison

When System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 (OpsMgr) was released, one of the most interesting new features was the addition of Cross Platform monitoring or, in other words, Unix/Linux monitoring. Having been involved with Enterprise monitoring for almost a decade now I was really intrigued by what OpsMgr could do in this area. It turns [...]

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6 Steps For Managing Risk in IT Operations

by Mark Farrugia

BusinessDictionary.com defines Managed Risk as the following: Identified probability of loss, or exposure to a danger, that has been minimized to an acceptable level through careful planning and implementation of effective countermeasures. What Exactly Does That Mean? We all manage risk everyday through our everyday actions. For example, when walking down a staircase, most people [...]

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IT Configuration Monitoring: What is it, and why do we need it?

by Kip Ng

Most companies today have some form of monitoring mechanism implemented to monitor different components of their IT system. There are various monitoring solutions out there. Some are more sophisticated than others, and, in general, there are different levels of monitoring available. I personally categorize most monitoring needs into the following five areas: Of course, I [...]

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How To Build A Simple and Efficient Windows Monitoring Solution (DTW)

by Samuel Drey

In this article, I’ll provide a quick reference guide and an Excel-based tool that allows you to build monitoring consoles using HTML without being a scripting star.  I call it the Document-Tool-Walkthrough (DTW). This is a new concept document/tool built using Excel that can help you to build System Monitor consoles that are centrally stored [...]

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Visualizing Your IT Environment Using Technical Service Maps

by Kip Ng

One of the key factors for successful operations is monitoring. The most common questions I get when helping customers plan their monitoring needs are: "How do I know what to monitor?" and "How do I know my system is healthy?" Yes, two very simple questions but not always easy to answer, and if you can’t [...]

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Documentation: Yes, I know it’s a pain, but it’s needed.

by Kip Ng

As a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer (PFE), one of our primarily roles is to perform risk assessments on client IT environments. Of course, we always have very well defined scope as in which Microsoft product that we are reviewing. One of the major issues that always come up from these reviews is the lack of [...]

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Release Management. Don’t just throw it over the fence!

by Suzanne Battiston

If you’re in IT operations, you’ve most likely experienced the following situation: a large scale integration project with several developers, business analysts, testers, UAT leads, project managers, program managers, executive steering committees…….but wait, where’s operations? A month before the project goes into production; they come to operations to involve you in learning about and implementing [...]

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IT Operations: Technology Is Not The Sole Answer

by Kip Ng

Most people in IT have a strong tendency to resolve a problem with technology or introducing more technologies into a solution. I‘m guilty on this count too. Well, you know what? Technology is not always the answer. 3 key elements to successful IT operations are People, Process and Technology. Believe it or not, most companies [...]

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IT Operations: The Reasons Why You Don’t Want To Be Unique

by Kip Ng

In today’s world, we are brought up in a society where we are taught to be first, to be different and to be competitive. We are frequently being urged to be unique in order to stand out among the crowd. There is no doubt that an element of uniqueness is essential in many different areas [...]

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How a Simple IT Operations Checklist Can Prevent a Load of Grief

by Kip Ng

6:05 p.m.: I was called and informed that the system had gone down. I rushed back to the office. 7:10 p.m.: I arrived and found that the drive containing the database had failed. How could it be? It was running on RAID-5. Well, let’s figure that out later and let’s fix the problem first. 7:30 [...]

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7 Steps to Evolve Your IT Organization from Being Reactive to Proactive

by Adis Tucakovic

Most IT organizations realize that yesterday’s potential issues are today’s actual problems; in turn, management and operations teams are constantly consumed fighting problems today because they did not avert yesterday’s issues and are consumed with the low-value work of reactively addressing problems instead of proactively addressing issues.  A reactive organization needs to look at what [...]

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Why Smart IT Organizations Use Performance Baselines

by Kip Ng

This is one of those topics (like “Do you have a well-tested Disaster Recovery plan?”) that many of you may look at it and say “yes, yes, I know we need it”.   Let me give you some of the answers I got from some of my customers when I asked them if they have a [...]

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