Proactive IT environment monitoring is essential in an online world where business success is equal to system uptime. Proactive monitoring means improved availability.

Organisations need to monitor their IT environments to ensure they are running optimally and identify any issues which could cause a failure down the line. In addition, IT environment health monitoring gives organisations the peace of mind they are providing an efficient and consistent service to their end users.

Total visibility of all interdependent systems is vital

In any IT environment problems which may cause service interruption are not immediately visible and tend to build up over a period of time.

Having total visibility of IT infrastructure services and their interdependencies is paramount in preventing issues and helps organisations make informed decisions about their IT environment.

Monitoring helps gather data and set performance benchmarks

IT infrastructure monitoring is not the only key to ensuring proactive alerting of negative incidents. Monitoring and gathering performance data over time is a key input into shaping IT strategy. As technology changes and business needs evolve monitoring IT infrastructure enables organisations to benchmark their IT systems performance and then use this information to plan for upgrades, enhancements and migrations.

Proactive analysis of IT system means organisations have a better chance of preventing major disruptions. Regular health checks on infrastructure and alerts which indicate where certain measurements are deviating from historical benchmarks can identify any discrepancies within systems and assist in proactively rectifying issues before they negatively impact business operations. The key outcome of proactive monitoring is the focus and effort of IT operations have shifted from fighting fires to preventing outages.

IT monitoring can also aid organisations in fine-tuning their infrastructure to ensure peak performance and efficiency is achieved. Close monitoring can highlight how systems interact and proactively identify any areas that are vulnerable or underperforming. By identifying bottlenecks and potential areas of danger, organisations can then use this information to enhance their services and prevent any system outages.

Monitoring is not an IT activity, it’s a business tool

Effective IT infrastructure monitoring enables data driven decision making, identifies issues early, improves the productivity and performance of IT systems, helps organisations plan for growth and ultimately helps prevent or reduce the negative effects of system downtime.

Zettagrid monitoring delivers insights

Zettagrid gives customers access to real-time monitoring of their entire environment through their status page. This service also gives customers the option to subscribe to updates which proactively alerts them should any incident occur which may have an impact on their environment.

The Zettagrid real-time status reports give customers a view of the current state of the primary Zettagrid services such as the operations centre, internet transit and DNS status. In addition, this dashboard also monitors the principal services at each of the Zettagrid locations in Australia and Jakarta.

Scheduled maintenance notices give customers prior notice to any maintenance being done on the Zettagrid platform which may affect their running services and real-time system metrics provide insight into the current bandwidth network utilisation.

Zettagrid also posts past incidents on their status page which give details into incidents which have affected the Zettagrid platform and how these were resolved, giving their customers full transparency into the environment running their critical IT services.

Real-time monitoring and historical metrics, 24/7

Customers are also able to monitor the real-time metrics of their Zettagrid services via the Zettagrid self-service portal.

Real-time and historical metrics are available at any time, so customers can monitor the performance of their virtual machines.

Ready to get your finger on the pulse with real-time monitoring?

Contact us to discuss how real-time monitoring metrics can improve your business decision making.

We’re happy to help.

*This article originally taken from blog.zettagrid.com

As mobile technologies advance in the workplace, how will the employee experience evolve—and IT along with it?

Noah Wasmer, Senior Vice President and Co-General Manager, VMware End-User Computing

For years, I’ve said the future of mobility will be the reason people love their work again.

There are parts of work people love—and parts of our work they hate. I believe technology advances will dramatically simplify processes and streamline day-to-day tasks—the dull work. These innovations will help eliminate mundane tasks, such as expense reports and meeting invites. This will enable employees to fast-forward to more important, challenging and rewarding work—the deep work.

I also see technology enriching the work employees love. Work apps are becoming more like their personal apps with intuitive, ergonomic experiences. As companies adopt modern app experiences, employees can work anytime, anywhere and on any device—taking advantage of their most productive, creative moments.

This is our mission at VMware. We focus on helping employees connect and share information in more efficient and intelligent ways, such as:

• A car insurance adjuster who instantly uploads photos with an easy-to-use mobile app, instead of filling out paperwork on a laptop.
• A doctor who immediately accesses patient data by securely accessing a virtual workstation on any computer or mobile device.
• A saleswoman who receives a client email and automatically receives insights from her customer relationship management (CRM) software.
• A manufacturing employee who works hands-free using augmented reality (AR), instead of stopping work to review how-to instructions.

These positive employee experiences result in major benefits to customers, as well. Consider:

• The driver from that accident can repair their car faster because the insurance company provided near-instant mobile coverage details.
• The patient feels less rushed and more cared for by their doctor, who spends less time behind a computer screen.
• The prospective customer receives a prompt, personalized reply about the right solution for their needs.
• The consumer purchases a well-made product from the manufacturer at a more competitive price, because of the more efficient AR-enabled production workflow.

As employees enjoy new and more meaningful work, customers also enjoy new and more meaningful experiences with businesses. Just look at what’s happening at ANZ Bank, Mercy and Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

Evolving to a Culture of Trust and Empowerment

For some organizations, the company-wide commitment to putting employees first begins with onboarding and continues all the way through retirement. These initiatives force IT to evolve from a culture of command and control to a culture of employee trust and empowerment.

For example, we’re seeing the importance of choice in attracting and retaining top employee talent. Increasingly, before a new hire even steps foot in the office, businesses ask employees which tools and apps they want and need to be most successful. Some new employee agreements now include device and app preferences. These tools are delivered to their homes, helping employees be productive on day one.

This is tremendous progress for organizations. Yet, it’s more than just automating paper-based processes or streamlining onboarding. Building a culture of trust and empowerment changes the way everyone works. It connects people to the right apps, backend systems and digital resources when needed the most. Ultimately, this helps employees focus on what they do best—and the work they love the most.

What’s Next for Mobility and the Employee Experience

The race to gain and maintain a competitive edge drives some companies to evolve faster than others in the name of innovation. However, organizations that ignore employee preferences will fall behind those that listen to and empower their employees.

Work seems, well, less like work without all the friction. Mobility helps employees work smarter with access to the tools and data they need, when and where they need it. That’s both personally and professionally fulfilling. When everyday tasks get done faster, there’s time to work on solving harder, more complex problems. That truly helps employees enjoy what they do.

As a result, companies reach new levels of success, as my colleague Shankar Iyer explains here. Shankar and I talked more about delivering what employees want and need during VMworld. Watch our on-demand showcase keynote now, and follow the #VMworld conversation online, to hear about our platform approach to employee empowerment, along with human-centered design.

Sources: VMware/Radius

Need Cloud Computing? Do not hesitate to contact us at sales@zettagrid.id or call to +62 811 28 38 78

When it comes to creating disaster recovery (DR) plans, Veeam Availability Orchestrator makes it easy to ensure your data is available when disaster strikes. Beyond creating what we call a Failover Plan in Veeam Availability Orchestrator, we also ensure that our DR plans are tested successfully on a regular basis, with the documentation to prove it. This documentation can also be used for compliance, auditing, and ensuring members of an organization know the state of the DR plan at all times.

You may be asking yourself, “What is a Failover Plan?” after reading the first paragraph of this post. Don’t worry, we are about to explore what they are, as well as other terms we commonly use when talking about Veeam Availability Orchestrator.

A Failover Plan is what is created in Veeam Availability Orchestrator to protect applications. The Failover Plan is central to an organization’s DR plan. The goal of the Failover Plan is to make failovers (and fail backs) as simple as possible. Within a Failover Plan, there are a number of Plan Components, which are added to the Failover Plan to meet the business’ requirements.

VM Groups contain the virtual machines (VMs) we are ensuring Hyper-Availability for in the event of a disaster. The VM Groups are powered by VMware vSphere Tags. VMs are simply tagged in vCenter, and the vSphere Tag name will appear in Veeam Availability Orchestrator as shown in the screenshot above. Plan Steps are the steps taken on the VMs during a failover. This includes a number of Application Verification steps available out of the box including verification of applications such as Exchange, SQL, IIS, Domain Controllers, and DNS. Credentials for verifying the applications are also one of the plan components. In addition to these built in application verification tests, Custom Steps can also be added to the Plan Components, allowing organizations to leverage already existing DR scripts.

Template Jobs ensure data is backed up and kept available during a failover scenario. They are created in Veeam Backup & Replication and then added to a Failover Plan during creation. Another big component of a Failover Plan is a Virtual Lab, which we refer to as a Veeam Data Lab. Veeam Data Labs allow for an isolated copy of a production application to be created and tested against. When we are finished using this copy of the data, we simply delete it without ever having impacted or changed our actual production data. This allows for Virtual Lab Tests to be performed to prove recoverability, and the corresponding Test Execution Report to be generated.

We all know how difficult testing DR plans used to be. We would spend a few days locked in the data center, without even getting the applications running correctly. We would say it would get fixed “next time,” but we all know the truth was often that these broken DR plans were never fixed. Veeam Availability Orchestrator removes this overhead, and allows for quick and easy testing without impacting production. In the event a test fails, the Test Execution Report shows us exactly what went wrong so we can fix it.

Before we run a Virtual Lab Test, we first run a Readiness Check on our Failover Plan, and yes, this also comes with a Readiness Check Report so we can easily see the state of our DR plan. This is a lightweight test that is performed to ensure we are ready to failover at a moment’s notice. Best of all, this check can be scheduled to run daily, along with a Plan Definition Report. The Plan Definition Report shows us exactly what is in a Failover Plan, including the VMs in a VM Group and all of our Plan Steps. This report also shows any changes so we have a full audit trail of our DR plan.

As you can tell by this image, our Failover Plans are ready in the event of a failover. They are listed as a “verified” state which means we have successfully run a Virtual Lab Test and a Readiness Check, both of which can be scheduled to run as often as we would like. We can also ensure reports are sent to key stakeholders when the checks are run.

In the event of a failover, which we can trigger on demand or schedule, an Execution Report will be generated. This will detail the steps taken as part of the Failover Plan on the VMs in a VM Group, and show that the application has been successfully verified and is running in the DR site. We know the execution of a Failover Plan will be successful since we have already tested it successfully.

Sources: Veeam Blog

Need disaster recovery? Do not hesitate to contact us at sales@zettagrid.id or call to +62 811 28 38 78

For CIOs just starting a journey to the cloud, here’s where the technology’s impact immediately shines.

Anyone who has ever doubted IT’s significant impact on a company’s top line hasn’t considered how much can go wrong during the delivery of digital products, services and experiences to customers. Across industries, that final, critical moment when customers decide whether to spend their money or time on a company could be determined by the availability and performance of a website or app.

Companies must be where customers are—digital mediums—to market, sell and build loyalty, but tech companies aren’t the only ones depending on the internet to also deliver the goods. The transactional, purchasing phase of the customer’s journey now occurs digitally even in industries that existed before the internet, like entertainment. People watch live events, follow their favorite TV shows and hear the newest songs not only on televisions and radios but also on web portals and mobile apps.

That’s a huge, expanding responsibility for IT. The shift also presents opportunities for CIOs to prove and add value to their company’s top line. Corporate websites, microsites and mobile apps are often customers’ first or final impression of a brand, as well as tools for acquiring heaps of valuable customer data.

To guarantee availability and improve the performance of these key digital destinations, many CIOs turn to the cloud.

Common Cloud Use Cases: Website Availability

Websites, and all the supporting applications, are often one of the first use cases companies try out for cloud computing. Years ago, it was reported that so many websites already depended on Amazon’s cloud that the company could be considered “a core piece of the internet.”

After all, the benefits of cloud computing lend quite well to the needs of websites, such as:

• High Availability & Disaster Recovery:Failure is not an option when it comes to website availability. Leading cloud providers offer and manage configurations that ensure the servers running websites never quit and are always up-to-date.
• Scalability:The sharp fluctuations in traffic that websites experience can impact performance and availability. IT can access on-demand resources from the cloud to keep sites afloat during unexpected peak traffic.
• Developer Enablement:IT can’t just run websites. They also need to build new features that keep up with customer preferences. Developers can easily replicate web environments in the cloud for testing, collaboration and rollout.

The following story further illustrates the benefits of cloud computing for one of companies’ arguably most important assets: customer-facing digital platforms.

Server Not Found

“For us, that’s the worst-case scenario,” said Roger Hofmann, head of digital for HIT RADIO FFH, a German radio station expecting on average 6 million monthly visitors to several web portals. “Every time our website was down in the past, there was a huge danger that our audience would go to the competitor’s radio station and get the information there.”

HIT RADIO FFH operated websites on-premises with some additional cloud resources, but IT couldn’t quickly get the additional resources they needed to handle peak website traffic. “In extreme weather situations or when competitions run, up to 100 times the number of users access our website and app. It was sometimes difficult to absorb these peak loads flexibly with our previous infrastructure,” said Hofmann.

So IT expanded to a software-defined data center (SDDC) managed entirely by a new cloud provider in the private cloud. That move, completed within just two months without any outages, empowered IT to scale up from two to 25 virtual machines andscale up or down again in the event of planned or unplanned events. With that newfound flexibility to get resources on demand, Hofmann said they ensure their audience can always reach HIT RADIO FFH.

Reaching Farther from the Cloud

From the cloud, HIT RADIO FFH doesn’t just make their websites available to regular visitors. IT also has part of a digital foundation from which to create better, more exciting digital experiences for their growing audience.

Hofmann and his colleague Thomas Winkelmann, a web developer, said they’re more easily setting up test environments to develop new features, like radio streaming. Virtualization and cloud technologies simplify monitoring and maintenance, so IT can also focus on improving the performance of multimedia-heavy web portals and mobile apps—a key digital medium to compete in for the foreseeable future.

“The fact that our listeners can access our offering at any time from any location—and not quickly click to a rival station—is of clear competitive advantage to us,” said Winkelmann. “We continue to pursue a clear strategy of mobile first.”

Sources: VMware/Radius

Need cloud computing? Do not hesitate to contact us at sales@zettagrid.id or call to +62 811 28 38 78