Similar to Excel-like grid discussed in previous article this technique helps you to achieve similar goals. Instead of bringing up the whole edit page you can click that single field you need to edit, change its value and see your changes posted to the database automatically.
Click any of fields that are enabled for inline editing. Text will turn into edit control, the way it were setup in PHPRunner, ASPRunnerPro or ASPRunner.NET. To exit editing hit Esc button on your keyboard or click anywhere outside of edit control. Changes will be saved automatically.
To make this happen select one or more fields to be editable inline and add the following code to List page: Javascript OnLoad event.
Code
PHPRunner
$(document).ready(function() {
var $elem;
var key;
var field;
var val;
function cancelEditing() {
if ($grid.data("editing")) {
$elem.html(val);
$grid.data("editing", false);
$elem.closest("td").css("padding","5px 8px");
}
};
$(document).keyup(function(e) {
if (e.keyCode == 27) {
cancelEditing();
}
});
$("span[id^=edit]").attr('title', 'Click to edit');
You will have to modify the Edit page URL accordingly to your project settings. Replace products_edit.phpwith corresponding name of your table i.e. tablename_edit.php.
ASPRunnerPro
Replace products_edit.php with corresponding name of your table i.e. tablename_edit.asp.
ASPRunner.NET
No changes are required. Code goes to List page: Javascript OnLoad event.
$(document).ready(function() {
var $elem;
var key;
var field;
var val;
function cancelEditing() {
if ($grid.data("editing")) {
$elem.html(val);
$grid.data("editing", false);
$elem.closest("td").css("padding","5px 8px");
}
};
$(document).keyup(function(e) {
if (e.keyCode == 27) {
cancelEditing();
}
});
$("span[id^=edit]").attr('title', 'Click to edit');
4 network requirements to enable the Internet of Things
The hype surrounding the potential of the Internet of Things shows no sign of subsiding, so how can network managers make it a reality for their business?
Posted by Ben Rossi
on 13 November 2015
‘Consistent connectivity now becomes critical to how effectively these devices will perform’
The Internet of Things (IoT) is morphing from smart concept to reality. Investment bank Goldman Sachs cites it as a $7 trillion opportunity by 2020, with the trend set to have an impact at every stage in the production and distribution of products.
The 'smarts' are now on parade: smart cities with their smart grids and smart transportation systems and smart cars, all demonstrating the benefits of machine-to-machine (M2M) connectivity.
Consistent connectivity now becomes critical to how effectively these devices will perform, and this connectivity relies on having the right network infrastructure in place.
There are four fundamental network requirements to enable businesses to take full advantage of the transformations that IoT will drive.
The sprawling nature of IoT requires comprehensive management of the entire network, wired and wireless, right to the edge as devices – smart and not so smart – seek access and data transfer to core network components.
This is why the switch is key. All the connected devices and sensors are transmitting data on the network, but sending data from devices straight to the data centre can be inefficient, cause bottlenecks on the network, and impact performance.
An intelligent network needs to extend functionality right to the edge so data can be analysed and processed on the way to the core, or from device to device. To manage the increased flow of IoT traffic, switches at the edge of the network will need to offer enhanced security and integrated analytics.
2. Are you fit for IoT purpose?
It is virtually impossible for a network that has been installed and upgraded on an ad-hoc basis – often with a separate solution for voice, data, wired and wireless – to deliver on the promise of IoT. There are many enterprise IT systems out there that are simply not fit for IoT purpose.
A single converged network is fundamental to an IoT environment and guarantees a greater level of interoperability and support for IoT applications and devices.
3. Smarter feedback for smarter decisions
Predictive analysis and reporting functions are vital in enabling enterprises to use big data to build proactive, data-driven decision-making. Analysis of big data can also provide valuable insight into network operations.
Predictive network analytics tools delivered alongside network management systems provide reporting utilities that offer detailed network performance indicators. This can be as simple as automatically prioritising data traffic, determining whether a new service or application being rolling out will exceed current network capacity, or that every Thursday afternoon the R&D department needs extra bandwidth to support its data heavy processes.
4. Defending dumber devices
Not every device is smart. Poorly secured 'smart' devices such as smart watches and activity trackers pose a threat to essential network security – as do traditional 'dumb' devices such as door locks.
Simply monitoring and controlling the flow of packets to and from IoT devices is not enough to guarantee security. All devices right out to the network edge must be made smarter by the network management and the switches on the network.
IoT offers the chance for enterprises to deliver new applications and support deployments with millions of endpoints by providing real-time insights that help enterprises capture, understand and make more effective use of device data. But it will also bring new challenges and expectations.
The key lies in having one converged network supported by state-of-the-art switches that enable an enterprise to remotely manage, monitor and safeguard all devices, software and data to provide IT departments with in-depth intelligence to make smarter decisions.
- See more at: http://www.information-age.com/technology/mobile-and-networking/123460494/4-network-requirements-enable-internet-things#sthash.qKDLL1eU.dpuf
Cloud is recognized as facilitating “speed-to-market” – and for its ability to drive business agility. This is because cloud supports rapid experimentation and innovation by allowing companies to quickly try and even adopt new solutions without significant up-front costs. The Cloud can be a highly agile wrapper around different systems, different behavior and bringing it all together in an engagement cycle. By changing the way people interact with technology, cloud enables new forms of consumer engagement, expand collaboration across the value chain and bring innovation to companies’ core business models.
Gartner listed cloud computing as one of the top technology’s investment in the next 5 years as showing on the chart below:
Credits: Gartner
Types of Cloud Computing
Public Cloud: In Public Cloud the computing infrastructure is hosted by the cloud vendor at the vendor’s premises. The customer has no visibility and control over where the computing infrastructure is hosted. The computing infrastructure is shared between any organizations.
Private Cloud: The computing infrastructure is dedicated to a particular organization and not shared with other organizations. Private Clouds are more expensive and more secure when compared to Public Clouds. Private Cloud is what used to be called your company network.
Hybrid Cloud: Organizations may host critical applications on Private Clouds and applications with relatively less security concerns on the Public Cloud. The usage of both Private and Public Clouds together is called Hybrid Cloud.
With all this in mind and the reality of cloud comping impacting businesses in all aspects and at all levels, there are myths surrounding cloud computing and clouding the reality of the cloud:
Myth # 1: It is only for tech companies. Nothing is far from the truth as this myth, any company in the horizontal and vertical markets can use it including no matter what is the size.
Myth # 2: Security is the biggest risk. Security measures used by well-known cloud vendors are often better than their clients; the cloud vendors have the resources and the skills to keep it up to date.
Myth # 3: Everything works better in the Cloud. Except old applications that were designed to run on dedicated servers, often difficult to run on the cloud.
Myth # 4: It is always cheaper to run in the Cloud. It is not always cheaper to run on the cloud, but it can often be more cost efficient. Cloud works best for variable demands and workloads, where you have high demand at times but lower demand at others.
Myth # 5: Cloud is harmful to the environment. There’s no question that data centers consume huge amounts of energy. But when businesses move from on-site facilities to consolidated cloud data centers, it saves energy and cuts pollution.
Myth # 6: Cloud costs jobs. Instead of taking jobs it is in fact creating them, industry predictions suggesting that by the end of 2015 cloud computing will have created more than 13 million jobs worldwide. It required a host of cloud-savvy experts whose skills and knowledge will maintain and strengthen growth and development.
Myth # 7: Migrating into the Cloud is more hassle than it is worth. If you work in partnership with a trusted and experienced hosting provider it’s a seamlessly process. It can all happen very quickly with minimal downtime.
Myth # 8: Cloud Is Not for Mission-Critical Use. Cloud computing can be used for all aspect of business including Mission-Critical applications for many reasons including less downtime, and auto backup.
Myth # 9: Cloud is virtualization. Virtualization is software that manipulates hardware, while cloud computing refers to a service that results from that manipulation.
Myth # 10: I’ll be caught by Vendor ‘lock in’. This is true only to the same extent of on-premise, traditional software. There would be nothing to stop businesses building their own applications and deal with more than one vendor.
The promise of Cloud Computig
Understanding what is next for cloud computing is crucial for businesses at all levels because the cloud isn’t just for techies anymore. Managers are responding to the real opportunities that the cloud offers to develop new business models, forge closer ties with customers, and use the expertise of employees and partners. From a technology that was initially adopted for efficiency and cost savings, the cloud has emerged into a powerhouse of innovation throughout organizations.
Cloud computing is here to stay and the numbers are supporting that:
75% of decision makers use the cloud in their business
94% of IT managers reported improvements in security with the adoption of the cloud
75% of business reported improvements in the availability in their services
91% of SMB used cloud services to satisfy compliance requirements
Spending on Cloud Computing never slow down, with a projected 183 Billion in 2015
The next-generation of cloud computing will deliver value to the business faster by automating everything from request to deployment and configuration — and do so up and down the stack and across the entire infrastructure. Cloud computing is part of the “Third Platform” according to IDC along with Mobility, Big Data Analytics and Social business, that explains why many businesses adopted the cloud to create innovative industry solutions. Now cloud computing is moving the bar higher with the Internet of Things (IoT) which is built by the cloud for the cloud.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is the network of physical objects accessed through the Internet. These objects contain embedded technology to interact with internal states or the external environment. In other words, when objects can sense and communicate, it changes how and where decisions are made, and who makes them. For example Nest thermostats.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is emerging as the third wave in the development of the Internet. The 1990s’ Internet wave connected 1 billion users while the 2000s’ mobile wave connected another 2 billion. The IoT has the potential to connect 10X as many (28 billion) “things” to the Internet by 2020, ranging from bracelets to cars. Breakthroughs in the cost of sensors, processing power and bandwidth to connect devices are enabling ubiquitous connections right now. Smart products like smart watches and thermostats (Nest) are already gaining traction as stated in Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research’s report.
IoT has key attributes that distinguish it from the “regular” Internet, as captured by Goldman Sachs’s S-E-N-S-E framework:Sensing, Efficient, Networked, Specialized, Everywhere. These attributes may tilt the direction of technology development and adoption, with significant implications for Tech companies – much like the transition from the fixed to the mobile Internet shifted the center of gravity from Intel to Qualcomm or from Dell to Apple.
Source: Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research.
A number of significant technology changes have come together to enable the rise of the IoT. These include the following.
Cheap sensors – Sensor prices have dropped to an average 60 cents from $1.30 in the past 10 years.
Cheap bandwidth – The cost of bandwidth has also declined precipitously, by a factor of nearly 40X over the past 10 years.
Cheap processing – Similarly, processing costs have declined by nearly 60X over the past 10 years, enabling more devices to be not just connected, but smart enough to know what to do with all the new data they are generating or receiving.
Smartphones – Smartphones are now becoming the personal gateway to the IoT, serving as a remote control or hub for the connected home, connected car, or the health and fitness devices consumers are increasingly starting to wear.
Ubiquitous wireless coverage – With Wi-Fi coverage now ubiquitous, wireless connectivity is available for free or at a very low cost, given Wi-Fi utilizes unlicensed spectrum and thus does not require monthly access fees to a carrier.
Big data – As the IoT will by definition generate voluminous amounts of unstructured data, the availability of big data analytics is a key enabler.
IPv6 – Most networking equipment now supports IPv6, the newest version of the Internet Protocol (IP) standard that is intended to replace IPv4. IPv4 supports 32-bit addresses, which translates to about 4.3 billion addresses – a number that has become largely exhausted by all the connected devices globally. In contrast, IPv6 can support 128-bit addresses, translating to approximately 3.4 x 1038 addresses – an almost limitless number that can amply handle all conceivable IoT devices.
Advantages and Disadvantages of IoT
Roberto I. Belda explained it well in his article about IoT: Many smart devices like laptops, smart phones and tablets communicate with each other through the use of Wi-Fi internet technology.Transfer these technological capabilities into ordinary household gadgets like refrigerators, washing machines, microwave ovens, thermostat, door locks among others, equip these with their own computer chips, software and access to the Internet and a “smart home” now comes to life.
The Internet of Things can only work if these gadgets and devices start interacting with each other through a networked system. TheAllSeen Alliance, a nonprofit organization devoted to the adoption of the Internet of Things, is facilitating to make sure that companies like Cisco, Sharp and Panasonic are manufacturing products compatible with a networked system and to ensure that these products can interact with each other.
The advantages of these highly networked and connected devices mean productive and enhanced quality of lives for people. For example, health monitoring can be rather easy with connected RX bottles and medicine cabinets. Doctors supervising patients can monitor their medicine intake as well as measure blood pressure, sugar levels and alert them when something goes wrong to their patients online.
In the aspect of energy conservation, household appliances can suggest optimal setting based on the user’s energy consumptionlike turning the ideal temperature just before the owner arrives home as well as turning on and off the lights whenever the owner is out on vacation just to create the impression that somebody is still left inside the house to prevent burglars from attempting to enter.
Smart refrigerators, on the other hand, can suggest food supplies that are low on inventory and needs immediate replenishment. The suggestions are based on the user’s historical purchasing behavior and trends.Wearable technology are also part of this Internet of Things, where these devices can monitor sleeping patterns, workout measurements, sugar levels, blood pressure and connecting these data to the user’s social media accounts for tracking purposes.
The most important disadvantage of the Internet of Things is with regard to the privacy and security issue. Smart home devices have the ability to devour a lot of data and information about a user. These data can include personal schedules, shopping habits, medicine intake schedule and even location of the user at any given time. If these data fall into the wrong hands great harm and damage can be done to people.
The other disadvantage is the fact that most devices are not yet ready to communicate with another brand of devices. Specific products can only be networked with their fellow products under the same brand name. It is good that AllSeen Alliance is making sure connectivity happens but the reality of a “universal remote control” for all these devices and products is still in its infantile development.
Gartner Reveals Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users for 2016 and Beyond
Analysts Explore the Digital Future at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2015 October 4-8
Gartner, Inc. has revealed its top strategic predictions for 2016 and beyond. Gartner's top predictions for 2016 look at the digital future, at an algorithmic and smart machine-driven world where people and machines must define harmonious relationships.
"The 'robo' trend, the emerging practicality of artificial intelligence, and the fact that enterprises and consumers are now embracing the advancement of these technologies is driving change," said Daryl Plummer, vice president, distinguished analyst and Gartner Fellow. "Gartner's Top Predictions begin to separate us from the mere notion of technology adoption and to draw us more deeply into issues surrounding what it means to be human in a digital world."
Gartner analysts presented their findings during the sold-out Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, which is taking place here through Thursday. In this year's Top Predictions, three trends come together — the relationship of machines to people; "smart-ness" applied to the work environment; and the evolution of the Nexus of Forces — to create 10 disparate predictions that are more related than they first seem.
1) By 2018, 20 percent of business content will be authored by machines.Technologies with the ability to proactively assemble and deliver information through automated composition engines are fostering a movement from human- to machine-generated business content. Data-based and analytical information can be turned into natural language writing using these emerging tools. Business content, such as shareholder reports, legal documents, market reports, press releases, articles and white papers, are all candidates for automated writing tools.
2) By 2018, six billion connected things will be requesting support.In the era of digital business, when physical and digital lines are increasingly blurred, enterprises will need to begin viewing things as customers of services — and to treat them accordingly. Mechanisms will need to be developed for responding to significantly larger numbers of support requests communicated directly by things. Strategies will also need to be developed for responding to them that are distinctly different from traditional human-customer communication and problem-solving. Responding to service requests from things will spawn entire service industries, and innovative solutions will emerge to improve the efficiency of many types of enterprise.
3) By 2020, autonomous software agents outside of human control will participate in five percent of all economic transactions.Algorithmically driven agents are already participating in our economy. However, while these agents are automated, they are not fully autonomous, because they are directly tethered to a robust collection of mechanisms controlled by humans — in the domains of our corporate, legal, economic and fiduciary systems. New autonomous software agents will hold value themselves, and function as the fundamental underpinning of a new economic paradigm that Gartner calls the programmable economy. The programmable economy has potential for great disruption to the existing financial services industry. We will see algorithms, often developed in a transparent, open-source fashion and set free on the blockchain, capable of banking, insurance, markets, exchanges, crowdfunding — and virtually all other types of financial instruments
4) By 2018, more than 3 million workers globally will be supervised by a "robo-boss."Robo-bosses will increasingly make decisions that previously could only have been made by human managers. Supervisory duties are increasingly shifting into monitoring worker accomplishment through measurements of performance that are directly tied to output and customer evaluation. Such measurements can be consumed more effectively and swiftly by smart machine managers tuned to learn based on staffing decisions and management incentives.
5) By year-end 2018, 20 percent of smart buildings will have suffered from digital vandalism.Inadequate perimeter security will increasingly result in smart buildings being vulnerable to attack. With exploits ranging from defacing digital signage to plunging whole buildings into prolonged darkness, digital vandalism is a nuisance, rather than a threat. There are, nonetheless, economic, health and safety, and security consequences. The severity of these consequences depend on the target. Smart building components cannot be considered independently, but must be viewed as part of the larger organizational security process. Products must be built to offer acceptable levels of protection and hooks for integration into security monitoring and management systems.
6) By 2018, 45 percent of the fastest-growing companies will have fewer employees than instances of smart machines.Gartner believes the initial group of companies that will leverage smart machine technologies most rapidly and effectively will be startups and other newer companies. The speed, cost savings, productivity improvements and ability to scale of smart technology for specific tasks offer dramatic advantages over the recruiting, hiring, training and growth demands of human labor. Some possible examples are a fully automated supermarket or a security firm offering drone-only surveillance services. The "old guard" (existing) companies, with large amounts of legacy technologies and processes, will not necessarily be the first movers, but the savvier companies among them will be fast followers, as they will recognize the need for competitive parity for either speed or cost.
7) By year-end 2018, customer digital assistant will recognize individuals by face and voice across channels and partners.The last mile for multichannel and exceptional customer experiences will be seamless two-way engagement with customers and will mimic human conversations, with both listening and speaking, a sense of history, in-the-moment context, timing and tone, and the ability to respond, add to and continue with a thought or purpose at multiple occasions and places over time. Although facial and voice recognition technologies have been largely disparate across multiple channels, customers are willing to adopt these technologies and techniques to help them sift through increasing large amounts of information, choice and purchasing decisions. This signals an emerging demand for enterprises to deploy customer digital assistants to orchestrate these techniques and to help "glue" continual company and customer conversations.
8) By 2018, two million employees will be required to wear health and fitness tracking devices as a condition of employment.The health and fitness of people employed in jobs that can be dangerous or physically demanding will increasingly be tracked by employers via wearable devices. Emergency responders, such as police officers, firefighters and paramedics, will likely comprise the largest group of employees required to monitor their health or fitness with wearables. The primary reason for wearing them is for their own safety. Their heart rates and respiration, and potentially their stress levels, could be remotely monitored and help could be sent immediately if needed. In addition to emergency responders, a portion of employees in other critical roles will be required to wear health and fitness monitors, including professional athletes, political leaders, airline pilots, industrial workers and remote field workers.
9) By 2020, smart agents will facilitate 40 percent of mobile interactions, and the postapp era will begin to dominate.Smart agent technologies, in the form of virtual personal assistants (VPAs) and other agents, will monitor user content and behavior in conjunction with cloud-hosted neural networks to build and maintain data models from which the technology will draw inferences about people, content and contexts. Based on these information-gathering and model-building efforts, VPAs can predict users' needs, build trust and ultimately act autonomously on the user's behalf.
10) Through 2020, 95 percent of cloud security failures will be the customer's faultSecurity concerns remain the most common reason for avoiding the use of public cloud services. However, only a small percentage of the security incidents impacting enterprises using the cloud have been due to vulnerabilities that were the provider's fault. This does not mean that organizations should assume that using a cloud means that whatever they do within that cloud will necessarily be secure. The characteristics of the parts of the cloud stack under customer control can make cloud computing a highly efficient way for naive users to leverage poor practices, which can easily result in widespread security or compliance failures. The growing recognition of the enterprise's responsibility for the appropriate use of the public cloud is reflected in the growing market for cloud control tools. By 2018, 50 percent of enterprises with more than 1,000 users will use cloud access security broker products to monitor and manage their use of SaaS and other forms of public cloud, reflecting the growing recognition that although clouds are usually secure, the secure use of public clouds requires explicit effort on the part of the cloud customer.
ServiceDesk Plus MSP is a perfectly integrated solution that combines IT Help Desk with Project Management and allows you to structure your projects, teams and workflows irrespective of the size of the projects!
It's no secret that an easy to use and a solid configuration management database is a must to track and manage the entire IT assets through their lifecycle. Which is why many enterprises are now increasingly implementing a CMDB.
Billing feature in ServiceDesk Plus - MSP lets you to enable the managed services business model through accurate billing for multiple accounts, so you no longer need to juggle with multiple tools and manually track and bill for services rendered.
Deploy agents on your assets and have them scan asset information. Agents can scan for changes in assets at periodic intervals and push changes to ServiceDesk Plus ’ MSP. Agents also allow you to make remote desktop connections instantly.
Reduce the burden on your helpdesk coordinator and assign incoming tickets automatically. The auto-assign functionality automatically assigns tickets to technicians based on their availability and access to tickets.
Showcase the IT services offered to users from your different accounts. Service Catalog improves the operational efficiency of your helpdesk technicians by managing the service delivery process from approval to fulfilment.
Provide services for multiple clients and accounts using a single application enabling users to access their specific accounts. Configure Account Specific Automations, Service Level Agreements, Knowledge base, Assets, Reports and much more.
Manage and control each of your clients’ IT and Non-IT assets remotely and transparently with the Asset Management Module specifically designed for Managed Service Providers.
An Incident is any event which causes, or may cause, an interruption or a reduction of the quality of the service offered.The objective of Incident Management is to restore normal operations as quickly as possible with the least possible impact on either the business or the user.
problem management in ServiceDesk Plus - MSP helps to reduce adverse impacts caused by incidents and avoids the recurrence of problems related to these incidents. This primary focus on problem management is root cause analysis and elimination. The tool also helps in managing multiple incidents revolving around a single problem easily.
With the Change Management in ServiceDesk Plus - MSP implement changes in a controlled and structured environment which reduce the impact in systematic approach. This change management process goes through a complete approval cycle depending on the type of change.
Meet your customers' expectations and achieve higher levels of customer satisfaction by providing quality and timely services using Service Level Agreements.
Avoid round trips to the desktop physically for diagnosing and resolving issues. Use the Remote Desktop Control Solution and gain access to the computers easily.
Get the visibility and control over your customers' accounts using a wide range of reporting options - more than 100 Canned Reports, flexible Custom Reports, easy-to-view Flash Reports and so on.
Know what is being purchased for each account along with the expenses and relate them directly to CMDB using our feature-rich Purchase and Contract Management Module. Set notifications to be alerted about the contract expiry.
Log files of systems and applications contain invaluable information such as operation status & results, errors, and much more. Monitoring the log files helps IT administrators to know the performance of the systems and mission critical applications such as Oracle, SAP, ERP, IIS, etc. in real-time.
OpManager offers agent-based log file monitoring to monitor system and application logs. The agent deployed on the end Windows system monitors the text log files in real-time.
Highlights of Log File Monitor
Real-time Log Monitoring & Alerting
The agent monitors the log files every 10 seconds once for the configured string. Once the application or system prints the string in its log, the agent captures it in real-time and raises an alarm in OpManager.
Match String & Case
The agent scans the log files for exact string match. The string can be a regex (regular expression) and can also include special characters. In addition to these you can also configure the agent to match the case of the string.
Latest Content Scanning
When the log files are scanned, the last scanned position is noted. The subsequent scan starts from the previously scanned position. This helps scan the only latest log prints.
Unobtrusive Log File Reading
To avoid log file getting locked while monitoring, the agent monitors only the log files that have shared read access.
Log Entry Counters
Log File Monitoring Agent also tracks duplicate entries and raises alert. This will be helpful in cases where you need to be alerted if the error message gets printed for N consecutive times.
Secure Communication
The communication between OpManager server and agent takes place via the web server port, so no need to open any port. If required you can configure OpManager to run in HTTPS mode. This secures the data communicated between the agent and OpManager server.
Lightweight & easy to install
Log file monitoring agent is very lightweight and does not consume much of the system resources. It is also easy to install.
Note:
At present the agent monitors log files printed in English only. Support for other languages will be included down the line.
The agent supports Windows 2003 and above devices only.
Data center consolidation helps you effectively utilize your resources to meet growing business needs, without increasing the data center’s footprint. However, consolidating a data center’s resources is a difficult process, because large enterprises expand their data centers constantly to meet new business challenges. New hardware boxes are added constantly to handle the load, which in turn increase the hardware and maintenance footprint, increasing the opex.
Here are four tips that you can follow to consolidate your data center easily:
Identify your data center’s current capacity
List/catalog the assets and facilities available
Adopt new technologies such as virtualization, SDN, and SDDC
Optimize power consumption
Identify current capacity This information is crucial for consolidation. Therefore, identify how much load your data center is handling and its actual capacity. You can also identify capacity at the device level. In fact, in most of the data centers, several devices are underutilized because of over provisioning or improper management.
VM sprawl is a classic example of over provisioning, where the number of VMs in a data center increases rapidly, because VMs can be created easily. You can avoid this by frequently auditing and effectively monitoring the VMs. Similarly, auditing your assets and facilities can help consolidate your data center resources.
Catalog the assets and facilities A thorough inventory of all assets is essential for consolidation. Effective asset management, complete with relationship mapping, helps you identify the devices associated to a particular service. This will help you identify the under- and over-utilized devices and optimize them accordingly. Asset management also helps you understand the life cycle of the devices in your data center. You can then proactively identify and replace end of life (EOL) devices. You will also be able to be gauge the free space available in the data center to fulfill dynamic business needs.
Adopting a 3D data center visual modeling solution helps obtain better visibility into the available facilities. In fact, having an integrated asset and facilities management solution will make your job easy.
Adopt new technologies Technologies such as virtualization, SDN, and SDDC play a major role in data center consolidation. These technologies decouple the computing, networking, and storage from the underlying hardware and help you expand your services without adding any hardware.
Besides these technologies, hardware vendors such Cisco and IBM have introduced converged infrastructure devices that pack hundreds of VMs bundled with the required networking and storage devices in a single rack. These agile and compact devices help you meet your business needs without any additional hardware. Although the capex of such devices are high, their ROI is good; stands at 177% according to Cisco. They also reduce the opex and maintenance costs.
Optimize power consumption Data centers spend much on energy. Similar to the VM sprawl, the PDUs in the data center are underutilized. The number of servers connected to a PDU depends on the power unit mentioned in the server’s specs. However, in reality, servers consume less power and more severs can be connected to a PDU. You can ascertain this only by using an efficient power monitoring solution.
In most of the data centers, 37% of the total power is supplied for cooling devices, such as CRAC, and not the actual computing devices, such as servers and routers. By efficiently monitoring and solving hardware temperature issues, you can optimize power consumption of the cooling devices by more than 30%. You can also reduce the number of cooling devices. However, this could mean more racks in the data center.
Benefits of data center consolidation• Reduced operations cost • Reduced footprint • Reduced maintenance • Improved energy efficiency • Optimum use of devices
Best-in class and scalable DCIM solutionBesides these steps, to consolidate your data center, you need a comprehensive DCIM solution that provides IT operations management, asset and facilities management, and energy management. Only then you will be able to have a bird’s eye view of your data center and consolidate it.
DrayTek launches VigorAP 910C enterprise-level ceiling-mount IEEE 802.11ac access point
The DrayTek VigorAP910C enterprise-level ceiling-mount access point requires no additional power supply and offers easy ceiling installation. The built-in high performance IEEE 802.11ac antenna offers reliable transmission and its user friendly interface reduces the burden caused by cumbersome network rollouts. The VigorAP 910C comes with central wireless management software (AP Management) that, when used in conjunction with DrayTek Vigor2925 and Vigor2860 broadband series routers, enables management of multiple access points. Administrators can assign IPs and modify settings via the AP Management settings screen.
Central AP Management
APM provides the 3-step installation, plug-plug-press, and then wireless clients are able to enjoy surfing internet. Moreover, through the unified user interface of Draytek routers, the status of APs is clear at the first sight.
If your network requires several VigorAP units, to centrally manage and monitor them individually as a group will be expected. DrayTek central wireless management (AP Management) lets control, efficiency, monitoring and security of your company-wide wireless access easier be managed. Inside the web user interface, we call “central wireless management” as Central AP Management which supports mobility, client monitoring/reporting and load-balancing to multiple APs. For central wireless management, you will need a Vigor2860 or Vigor2925 series router; there is no per-node licensing or subscription required. For multiple wireless clients, to apply the AP Load Balancing to the multiple APs will manage wireless traffic with smooth flow and enhanced efficiency. The AP management of Vigor2860 and/or Vigor2925 series can support up to 20 nodes of mixed VigorAP 910C, VigorAP 900 and VigorAP 810 wireless access points.
Flexible Network Management
Like all DrayTek routers and VigorAP series, VigorAP 910C is also TR-069 and it can be remotely managed by the VigorACS SI Central Management. When your project requires more than 20 nodes of VigorAP, you can apply the VigorACS SI to manage the massive deployment.
There are many nodes of license for deploying VigorACS SI Central Management. Through “Self-hosted” or “Cloud-based” subscription, the remotely-deployed DrayTek VigorAP wireless access points can be managed for firmware upgrade, real-time monitoring and obtain proper customer care.
Availability and consultancy of Product: Should you have queries about product availability and networking applications, please feel free to contact local resellers or info@draytek.com
About DrayTek DrayTek (TSE:6216), a Taiwan-based networking solutions provider, is the leading supplier of state-of-the-art firmware designer and quality hardware producer for SOHO and SMB. DrayTek's solutions, ranging from enterprise-level firewalls, mission-critical bandwidth management and comprehensive VPN facilities, triple play routers, to prospective IP PBX solutions, meet the market trend and beyond customer expectations.
Vigor2925 Series is the IPv6 ready Dual Gigabit Ethernet WANs and Dual USB WANs broadband security firewall router. The product range is from Vigor2925, Vigor2925n, Vigor2925n plus, and Vigor2925Vn plus.
It ensures the business continuity for today and the future IPv6 network. Its two gigabit Ethernet WAN ports can accept various high-speed Ethernet-based WAN links via FTTx/xDSL/Cable. The 2 USB ports are for 3.5G/4G LTE mobile broadband access. With the multi-WAN accesses, Vigor2925 series routers provides flexible and reliable broadband connectivity for the small business office. The VPN backup and VPN load balancing assures business continuity via multi-WAN connection to the Internet. The bandwidth management, Quality of Service, VLAN for flexible workgroup management, User Management for authentication, Route Policy, Central VPN Management, Central AP Management and Firewall serve your daily office network to bring in more business opportunities.
Dual Gigabit Ethernet WAN ports for failover and load-balancing
The Gigabit Ethernet WAN ports cater for any type of Internet access, including FTTx, xDSL and Cable fitting your local infrastructure. You can then use both WAN 1 and WAN 2 for failover, ensuring that you will always have an access to the Internet even if one of the WAN fails, or for load-balancing so the 2 WANs share Internet traffic requirements of your organization.
2 USB 2.0 ports for 3G/4G LTE mobile, FTP drive and network printers The two USB ports can be used for the connection of 3G/4G mobile broadband dongle, FTP drive and network printers. A 3G/4G mobile broadband connected to one of the 2 USB ports can be used as a second WAN for bandwidth management. The USB WAN interface can also be the primary access if the local fixed line service hasn’t been deployed yet. You can have 2 USB 3G/4G dongles connected to the USB ports, and assign one of these (WAN 3) to be the primary access and the other (WAN 4) as the fail-over back-up. And, you have the flexibility to convert back to fixed line services when these become available.
Secured Networking
DrayTek Vigor2925 series inherited versatile firewall mechanism from previous Vigor series routers. The firewall allows setting of Call/Data Filters and DoS/DDoS prevention, whereas the CSM covers IM/P2P/Protocol filter, URL Content Filter and Web Content Filter. The object-based design used in SPI (Stateful Packet Inspection) firewall allows users to set firewall policy with ease. The object-based firewall is flexible and allows your network be safe. With Objects settings, you can pre-define objects or groups for IP, service type, keyword, file extension, etc., and mix these with the Time Scheduler or the VLAN groups as required. Altogether this gives you peace of mind whether you are guarding a complicated network or a small office. The DoS/DDoS prevention and URL/Web content filter strengthen the security outside and control inside. The enterprise-level CSM (Content Security Management) enables users to control and manage IM (Instant Messenger) and P2P (Peer-to-Peer) applications more efficiently. The CSM hence prevents inappropriate content from distracting employees and impeding productivity. Furthermore, the CSM can keep office networks threat-free and available.
By adoption of the world-leading Cyren GlobalView Web Content Filtering, you can block whole categories of web sites (e.g. sports, online shopping), subject to an annual subscription to the Cyren GlobalView WCF, which is timely updated with changed or new site categorizations. A free 30-day trial can be activated via activation wizard of Vigor2925 series routers’ web user interface.
The "User Management" implemented on your router firmware can allow you to prevent any computer from accessing your Internet connection without a username or password. You can set scheduler or maximum usage time to your employees within office network. The user accounts can also be restricted by any other aspect of the firewall rule on a user-by-user basis.
The Vigor2925 series support DrayTek’s SmartMonitor network traffic analyzer (up to 50 nodes), which captures actual live data of activities in your managed network, such as the content of MSN entering to or out of your network. You can track specified files download/upload or view statistics on data type activities to realize what corporate related information have been released accidentally or on purpose.
IPv6
Because the IPv4 addresses are limited and IPv6 allows for a larger address space and much more efficient routing. The Vigor2925 series support IPv6 and IPv4. The Vigor2925 series can support IPv6 broker/tunnel services to provide IPv6 access using either AICCU or TSPC via 3rd party IPv6 providers if your ISP does not support IPv6 yet.
can be run on any one of the WAN ports (ADSL/VDSL2, Ethernet or 3G; but the USB WAN port can run AICCU/TSPC tunnel mode only)
can connect to direct native IPv6 ISPs
can build tunnel to 3rd party IPv6 brokers using either AICCU or TSPC methods
Default stateful firewall for all IPv6 LAN clients/ devices
DHCPv6 Client
Static IPv6 Client
DHCPv6 & RADVD (Router Advertisement Server) for client configuration
QoS for IPv6 with DiffServ
IP Filtering Rules
Router Management over IPv6 (Telnet/HTTP) with IPv6 access list
Concurrent operation with IPv4 (“Dual-Stack”)
Other router features are only available on IPv4
VLAN for secure and efficient workgroup management Not only with 5 x Gigabit LAN ports for the needs of unified communication applications, such as CRM server, FTP server, Mail server, the Vigor2925 Series has the comprehensive VLAN function for management. The VLAN functions allow 5 subnets to be allocated for multiple workgroups. When combined with the NAT and firewall functions, you can design corporate network groups in terms of traffic, security level, priority settings, etc.
Applications such as VoIP, IPTV and Wireless SSID can also be integrated into VLAN tags and firewall objects, giving you the maximum flexibility in designing workgroups for your organization.
Comprehensive VPN
For remote teleworkers and inter-office links, Vigor2925 series provide up to 50 simultaneous VPN tunnels (such as IPSec/PPTP/L2TP protocols) for secure data exchange and communication. With a dedicated VPN co-processor, the hardware encryption of AES/DES/3DES and hardware key hash of SHA-1/MD5 are seamlessly handled, thus maintaining maximum router performance. Teleworkers can be authenticated directly with your LDAP server if preferred. The Vigor2925 series are equipped with two Gigabit Ethernet ports and USB WAN ports for WAN load-balancing and backup. The VPN trunking (VPN load-balancing and VPN backup) are hence implemented on Vigor2925 series. With VPN trunking, you can create multiple WAN connections to a remote site in order to increase bandwidth. The VPN trunking also can allow you to have failover (backup) of VPN route through a secondary WAN connection.
With SSL VPN, Vigor2925 series let teleworkers have convenient and simple remote access to central site VPN. The teleworkers do not need to install any VPN software manually. From regular web browser, you can establish VPN connection back to your main office even in a guest network or web cafe. The SSL technology is same as the encryption that you use for secure web sites such as your online bank. The SSL VPNs can be operated in either full tunnel mode or Proxy mode.
For client-to-site, remote dial-in users can use up-to 25 SSL VPN tunnels to avoid the local network infrastructure limitation, , there are 64 profiles on WUI, but it only allows 25 concurrent tunnels.
Multi-subnet With the 5-port Gigabit switch on the LAN side provides extremely high speed connectivity for the highest speed local data transfer of any server or local PCs. The tagged VLANs (802.1q) can mark data with a VLAN identifier. This identifier can be carried through an onward Ethernet switch to specific ports. The specific VLAN clients can also pick up this identifier as it is just passed to the LAN. You can set the priorities for LAN-side QoS. You can assign each of VLANs to each of the different IP subnets that the router may also be operating, to provide even more isolation. The said functionality is tag-based Multi-subnet.
Each of the wireless SSIDs can also be grouped within one of the VLANs.
With multi-subnet, the traffic can be sent through non-NAT mode with higher performance. If you deploy Vigor2925 series with MPLS network with your main office, the multi-subnet settings will let your data transactions be carried out without NAT.
Centralized Management With F/W 3.7.4, the embedded Central VPN Management (CVM) will let network administrator register up to 16 remote routers but run concurrent remote management over 8 remote routers.
AP Management APM provides the 3-step installation, plug-plug-press, and then wireless clients are able to enjoy surfing internet. Moreover, through the unified user interface of Draytek routers, the status of APs is clear at the first sight.
If your network requires several VigorAP900 or VigorAP 810 units, to centrally manage and monitor them individually as a group will be expected. DrayTek central wireless management (AP Management) lets control, efficiency, monitoring and security of your company-wide wireless access easier be managed. Inside the web user interface, we call “central wireless management” as Central AP Management which supports mobility, client monitoring/reporting and load-balancing to multiple APs. For central wireless management, you will need a Vigor2860 or Vigor2925 series router; there is no per-node licensing or subscription required. For multiple wireless clients, to apply the AP Load Balancing to the multiple APs will manage wireless traffic with smooth flow and enhanced efficiency.
Supports Smart Monitor traffic report software Vigor2925 series routers support Smart Monitor, DrayTek's proprietary network traffic reporting software, for up to 50 users. This software monitors all incoming and outgoing network traffic, categorizes these into various activity and data types and provides statistics in various report types, so network administrators can monitor network activities for planning and/or fault locating purposes.
Concurrent dual-band 802.11n WLAN (2.4G/5G)
Vigor2925n plus and Vigor2925Vn plus have a built-in IEEE 802.11n WLAN Access Point with concurrent dual-band (2.4G/5G). They can allow the essential applications to use the less interference band (e.g. 5G). The Wi-Fi access is also protected by security and encryption protocols, including WEP/WPA/WPA2, MAC Address Control, Multiple SSID, Wireless LAN Isolation, Wireless VLAN* and 802.1x Authentication.
The Wireless Rate Control function allows connection rates for each network device to be individually managed as required. The WMM (Wi-Fi Multi-Media)* function allows setting of priority levels for various applications: voice, video, data, etc., so time-critical applications can be assigned higher priority levels. Furthermore, WDS (Wireless Distribution System) function allows you to extend the wireless coverage distance easily.
Flexible Network Management
Like all DrayTek routers, Vigor2925 Series routers support comprehensive network management functions. For example, you can set username/password and directory/file access privilege for individual users as required. There are also routing/network tables, system log, debugging utilities, etc., making network administrators' jobs easy.
Other management features include SNMP, TR-069 and TR-104. TR-069 can be utilized with DrayTek's VigorACS SI management software to remotely monitor and manage the Vigor2925 Series.
Ini pertanyaan yang menarik. Setelah membaca konsep ITIL, tentu anda dituntut tidak sekedar tahu saja, tapi juga bagaimana menerapkannya.
Penerapan ITIL sangat beragam tergantung dari perusahaannya.
Saya akan membagi Implementasi ITIL ini menjadi 2 case:
1. Anda dituntut untuk menghasilkan IT service baru yang bisa memenuhi kebutuhan perusahaan. Biasanya ini dilakukan oleh IT Service Provider. Mereka dituntut untuk menghasilkan service yang menghasilkan value bagi customer, dan tentu saja membawa benefit bagi Service Provider itu sendiri.
2. Anda sebagai bagian dari organisasi IT, di mana sudah ada IT services yang disediakan untuk customer. Masalahnya adalah IT service ini tidak bisa dinikmati oleh user dengan optimal.
Saya akan membahas case yang ke-2 ini.
Untuk implementasi ITIL kita harus tahu apa visi perusahaan, posisi kita, dan apa yang menjadi tujuan kita.
Sebenarnya ini yang menjadi inti dari Continual Service Improvement. Model ini bisa kita gunakan untuk implementasi ITIL dalam perusahaan.
CSI Model:
1. What is the vision? Vision and business objectives
2. Where are we now? Assessments
3. Where do we want to be? Measurable targets
4. How do we get there? Process improvement or re-engineering
5. Did we get there? Measurements and targets
6. How do we keep the momentum going?
Untuk menjalankan langkah 1, kita perlu mendapatkan Formal Stakeholder Feedback. Artinya harus ada komunikasi dengan top level management mengenai visi perusahaan dan bagaimana IT bisa bersinergi untuk mempercepat pencapaian tujuan perusahaan. Dari sini diharapkan dukungan dari top mangement untuk ITIL Initiative.
Sebelum mengkomunikasikan ITIL Initiative anda harus benar-benar siap, sudah mempunyai ITIL Implementation Plan atau roadmap. Anda juga harus bisa mengkomunikasikan value baik dalam istilah yang dimengerti bisnis maupun IT. Kalau perlu anda bisa melibatkan 3rd party dalam Implementasi ITIL.
Tetapkan jalur implementasi secara bijaksana. Mulai dengan target kecil tetapi bisa mendatangkan hasil yang cepat. Jangan terjebak dengan keinginan untuk menerapkan semua proses di ITIL. Dengan mengimplementasikan ITIL dalam beberapa tahapan, maka bisnis bisa melihat dan mendapatkan value IT secara lebih cepat.
Perlu diingat bahwa Implementasi ITIL sebaiknya bertahap dan merupakan proses terus-menerus/continual.
Langkah 2.
Kita perlu juga melakukan survei terhadap kondisi IT saat ini. Ini bisa dilakukan dengan menggunakan Maturity Model.
Langkah 3.
Pilih beberapa fungsi dan proses ITIL yang bisa mendatangkan quick wins. Mulai dengan Incident Management dan Service Desk, bisa digabungkan dengan Problem Management dan Change Management.
Langkah 4.
Membuat desain untuk masing-masing proses yang dipilih.
Langkah 5.
Membuat metric dan pengukuran.
Langkah 6.
Momentum ITIL Initiative ini perlu dijaga sehingga proses2 yang ada terus disempurnakan. Demikian juga proses-proses baru akan bisa ditambahkan dengan baik
Traditional IT management practices are no fit for today's modern day businesses that are powered by cloud and datacenters. Now, IT is more dynamic and provisioned quickly with technologies such as virtualization and elastic computing. That says, IT is not confined within the office and extends to all across the globe. With more and more applications being served over the cloud from all around the world, it is imperative for you to ensure seamless access to mission critical applications and provide a good end-user experience.
Provide an uninterrupted access to mission critical applications and the best user-experience networks and applications should no longer be managed as discrete entities. The problem with such a model is that all the performance data and events remain separate, and needs lot of manual effort to correlate them to get a clear picture. By the time you trace the fault and fix it, users would have started to receive a 404 error.
Causes for slowness or loss of access to an application
Recent configuration change done at the core router
Server system resource scarcity
Switch port may be down
Bandwidth bottlenecks
Problem with the ISP's WAN links
Application itself might have crashed
Correlation of App & Network performance data is the key to identify where the fault is
delivering an application seamlessly lies in identifying where the fault is. The sooner you identify the fault, the faster you can fix it. Disparate tools help you know the performance of network and applications in silos. There would be no correlation between them. It requires a lot of manual effort to analyze various reports and come to an assumption where the fault would be.
Monitoring Applications from a network perspective (a.k.a Application-aware Network Performance Management) provides the correlation between application and network performance data. It provides in-depth visibility into the impact caused by the applications on your network and vice versa, and helps you identify where the fault is exactly.
OpManager provides the required correlation between App & Network performance data
OpManager now includes in-depth application monitoring capabilities into its existing portfolio. This helps you also monitor your mission critical applications such as Oracle, SAP, Sharepoint, Webshpere, etc. along with your network and servers from a single console.
Being a comprehensive network management software, OpManager, with the newly added application monitoring functions, provides application-aware network performance management. In case of any application slowness or loss of access to an application, OpManager provides the required visibility into Network, Server and Application levels. It allows you drill down from the end-user experience level to the network level to find out where the fault is in a quick and easy way.
What does OpManager now provide with the newly added Application Monitoring plugin?
In-depth Application Monitoring
Real-time End-user Experience Monitoring
Single Dashboard for viewing the Performance health of Network & Application in real-time
Singe alarm console for Network, Server & Application faults
Device snapshot page with System and Application Performance Data.
About OpManager
ManageEngine OpManager is a network management platform that helps large enterprises, service providers and SMEs manage their data centers and IT infrastructure efficiently and cost effectively. Automated workflows, intelligent alerting engines, configurable discovery rules, and extendable templates enable IT teams to quickly setup a 24x7 monitoring system within hours of installation. Do-it-yourself plug-ins extend the scope of management to include network change and configuration management and IP address management as well as monitoring of networks, applications, databases, virtualization and NetFlow-based bandwidth. For more information on ManageEngine OpManager, please visithttps://www.manageengine.com/network-monitoring/.
SNMP is composite of three components. The first is Network-management systems, the second is Managed device, and the last is SNMP agent. There are three versions of SNMP:
Version 1 is poor of security that only performed community in cleartext as password.
Version 2 enhances the security and confidetiality. However, the security system is too complex that is not widely accepted.
Version 3 transmits messages encoded as octet string that provides SNMP packets authentication, integrity, and confidentiality.
Administrator can collect management informations from SNMP agents or set the configurations to the device. In this note, we want to set SNMP agent for two different administration scenarios, that the first one is SNMP on loopback insfrastructure, and the second one is SNMP agent from WAN interface. User can specify the host IP for the specific SNMP agent access. For more informations, please refer to the follwing steps.
Note: Vigor router supports SNMP Version 3, which prevents SNMP packet from being exposed on the wire. The Authen Algorithm supports MD5 and SHA modes, and Privacy Algorithm supports DESand AES modes.
A. SNMP on loopback infrastructure.
The scenario is showing below.
On Vigor1, go to System Maintenance >> SNMP to enable the SNMP, and click OK to apply the settings.
Tick Enable SNMP Agent.
Set Get community to "public", set Set community to "private", and set Trap community to "public. Set Manager Host IP and Notification Host IP to "192.168.21.10".
On Vigor2, go to System Maintenance >> SNMP to enable the SNMP, and click OK to apply the settings.
Tick Enable SNMP Agent.
Set Get community to "public", set Set community to "private", and set Trap community to "public. Set Manager Host IP and Notification Host IP to "192.168.50.10".
Go to System Maintenance >> SNMP to reboot the router.
Send SNMP request from MIB browser.
Enter the Host IP and Community.
Note: The GET, GETNEXT, and GETBULK request is shareing the Get Community, "public" set as default, that we set in the part A. But SET request is using Set Community, "private", that user should change it manually.
B. SNMP agent from WAN interface.
The scenario is showing below.
Go to System Maintenance >> SNMP to enable the SNMP, and click OK to apply the settings.
Check the Enable SNMP Agent state.
Set the Get community to "public", set Set community to "private", and set Trap community to "public. Set Manager Host IP and Notification Host IP to "36.226.152.185".
Go to System Maintenance >> Management to enable Allow management from the Internet.
Go to System Maintenance >> SNMP to reboot the router.
The subject backup is getting more and more complicated for service companies with many customers as well as for end-user companies: there are many kinds of backup solutions, the amount of data rises, etc. Not only in big companies, even in small or medium-sized companies the kinds of backup solutions rather vary:
Backups in the area of virtualization, for example, Veeam
Additional backups of the operating system, for example, complete Images, SQL backup, Exchange backups, etc.
With these various options it is difficult to keep an overview of what is going on with your backups.
Email Notifications as Common Ground
Most backup services can send email notifications to inform you about the status of the last backup. Though, with a certain amount of backups to be checked, it is not practicable to analyze manually every email for malfunctioning backups day by day. You will need a system that displays all backup jobs at a glance and indicates if they succeeded or not.
Monitoring Backups with PRTG
Because of email notifications as common ground for different backup solutions, this is an universal method to centrally receive status messages from almost every backup job. With PRTG you will not need to check any more all individual emails that your backups send to your personal inbox. PRTG will analyze these emails for you and keep track of all your backup jobs.
PRTG’s IMAP Sensor has specific filter options and automatically runs through your emails, checking them for keywords in the subject line and in the text. Also it can notify the responsible person if there were not received any emails by a backup during a certain time span. You will know that everything is fine with your backups as long as the IMAP sensors are green.
You only need two things to set up backup monitoring with PRTG:
Configure your backup software to send emails to a dedicated email account, and
configure PRTG’s IMAP sensor so it checks your backup mails.
You run two different backup solutions. Both send emails to your in-house mail server with information about their respective backup status. Now you would like PRTG to retrieve the emails regularly to check them for keywords in order to show you the backup status, as well as trigger an alert if there has not been any incoming email during the last 24 hours.
Following are listed the necessary steps for this scenario.
Step 1—Configure Your Backup Solution
Your backup software must be enabled to send emails. Furthermore, we recommend that for each of your backup solutions there is particularly one dedicated email account. Thus, in this use case scenario you will need two dedicated email accounts on your in-house mail server. These accounts have to be accessible via IMAP.
Emails sent by your backup software most likely look like this:
Email Indicating a Successful Backup
Email Indicating a Partially Successful Backup
Email Indicating a Failed Backup
Step 2—Configure IMAP Sensor in PRTG
Following are listed the steps how to configure IMAP sensors in PRTG for backup monitoring:
Create a new device in PRTG for your mail server: add a new device to your desired group, for example, by clicking Add Device… in its context menu.
Add a Device to PRTG
In the appearing setup assistant, enter a suitable name and the corresponding IP/DNS of your mail server. Click on Continue.
Add two IMAP sensors, one for each of your email accounts on the mail server, for example, right-click on the device, and from the context menu, choose Add Sensor…. In the "Add sensor" dialog, filter for Email Server under Target System Type to find the IMAP sensor in a fast way. Click on Add This >.
In the Identify Email section, set Process Email Content to Process emails in this mailbox. Enter the name of the corresponding mailbox. Because you use only one dedicated email account per backup, you can leave the other identify fields unchanged: Don’t check.
Still in the Identify Email section, set Check Last Message Date to Check for new messages received within the last x hours. Because we would like to trigger an alert if there has not been any incoming backup mail for the last 24 hours, enter 24 in the Error Threshold (Hours) field. Enter a lower number of hours without any backup mail in the Warning Threshold (Hours) field to receive an additional Warning status earlier already.
In the Sensor Behavior section, customize your filters for warnings and alarms. In our use case we want green sensors if the backup job succeeded and warnings for backup emails containing both “error” and “partially” in the subject. Additionally, we want a red alarm status for emails containing “error” only. If we get an email with any other text, but without the word “success”, this is an unknown email and indicates an error. We want to have a red alarm status in this case, too.
For Set to Alarm, choose If subject does not contain and String search as Check Method. Entersuccess in the Search Text field. This sensor behavior states that if there is no (sub-)string “success” in the subject line, the sensor is set to a Down status. Enter an Error Message for this case.
For Set to Warning, choose If subject contains and Regular expression as Check Method. To match subjects like the one in our example (ERROR: Backup backup_xyz is partially successful) use the following regular expression (regex):
(?=.*\berror\b)(?=.*\bpartially\b).*
This regex finds matches containing the words error and partially in any order. Enter a Warning Message for this case.
Set No Matching Mail Behavior to None, so if none of the defined filter matches, everything is fine and the sensor will stay green.
Repeat these configuration steps for your second IMAP sensor.
PRTG will start monitoring your backups immediately! Note: Of course, you can also define filters for the mail body of your backups.
Step 3: Test Your Configuration
To test your configuration, send some test mails to the accounts you use for your backups. Try several subjects. For example:
try a subject that simulates a successful backup,
try a subject for which you want a Warning status,
try to trigger a Down status, for example, by using an error term without “partially”, and by using some other text, for example, “Acronis True Image Notification from exchanger.johnqpublic.com”.
Using One Mailbox Only for Several Backup Services
For an easier setup, we recommend using separate dedicated mailboxes, one for each backup service. However, it is possible to monitor several backup services within one mailbox. This means that all of your backup solutions will send mail to the same target address. However, each of your solutions will use a different "from" address, or at least a unique identifier in the subject field.
To set up monitoring for this scenario, you need specific criteria in your sensor settings in order to identify the emails. You can either use a specific sender ("from") address, an ID; or a URL. In any case, you need one IMAP sensor for every backup job, and each of these sensors will query the same IMAP mailbox.
Configure the IMAP sensor as above.
Under Process Email Content, configure the criteria how the sensor will discern emails. Use theIdentify by fields. For example, if backup mails from backup@example.com are supposed to be analyzed, choose Check using string search in Identify by “From” Field and enter this email address. The sensor will now ignore mails from other addresses.
If the backup emails contain an ID or another distinctive term in the subject, for example, “Backup successful (ID 12345)”, you can use Identify by “Subject” Field the same way.
Debugging
If your IMAP sensors do not work as expected, ensure that the following requirements are met:
Your IMAP mailbox receives emails from your backup software.
You entered the correct credentials in PRTG for your IMAP mailbox. Ensure that PRTG can log in.
You set the email content filters correctly. Especially ensure that you use the right syntax for regular expressions! If in any doubt about what they are matching, check your regex with a regex tester like REGex TESTER.
The error/warning thresholds of your IMAP sensors are set correctly.
Note: We strongly recommend setting up a mailbox that is only used for monitoring. If a user connects to this mailbox via any email client or web GUI, the IMAP sensor will not be able to correctly calculate the last message date and will therefore likely send false alarms, especially when using error thresholds.
Sending Out PRTG SMS Notifications Using a GSM Modem and the MWconn Freeware Tool
8 Easy Steps to Go
In some monitoring scenarios users want a notifications system that can alert independently from an existing IP (and internet) connection. We have already introduced several means to do so, but with MWconn it gets really simple.
PRTG already comes with IP-based SMS functionality which enables you to trigger and send out text messages to your mobile whenever there are alarms in your monitoring. IP-independent SMS dispatch can be achieved, for example, with a GSM modem connected to the machine running the PRTG core server in combination with some third party command line client which can send out SMS text messages via the connected modem.
There are several suitable tools available. Our partner ProComp gave us a valuable hint to a solution that even works with free software only.
In this article we will describe a sample setup using the well known Freeware tool MWconn. We have set up a test scenario using an Option iCON 225 GSM USB modem (also known as "T-Mobile Web'n Walk Stick") in combination with a prepaid card operating in the Vodafone network. Our test scenario runs well under Windows 7 x64 and can send SMS text messages with up to 160 characters (longer messages will be cut off in the current MWconn version). This setup is inexpensive, too: Searching the "bay", compatible USB GSM modems start from 20 EUR (new).
Please note: This article is intended for your information to demonstrate how you can add independent SMS functionality to PRTG easily. Very likely, the steps to go will vary for your individual setup, depending on Windows version, hardware, and network provider used. Please understand that we cannot provide any support regarding the functionality of third party software, nor answer specific questions regarding hardware configurations.
Step 1: Check for Compatible Hardware
There is only a selection of GSM modems which work well with MWconn. In order to find a compatible device, please have a look at the "Data Cards" list in the MWconn wiki.
Step 2: Install Your Hardware
On the computer running your PRTG core server, install the modem using the correct drivers (we found drivers on the manufacturer's website). Make sure that the hardware is installed correctly and that no modem management software (running in the system tray) is blocking access to the modem.
In our test, we downloaded version 5.7 and installed it directly on the computer running our PRTG core server, into the folder
C:\mwconn
We assume you use the same folder.
Step 4: Configure MWconn
In the installation directory, start the "CONFIG.exe" file with Administrator rights. MWconn is mainly intended to provide internet access via GPRS/UMTS. As we only want to use SMS functionality, there are just a few specific settings we want to change here. Our SIM card does not require any PIN code.
Global Tab
In the "Global" tab, in the section "Standard settings", select the network provider from the list (you will find several for almost every country). Apply your selection by clicking on the "Confirm" button.
This will set the short message service center (SMSC) to the correct number. This setting is needed to successfully send out SMS messages. If you do not find your network provider in the list, go to the next step.
In the "Network" tab, in the "SMSC" section, make sure the correct short message service center number for your network provider is shown. It should be right if you successfully could apply settings in the previous step. Change the number if needed.
We do not pay attention to the other settings in this tab.
Connection Tab
In the "Connection" tab, disable automatic start and set the "Connection mode" option to "dial-up". This is because we do not want MWconn to establish any data connections.
In the "Start/End" tab, we will tell MWconn to set up itself as a Windows service on the computer running the PRTG core server. This way, it will start-up automatically after a server reboot and will be available even if no user is currently logged in to the server (just as the PRTG services themselves).
Make sure you started "CONFIG.exe" with Administrator privileges. From the "Rules for program start" section, choose "GPRS.exe" from the drop-down menu. For best network coverage, do notchoose one of the EXE files containing "UMTS". This way you make sure your modem connects to the nearest available cell on the mobile network, no matter if this cell supports UMTS or not.
Click the "Confirm" button and confirm the following messages. MWconn will tell you that you will need a "CONTROL.exe" file if you want to see GUI output for the program running as service. Confirm with "Yes" to create it.
MWconn is now set up as a Windows service. Open "services.msc" to check if creation was successful. There should be an entry called "MWconn_Internet" with start type "Automatic", running under the "Local System" user account.
Leave the "CONFIG.exe" program by clicking on the "OK" button.
From the installation directory, start "MWconn.exe". Make sure your GSM modem is recognized successfully. It might take a few seconds until the modem is initialized and connects to the mobile network. Eventually you should see your network provider's name and the signal strength.
"up" and "down" will both be shown as "offline", as we previously disabled automatic network connections. This is okay. MWconn is now ready to send out SMS text messages.
Step 6: Understand How Sending SMS with MWconn Works
Check the MWconn user manual in your installation directory to understand how sending SMS works.
From the MWconn Manual
«MWconnprovides other programs with the option of sending short messages. To make this process uncomplicated and also facilitate the usage of batch files, data exchange per files is used in this case. For this purpose, MWconnchecks on a regular basis, whether a file whose name meets the formatsms_ExampleApplication__155500123.txtexists in the folder sms_send in MWconnworking directory. If yes then the text that is contained therein is sent and subsequently the file is moved to the folder sms_out. The destination address must be provided in international format, the plus sign is omitted in the file name. The maximum text length is 160 characters, i.e. no 'long SMS' can be sent in this case.
Example of application: In case you want to send an SMS from a new batch file (e.g. senden.bat), then generate this file with the name "send.bat" and the following content:
echo Hello, this is an automatically sent SMS. >sms_send\sms_test__155500123
Double-clicking on the icon of "send.bat" will send an SMS with the above-mentioned content and to the number +155500123.
[...] In order to prevent duplication of SMS that is sent or that it is continuously sent across in the case of a program error, MWconn sends the consecutive SMS with the same destination and same content only post lapse of a time lag of ca. 3 minutes since the time of the last send action.»
In a Nutshell
Basically, PRTG just needs to create a text file in a specific format and save it to an "sms_send" folder in the MWconn directory, in our case:
C:\mwconn\send_sms
MWconn will check this folder and send out SMS messages automatically. Processed files will be moved to the "sms_out" folder. Only the first 160 characters of each message will be sent; all other content will be cut off.
This batch file will expect two inputs as parameters, a phone number and a message, and create a new text file using MWconn compatible naming and content. File names will also contain an ID based on the current time in order to make them unique (the ID is parsed for incompatible characters typical for date/time values).
Step 8: Add PRTG Notification
In the PRTG web interface, create a new notification using the "Execute Program" method. In the "Program file" drop down, select the "Mwconn.bat" entry.
This will create an SMS message to the US number +1-555-123-456 containing some default information about the sensor which triggered the notification.
Please note that the message must be written in double quotes (") to make sure it is regarded one parameter. Only the first 160 characters of the message will be sent.
Save the notification and test it by clicking the "Test" button in the notifications list. You should receive a test SMS shortly.
If you have problems sending SMS messages with such a setup, please make sure your MWconn Windows service is up and running. From the MWconn installation directory, start "CONTROL.exe" to see the output of the MWconn instance running as Windows service. This window should show your mobile network name and coverage. It will as well show a message while an SMS is sent.
Create a new text file with the name
sms_test__1555123456.txt
In the filename, replace 1555123456 by your own mobile number in international format, omitting the leading plus (+) sign. Open the text file and write the word "test" in it. Save it.
In the MWconn installation directory, create a "sms_send" sub folder (if it does not yet exist) and copy the newly created text file to this folder. The SMS containing the word "test" should be sent to your mobile number after a few moments.
If the SMS is not sent, please check the SIM card and make sure you are allowed to send SMS with it.
If you like MWconn, please consider donating to the author to support this project
PRTG: Ticket System Keeps Track of Network Monitoring Issues
Another new feature for PRTG Network Monitor has arrived! Monitoring your IT infrastructure and taking care of potential issues is even more comprehensible now: The new ticket system lets you and your colleagues from the administration team keep track of all network related issues which PRTG detects. You can use it to document related resolution steps and important system information.
Basically, the ticket system as implemented in PRTG manages and maintains lists of current issues regarding a defined application scenario. One element in this system is a ticket which reports about a particular problem, the status of it, information about the steps which were conducted to resolve it, and the involved person(s) who took care of the issue. You might be familiar with such systems from working with them in your support center or utilizing them as a bug tracking system. Such a ticket system perfectly suits network monitoring: You can use it in PRTG to work on network issues, to gather PRTG system information, and to distribute information and tasks to your colleagues.
Tickets in PRTG can contain information about recent events in your PRTG installation which need a closer look by the administrator or another responsible person. They can be created either by the PRTG system or by PRTG users. If you use PRTG with a team of administrators, you can now assign a monitoring related task together with your comments to a particular user directly in PRTG-quickly and easily with two clicks via the context menus of affected monitoring objects in your device tree. With notification triggers, you can set up PRTG to open tickets (and automatically close them) for any of your sensor alarms.
Notifications as Tickets
With the ticket system, we added a new option to PRTG's notification system as well: When you choose the option "Assign Ticket" within a notification, PRTG will create a ticket automatically and assign it to you (or another PRTG user defined) when there is an outage or a limit triggers the notification. As soon as a notification ticket has been opened, the responsible person receives an email that informs about the new ticket and can take care of the issue immediately. As long as the ticket remains open, you know that the problem persists. If the ticket is assigned to a whole user group (for example, the PRTG System Administrators group), all members of this group receive an email and the first person reacting to it can indicate that the issue is taken care of: "Hey, the disks on our ESX server are running out of space. Since I can take care of the issue, I'll assign this notification ticket to myself!"
A Ticket's Lifecycle: Open—Assign—Edit—Resolve—Close
You can consider each monitoring related task to have a lifecycle in the ticket system:
The task becomes alive when a ticket is created. Either a user or the PRTG system has opened it. For example, a notification was triggered by low disk space. The system creates a notification ticket and assigns it to the PRTG Administrators group.
Then, members of this group take appropriate actions. One member of the group knows who is responsible and assigns this ticket to this person together with a comment describing the problem.
This PRTG user increases the disk space; the alert condition clears and the corresponding sensor turns up again.
Now the user resolves the ticket which goes back to the PRTG admin group.
Another member of this group proofs the solution ("Sensor is indeed green!") and closes the ticket. The lifecycle of the task ends.
Oh, and by the way, to keep it simpler for you, PRTG can close notification tickets automatically as soon as an alert condition disappears. This comes in handy when an outage appears during night, for example, due to a faulty internet line:
PRTG detects the outage, opens a new ticket, and assigns it to a specific user (group) as defined.
Your provider restores the internet line and the issue is resolved by the next morning.
Because of this, there is no need for an issue tracking for you anymore.
PRTG can automatically close the ticket which it originally created when it detected the outage.
It does this automatically so you don't waste your time by looking into an issue which has already been resolved!
Three Types of Tickets: User, ToDo, Notification
In conclusion, we have three types of tickets: user tickets which are created by a user in PRTG; ToDo tickets which are created by PRTG and show important system information and in case of specific system events; and notification tickets which are created in case of monitoring alerts. Tickets are neatly arranged in a list which you can call via PRTG's main menu bar. You can filter the list by ticket status, type, responsible person, related object, and date of last change to find desired information quickly. Keep everything in your network under control—we are sure that tickets will help you to comprehend what is actually going on in your network.
Until now, PRTG has used ToDos in order to provide you with items regarding important system information or action for you to take as the administrator. For example, new ToDos were created after applying auto-discovery, after connections of new remote probes, for finished reports, or when a new software version was available, as well as for some other system related issues. However, you were only able to view information and to acknowledge it. The introduced ticket system supersedes ToDos, you will be able to view and accomplish system related tasks in a more comprehensible way and relate and work on the issues with your colleagues. PRTG documents each resolution step so you will never miss important information.
You can also maintain your tickets in PRTG for Android—we plan to include the ticket system into our iOS app in one of the upcoming versions as well!
If you aren't a PRTG user yet but want to manage network monitoring more comprehensibly with the help of tickets, then try out PRTG's free trial now!
What Is the Data that Drives Performance? By Joe Hessmiller
Research indicates despite everything we’ve tried, project success rates have hardly budged in 30 years.
A McKinsey & Company study of 5,400 large scale IT projects (projects with initial budgets greater than $15M) found that the well-known challenges with IT Project Management are persisting. Among the key findings quoted from the report: “17 percent of large IT projects go so badly that they can threaten the very existence of the company. On average, large IT projects run 45 percent over budget and 7 percent over time, while delivering 56 percent less value than predicted”.
Additionally, IBM found only 40% of projects ever met schedule, budget and quality goals.
Looking at the numbers, we can see there is plenty of opportunity for improving challenged project success rates. In 2012, the CHAOS report found that only 39% of projects were deemed successful, and 18% were just plain failures. The remaining 43% were considered “challenged.” Even if we only focus on the projects that were considered challenged, it’s clear that there’s a huge opportunity to be better.
So, rather than dwell on numbers with poor performance, let’s focus on the positive: the ability to be more competitive.
Organizations that have mature project management offices (PMOs) have been able to become more significantly and consistently reliable. This is giving them the ability to out-compete their rivals by:
28% for on-time project delivery;
24% for on-budget delivery; and
20% for meeting original goals and business intent of projects.
So, how can organizations develop more mature PMOs to be able to compete?
The answer lies in what we should be measuring in our organizations, and how we should it. It’s in the data that drives performance.
So, what should we be measuring?
In the end, there are only two things that REALLY matter:
Am I making progress toward my objectives?
Am I managing the conditions that will determine future success (risks)?
As the research in the beginning of my post indicates, managing project risk is still a challenge. It’s still a challenge because the conditions that should be tracked almost never are. These are critical conditions that determine what the volume, quality, and cost outcomes will be.
The conditions that should be monitored are:
Expectations Management – Are expectations clear?
Sponsor Involvement – Is my sponsor engaged?
Process Compliance – Are processes being followed?
Together, they address the ultimate metric:
Project Rework Probability
If an organization is lucky enough to already be aware of these conditions, a lot of them still rely on ‘feel’. Others have semi-formal management by walking around approaches. Some situate teams together for a combination of both. Others have systemized the process with surveys like Survey Monkey. A few have even developed software specifically for capturing and combining the relevant project management data and providing project stakeholder with dashboards. This equips everyone with the ability to make better decisions by acting upon the data that drives performance.
No matter what approach is taken, the organizations that have managers who monitor the conditions that matter will see significant competitive advantages.
Over the past month, IDC and Forrester Research, two of the largest and most venerable analyst firms, have released 2016 predictions – and many readers will find their reports disquieting indeed (unfortunately, neither IDC’s FutureScape 2016 or Forrester’s Predictions 2016: The Cloud Accelerates are freely available to the general public).
I believe that we’re in the beginning stages of an IT landscape transformation and, from these reports, it appears these firms share this belief. Moreover, they contain predictions that should frighten most vendors. Simply stated, this landscape transformation is bringing a new set of dominant vendors to the fore to the disadvantage of legacy players. According to IDC and Forrester, the next five years will bring immense change and disruption to the IT industry. I see this every day, but my sense is most people in the industry fail to grasp just how quickly things are changing.
It’s not often that analyst firms paint such a bleak picture. After all, much of their business comes from vendors seeking guidance about user needs, market opportunities, and technology trends. So announcing that most of them are in for hard times doesn’t seem like a strategy to generate more business.
On the other hand, providing overly rosy predictions does no one any good; moreover, tweaking predictions in a more optimistic direction that subsequently fails to materialize risks reputational damage, which is bad for long-term analyst business survival. So, it’s safe to say, for these firms to be so blunt in their assessments means they feel the trends are so profound that they cannot be ignored, denied, or whitewashed.
Here are five of the most important predictions I gleaned from their reports:
1. Legacy vendors face a bleak future
It couldn’t be put more clearly: In its report, IDC states that “By 2020, More than 30 percent of the IT Vendors Will Not Exist as We Know Them Today.” In other words, nearly one-third of today’s vendors will be out of business, stripped-down shells of their former selves, or combined via mergers.
However, this is just the warmup for what promises to be a wrenching time for the entire spectrum of legacy vendors – and the largest ones are the most at risk. It’s been clear for some time that they’re in trouble – no growth, missed earnings, excuses ranging from lousy salespeople to unfavorable exchange rates. The fact that growth has disappeared for these vendors is a leading indicator that things are about to get much, much worse.
The thing is, this isn’t a failure of execution, to be fixed with a CEO change or a large layoff. It’s a sign that the nature of the industry is changing, and these vendors aren’t delivering tomorrow’s solutions. The restructuring of the existing industry will be accelerated by a new phenomenon in the tech world – private equity.
Those of us who live in Silicon Valley smugly throw around the term disruption, and imply that any fallout is just collateral damage. The truth is that this restructuring will be extended, painful, disheartening – and inevitable.
Well, even if disruption occurs in traditional legacy vendor markets, they can always take refuge in the cloud, right? Not according to Forrester. In its prediction, it says:
The major public cloud providers will gain strength, with Amazon, IBM SoftLayer, and Microsoft capturing a greater share of the business cloud services market. Despite excellent technology and scale, Google will only begin to develop momentum in large-enterprise business in 2016. Even with innovative new players like Aliyun and DigitalOcean emerging, the number of options for general infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud services and cloud management software will be much smaller at the end of 2016 than the beginning.
I recall seeing a tweet from Lydia Leong (a savvy cloud analyst at Gartner, Twitter handle @cloudpundit) in which she said she is fielding inquiries from cloud service providers trying to figure out how to sunset their offerings.
Forrester goes on to say that users should “standardize on the cloud leaders.” In other words, we’ve reached the musical chairs stage of the CSP market, and you want to commit to providers sure to, so to speak, have a place to sit. This is, of course, a self-fulfilling prophecy – as users turn to the major providers, smaller providers end up with less revenue, thus forcing service shutdown, driving more business to the large providers … and so it goes.
This is not unexpected. In its 2014 predictions (see my discussion here), IDC said that the public CSP market would end up with six to eight players of scale, with remaining providers fighting over scraps.
Like all capital-intensive industries, this is turning into a battle of who has the biggest checkbook, and 2016 will see many current providers conclude their bank balance just isn’t big enough to stay in the market.
Big data is a phrase on everyone’s lips, and it has made data scientist, according to the Harvard Business Review, the sexiest job of the 21st century. This intense interest reflects the growing understanding that analyzing large amounts of data can offer insights previously unavailable or, worse, ignored in favor of “gut feel” and intuition.
What’s remarkable is how widely big data is being applied. There does not seem to be any area that big data, and its associated fields like machine learning and artificial intelligence, is not being applied. Big data is transforming drug discovery, healthcare, education, language translation, employment recruiting … in fact, it might be easier to list industries and tasks big data isn’t transforming than to list those it is.
But according to IDC, big data is only getting started. Today, only 1 percent of all apps use cognitive services; by 2018 (in other words, in three years), 50 percent will. Essentially, analytics will be embedded in every application, used to facilitate functionality or convenience.
One of the major challenges of big data is, naturally enough, how much storage it requires. This is an area the big cloud providers are jumping on. You’ve undoubtedly heard of IBM’s Watson, but Google, Microsoft, and AWS have all rolled out machine learning services as well as access to a range of very large datasets that can be used for analytics. One obvious implication of this trend is that it once again makes the large providers more attractive to the disadvantage of smaller CSPs that cannot make the investment to host machine learning services.
IDC’s prediction may be too optimistic in terms of timing, but it’s clear that big data will be an important area for enterprise IT for the foreseeable future.
4. Enterprises turn into software companies
So enterprises are turning away from traditional vendors and toward cloud providers. They’re increasingly leveraging open source. In short, they’re becoming software companies, or, as IDC puts it:
By the End of 2017, Two-Thirds of the CEOs of Global 2000 Enterprises Will Have Digital Transformation at the Center of Their Corporate Strategy.
and
By 2018, Enterprises Pursuing DX Strategies Will More than Double Software Development Capabilities; 2/3 of Their Coders Will Focus on Strategic DX Apps/Services.
Corporate IT is about to see its role and expectations change as never before. For many, this will be disconcerting. As I often put it: “For years, IT has asked for ‘a seat at the table.’ It’s terrifying when you finally get a seat and then everyone turns to you and asks ‘what should we do?’.”
But that’s the situation most IT organizations will find themselves over the next few years. While many companies outsourced their initial forays into mobile applications, there’s no way that you can build a digital enterprise on the back of external consultancies.
Furthermore, even if you could, no company could afford to do so. Being a digital enterprise is so critical to the future of every company that relying on an external party, and living with the inevitable inefficiencies, false starts, and missed communications, would be too dangerous.
Instead, IT will become the core driver of “how business does business.” The responsibility -- and expectations -- will be high. For those CIOs who rise to the challenge, it will be a heady time. Those unable to fulfill this role will face a gloomy future as they are discarded in favor of someone -- anyone -- seemingly better suited to the task at hand.
Make no mistake, as companies move toward their digital future, IT will be leading the way.
5. Developers are the scarce commodity
Of course, CIOs can’t do it on their own. They require an organization staffed with people capable of implementing the applications that will make the company a digital enterprise.
And everything about those applications will be different from traditional enterprise applications. They’ll use different languages. Different databases. Different frameworks. Different execution environments. In short, nearly everything will be new – and require a different set of skills from those appropriate to last-generation applications. IDC puts it this way:
By 2017, over 50 percent of organizations' IT spending will be for 3rd platform technologies, solutions, and services, rising to over 60 percent by 2020.
For a discussion of the third platform, see my blog post here. The bottom line is that the difference between “enterprise IT” and “technology vendor” will blur as both seek to implement technology solutions that form the basis of how their company operates.
Therefore, one thing you can expect to see is a brutal war for developers (which I wrote about two years ago here) as enterprise IT shops and tech companies battle for a limited pool of next-generation talent.
Frankly, I think this will require a significant mind shift on the part of both enterprise IT organizations as well as the larger entities of which they are part. IT has traditionally been viewed as a cost center with a focus on keeping a lid on budgets – and one place that enterprise IT has traditionally held the line on is salaries. In all too many enterprise IT organizations, developers are seen as odd-behaving interchangeable commodities. The emerging reality is that developers are critical resources, who will increasingly be able to write their own ticket.
And don’t imagine that your IT organization is protected because it’s located outside Silicon Valley. The demand for talent by valley companies is so high that they are more and more frequently placing centers of talent wherever it happens to be located – and that could very well be wherever you’re located.
In conclusion, both Forrester and IDC’s predictions are unusually direct statements of a very different world of IT, one in which software infuses every part of an enterprise and technical talent is critical. If I hadn’t read the reports, I would have been surprised to be told about their bluntness; reading them, you can see that it will be an incredibly tumultuous time for the industry. I wonder how their briefings are going these days?
Named by Wired.com as one of the 10 most influential people in cloud computing, Bernard Golden serves as vice president of strategy for ActiveState Software, an independent provider of CloudFoundry. He is the author of four books on virtualization and cloud computing, his most recent book being Amazon Web Services for Dummies. Learn more about him at www.bernardgolden.com.
Administrators have preset routine (run book) tasks to perform either during network faults or as an on-going maintenance task. These first level troubleshooting steps and repetitive laborious maintenance tasks can now be orchestrated and automated through powerful IT workflow automation engine.
Code-free IT workflow automation with out-of-the-box checks and actions
Over 70 workflow checks and actions grouped under 9 different categories, including VMware ESX actions are available for you to construct a powerful workflow rule to suit your IT management need. Just create workflows using these out-of-the-box checks and actions to the workflow builder and you are good to go.
You don’t have to skim through complex scripts and codes to automate your IT. OpManager IT workflow automation is carefully built with user friendly interface and code-free
IT automation
to help you build workflow rules quickly.
An agile and flexible drag-n-drop workflow builder
The intuitive drag-n-drop workflow builder makes it really straightforward to create new workflow rules for every administrator.
Besides defining new workflows, you can modify an existing workflow by making changes to the conditions or actions inside the workflow builder.
Initiate the workflow rules on network faults or as an on-going maintenance tasks
The application of IT
run book automation
can be initiated when there is a network fault, or as on-going maintenance tasks, or even on an ad-hoc basis. OpManager IT workflow automation module gives you the free hand to trigger workflow in all the aforementioned situations.
Record the IT workflow procedures as an XML and ensure structured practices across IT
Using OpManager, seasoned administrators who are well-informed of their organization’s IT setup, can create IT workflow rules to meet the organization’s requirement. Contextual workflows address your specific IT automation needs, leading to minimized downtime and reduced time to repair a fault. These structured, time invested, useful documents can now be preserved as XML files with the option to export the workflows and also import them even into other instances of OpManager when there is a need.
Audit trails of workflow progresses and logs with detailed workflow execution logs reports
Every executed workflow is recorded under "Execution logs" for future audits. This report comes handy when the administrators want to make sure what has happened during a particular workflow execution.
Benefits of OpManager IT workflow automation:
Helps you...
Resolve issues faster and reduce MTTR (Mean Time To Repair)
Inherit your IT infrastructure best practices and ensure structured/ proven methods to handle incidents and problems
Automate repeated activity executions for efficient IT management
Avoid human errors and substantially reduce support and operational costs
Backup Monitoring via Email
Email Indicating a Successful Backup
Email Indicating a Partially Successful Backup
Email Indicating a Failed Backup
Device Settings 
