The FireBlog

Change for the better

They always say to look before you leap, right?  Well here at FireScope, we’ve listened closely to these wise words, and kept them in mind while creating the Change Management feature of CMDB.  

Change is chaotic - all too often a system enters maintenance without clear understanding of who will be impacted, if the change will be beneficial, or if it will disrupt other applications.  Whether it's new assets introduced to the enterprise or legacy systems being retired, changes need to be thoughtfully and thoroughly planned.  FireScope  CMDB’s pre-flight testing makes change structured and predictable, essentially letting you document, approve and organize your change so there are no surprises.  Experience the magic for yourself by downloading a free trial of FireScope CMDB!

 HIGHLIGHTS

•  Easy, straightforward process

•  Point-and-click change planning, reduces workload

•  Plan mode provides sandbox for evaluating change and impact.

•  Easy visibility into change impact on critical services

Keepin’ It Real-time

The Live Links feature of CMDB is a rare bird.  Unique to FireScope, Live Links gives you on-demand, attribute-level federation with virtually any data repository.   Most federation techniques grab information on a set schedule or as one-time occurrences, meaning by the time you see it, your data is already hours old – not good.  While this may be acceptable for the majority of your data, there's always a few key pieces of information that are constantly changing; think things like the number of open tickets for a CI, current status.

We created FireScope Live Links to keep data fresh.  Sometimes you just want a quick glance of information in a third-party solution such as those mentioned above, the last event identified by your monitoring tools, or who last logged in.  Live Links gives you complete control over what data to aggregate and how it fits with your data model. 

RECAP

FireScope Live Links = Gain instant, on-demand access to fresh data from your existing applications, and connect with any standard database technology.  Plus the setup is just two easy steps – it takes minutes.  TRY CMDB FO FREE!

Service Visualization – its not just maps and graphs

Everyone is different – even here at FireScope. There are no two people here who have the same opinions, same taste in music, same tattoos, or same way of wanting to visualize data. That diversity is really a driving force behind one main concept that we strive to deliver in our products – customizable - we give our clients the framework to do whatever they want or need to do with the data presented to them.

 

Take visualization, for instance. When you think of visualization, what comes to mind? Graphs? Tables? Pie charts? What about Google Maps? What about something I’ve never even thought of? That’s my point exactly – it’s not up to us, the power is in your hands.

 

When we designed FireScope BSM we wanted to free the user to do as they please. You want charts, graphs and trends? You got it. You want an interactive Google Map actively displaying real-time event status for every location? You got it. How about a customized graphic with the layout of your datacenter, with live map links displaying live event notification? Sure, you can have that too.

 

Until now, users who wanted a customized view into their data had major restrictions placed on them. Mostly limited to graphs and a static map, users were getting tired of being told what visualization was supposed to mean to them. FireScope has taken the power back and put it in the hands of those who best know what they need and how they need it. In fact, FireScope allows users to upload their own icons, images and maps – even Visio Diagrams.

 

But that wasn’t enough – the custom maps that users upload are not only clickable and possess exploration possibilities through drill-down functionality, but they can display status for any event at all, not solely up/down. The capabilities are truly endless.

 

FireScope BSM gives users such power to provide visualization to services and so far, we’ve had great feedback!  So for fun, we’re starting a gallery of customization.  Send us screenshots of how you have utilized our drag and drop features or uploaded your own graphic and used it as a custom map.

Here are some examples:

Here is a map created by one of our customers who uses the custom map as a relationship map. The links are live map points displaying active relationships. This was created by adding CI’s, and dragging and dropping the icons to create a relationship map.

 

These are racks of servers from a datacenter. The green servers in this case indicate that there are no events (critical or not - all defined by the user), if there were any notifications, the server status color would have changed to red. (The red server in the second rack from the right is the FireScope appliance)

This major theatre chain uploaded their own drawings of their locations and can easily monitor their services in each auditorium, at each location. In this example, the red auditoriums indicate a failed event on the monitored service in that auditorium. 

So, in what creative ways do you use the powerful visualization offerings? Send us screenshots and we'll post them for everyone to see!

IT’s Role in Customer Service – Part I

Does IT have a role in customer service?  Well, let me ask this another way.  How many times have you given up trying to buy something online because the site was taking too long to load?  How many times have you walked away from a business after seeing ‘Out of Order’ on a kiosk?  Have you ever switched banks because their online banking was too painful to use?

These are just a few examples of how IT directly impacts your customers’ experiences.  In fact, it’s probably fair to say that your customers interact more with a business’ technology than its employees.  And a poorly performing or failed application can be just as damaging to the business as a rude or incompetent employee, if not more if you consider the scale.  So, in times like these, where every business is scrutinizing the bottom line, how you manage your digital customer experience is more important than ever. 

Consider these questions:
1.  Do you know ALL of the interfaces – websites, terminals, kiosks, applications, etc. – that your customers are using to transact business with you?  (Surprisingly, in many organizations this information is scattered, fragmented)
2.  Who is the first to notify you when customer-facing interfaces have failed, especially remote assets such as kiosks or terminals?  The fourth customer to give up?  Employees who happen to walk by?
3.  How quickly does it take on average to restore services once you’re notified?
4.  Do you actively measure the performance, from the user’s perspective, of customer facing interfaces?  Do you have thresholds for required performance, or processes to ensure performance?
5.  Do you track failed transactions?  Do you have processes in place to investigate the cause as part of a continual service improvement system?

The point of these questions is this – what are you doing to reduce the number of lost customers or lost opportunities?  Imagine the impact to your business if 15% of these damaging incidents could be avoided in a six month period, and 10% more in subsequent improvement cycles?

In this 3-part series, I’ll talk about how IT can start measuring it’s impact on customer service, the KPI’s of IT customer service, and the approaches FireScope customers have used to improve the quality of their customers’ experiences.  Check back next week for the second installment.

Imitation is the best form of flattery

It’s been nearly a year since we launched the Business-Edition of FireScope Business Service Management, designed to make BSM accessible where it never was before – smaller, growing businesses.  And if our rapidly expanding customer base wasn’t proof enough that this was a brilliant idea, the number of our competitors following our footsteps certainly is; Nimsoft being the latest, and only a year behind the times.

Unfortunately, just as many PC manufacturers have taken the wrong clues in trying to mirror Apple’s success, it seems that Business Service Management vendors trying to break into this market are missing key points. 

The prevailing thought seems to be, slash your price point and dumb down the feature set, and you’re all set with an SMB solution.   Someone’s obviously not listening to their customers. 

We spent considerable time in discussions with our customers while designing FireScope BSM:BE, and consistently heard the same things:

1.    My time is just as important as money – initial configuration, maintenance and post-deployment configuration of new assets and technologies shouldn’t eat up my time, or require me to bring in a consultant or hire a dedicated admin.
2.    I know how I want to run my business; don’t make me change processes just to use a solution.
3.    I’ve got stuff you’ve never heard of, so give me a path to monitor and manage them without custom programming.
4.    Don’t nickel and dime me with add-ons or consultant time.  It’s not the 90’s any more, don’t try to turn a $10k product into a $100k project.
5.    Don’t add to my stress.  I’ve got too much on my plate as it is.

The heart of the success of our Business-Edition isn’t the price point, it’s all the little stuff around it that the competition misses.  It’s delivering the solution in a prebuilt virtual appliance, so all the customer has to do is power it on.  Its embedding best practices and help through the solution to walk overworked users through complicated tasks easily, quickly.  It’s offering a web-based administrative interface that can automate administrative tasks like updates and backups.  It’s keeping things easy, straight-forward and avoiding complicated scripting languages or inventing our own rules language.

Granted, I just gave away our secret recipe, but I’m not worried.  One of the advantages of not being a massive company is that by the time the competition catches up, we’ll be two or more innovations ahead.