How to gain total visibility and better insights into your IT infrastructure

Having visibility over your all IT environments, from desktop virtualisation to web apps to storage and networks, is vital for every IT team. Yet so many still struggle with only having visibility over silos of data, and end up passing issues from one part of the IT team to the other as each tries to find a solution. The result? Frustration for the IT team and end user alike.

Over our last couple of blogs, we’ve explored why a lack of visibility into your IT infrastructure and end-user experience causes pain for both IT and the end-user – read parts one and two here. Now we look at how you can get that visibility back into your IT environments and back into your business.

What sort of issues are we talking about?

Troubleshooting is complex. You have a client connected over a network, which is connected to a server, which is connected to other servers, storage, and network infrastructure in a data centre. And if the user is at home, they may be connecting over public internet. Slow page loads, login errors, screen freezes, slow logins, session disconnects, and overall bad user experience can have a significant impact on business operations. But identifying the exact cause of these performance issues can be a challenge.

After seeing the frustration this was causing among IT teams and end users, Deptive realised that we needed to create a solution that would combine the best of in-house customised visibility and monitoring tools with the convenience of a SaaS offering to give businesses an overarching view of their entire IT infrastructure and help them troubleshoot, make decisions, and improve the end user experience.

Deptive Visibility Insights: Expert knowledge wrapped around an existing tool – the secret sauce

Commercial on-premise options already tend to give a great view, but need expertise to get them working effectively for your IT team (see part 2 of this blog series). We’ve taken an off-the-shelf product (eG Innovations) and made it available in an “as a service” model by implementing it in Azure. We do the hard work for you, setting up the infrastructure, and then maintaining and updating it along the way, tweaking and tuning it for your business as we go.

What makes this so effective, and what our customers keep telling us they love, is that we wrap our expert knowledge around the monitoring software, generating monthly insight reports for your specific environment. We understand that it’s fairly complex to dig in and figure out what’s going on – so we’ll tell you what you should be focusing on.

We particularly see this as a benefit for those using Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop, or other end-user computing platforms. We know how powerful these tools are for empowering your workforce to be productive anytime, anywhere – but they can also be prone to end user issues because there are so many inter-dependencies. By wrapping our expertise around our visibility tool, we keep an eye on all those inter-dependencies to make sure everything’s working together well.

Monitoring-as-a-service

Like a SaaS offering, we wanted to create a monitoring solution that would be flexible and with a lower cost of entry than enterprise on-site options. For a monthly fee, and using a secure cloud hosted (Azure) platform, we:

• Consistently keep track of the health and performance of your environment
• Upgrade and maintain the monitoring system
• Provide monthly reports highlighting trends, issues, and capacity
• Provide detailed, and actionable recommendations that will massively improve the experience of your users
• Meet with you quarterly to discuss trends and improvements
• Allow you to login at any time to get overarching visibility over your IT infrastructure, run reports, and diagnose issues
• Provide visibility and support for 120+ applications, including Citrix XenApp, StoreFront, NetScaler, and Provisioning Services, IIS, Active Directory, SQL, and Oracle

In-depth reporting and recommendations

The key difference when you have your own on site monitoring option is that you’re still likely to spend most of your time troubleshooting, or working in the job day to day. Without specialist expertise, it’s difficult to find the time, or have the ability, to dig deep into the data and discover what needs to be done long-term, or what issues may become even bigger issues in the future. You might know that something’s not right – but finding the time to discover what it is can be tricky. That’s where we come in – interpreting alerts and metrics into actionable recommendations that you can take away and run with.

Plus we’re always at the other end of the phone to help you troubleshoot. Why wouldn’t you want a direct line to the best support team on the market?

Ultimately, partnering with Deptive improves your organisation’s ability to respond to issues, resolve problems more quickly, fine tune your system, and, most importantly, keep your people happy and productive. If you need better visibility over your IT environments and the existing solutions just won’t cut it, why not get in touch?