Facilitating ITIL Best Practices with the nGenius® Performance

Management Solution

Today’s Agenda

ITIL Overview, Benefits and Implementation TipsNetScout’s nGenius Facilitates:– Business Alignment – Benchmarking– Incident Management– Problem Management– Automation– Streamlining Workflow– Knowledge Sharing– Capacity Management– Enhanced Communication

Growing attention toward IT process improvements

Organizations are more reliant on technology

As technology dependence increases, the business is making demands for highly reliable IT service excellence

IT is increasingly expected to enhance business processes

Compliance requirements (HIPAA, SOX, Basel II) increase the need for measurement and documentation

What is ITIL

Information Technology Infrastructure Library– De facto standard for providing IT service excellence– Under development since late 1980s within the British

government

A framework of best practices and management guidelines for IT Services– Flexibility to fit individual organizations – i.e., best practices

without specific direction

Goal to develop repeatable methods and procedures for service support and deliveryUltimate goal to improve quality of IT services delivered to the business

Core ITIL Texts

Service Support

Service Delivery

Information & Communication Technology (ICT) Infrastructure Management

Application Management

Security Management

Software Asset Management

Business Perspective

Planning to Implement Service Management

BenefitsConsistent, high-quality service (from the business perspective)Enhanced relationships, trust, and credibility with the business Cost reduction as a result of optimization and improved investmentBreaking down of IT silos– Establishing integrated processes – Implementing common terminology

Improved IT staff productivity and concentration on strategic projectsBetter use of skills and experience leading to greater IT staff job satisfaction

ITIL Implementation Tips Almost every company that executes a well-planned, well-run IT service management program based on ITIL reports significant benefits…

Executive support and employee buy-in are essentialMeasure performance before making changesFocus on service and business performance improvements Put in place “just enough” processDon’t be too ambitiousMake sure your organizational structure supports service management excellenceChanging process means changing the culture and the organizationImprovements in service quality and customer satisfaction can only come through a long-term program of changeContinuous improvement is necessary to maintain the highest level of Service Management

nGenius® Facilitates ITIL Best Practices

Business Alignment Benchmarking

Incident ManagementProblem Management

AutomationStreamlining Workflow

Knowledge SharingCapacity Management

Enhanced Communication

The nGenius® Performance Management Solution

Increase visibility into the network traffic flows to ensure business continuity– Quickly restore service, manage capacity and understand the

users’ quality of experience– Expedite incident resolution – Optimize infrastructure/bandwidth consumption– Proactively plan for new IT services

Facilitate IT’s intradepartmental process integration and communication and lower your TCO– Unified performance management

Streamline your workflow in support of process improvements

nGenius® in the ITIL landscape

Service Delivery– Service Level Management – Financial Management for IT Services – Capacity Management– Availability Management– IT Services Continuity Management

Service Support– Service Desk– Incident Management – Problem Management – Change Management – Configuration Management– Release Management

Business AlignmentSpeak in a language business people will understand: ApplicationsMake business-justifiable decisions about your time, budget and policiesnGenius Facilitates…– Identification of all applications

• Well-known, custom, web-based, complex (e.g., SAP/R3, Citrix), and next-generation communication applications (e.g., VoIP, video, instant messaging, peer-to-peer).

– Granular insight into key business applications: volume, utilization, response time, host/conversation information

– Partitioning information into business-relevant groups

All Applications: Understand how the business uses the network

Do you know all the applications running on your network? Application visibility provides business

justification for IT decisions

Do you know all the applications running on your network? Application visibility provides business

justification for IT decisions

Well-knownWell-known

CustomCustom

ComplexComplex

Web-basedWeb-based

IP MulticastIP Multicast

P2PP2P

VoIPVoIP

BenchmarkingMeasurement is the first step to improve results– You cannot tangibly improve what you cannot measure– Define key performance metrics to measure improvements and

success• Define metrics that align with the business

nGenius Facilitates…– Robust reporting capability to document benchmark– Inventory of all applications on the network– Full coverage of the network (whether instrumented or not) for

assessment of enterprise-wide capacity– Profile of network activity and business application performance

Benchmark response times of key business applications. As you go advance through the ITIL process, compare current with benchmark to track

improvements and make adjustments to application response time goals.

Benchmark response times of key business applications. As you go advance through the ITIL process, compare current with benchmark to track

improvements and make adjustments to application response time goals.

Response time provides insight into the end-user experienceResponse time provides insight into the end-user experience

Incident ManagementTroubleshoot and restore service performanceDiagnoses are difficult because of the inter-dependencies of the infrastructure components in delivering application services – Everything looks okay from each IT silo

Ultimate goal: Reduce MTTRnGenius Facilitates…– Real-time access to high-definition traffic flows – Ease of navigation with top-down approach with context-sensitive

drill-down and data mining– Ease of correlation of all key data sets so you can pull up any set

of metrics needed to see the context of an incident in order to quickly restore service

Context to performance problems: An alarm indicates degrading response of a key business application -- what metrics do you need to solve the problem? In

Workspaces you call display all needed information side-by-side

Context to performance problems: An alarm indicates degrading response of a key business application -- what metrics do you need to solve the problem? In

Workspaces you call display all needed information side-by-side

High-Definition: Finely granular performance information allows you to analyze every application, host and conversation, providing all the detail you need to quickly solve the

performance incident

High-Definition: Finely granular performance information allows you to analyze every application, host and conversation, providing all the detail you need to quickly solve the

performance incident

Who is creating this spike in traffic?Who is creating this spike in traffic?

Problem ManagementIn-depth investigation/analysis into the root cause of an incident or group of incidentsHistorical analysis – takes place after the incident has been resolvedGoal to prevent recurrence of incident(s)Ultimate goal: service continuity and increase in MTBF nGenius Facilitates…– Continuous recording and forensic evidence to get at the root

cause of a complex application problem– No need to wait for the problem to recur– Access to detailed information about a problem within the

application as evidenced within a packet trace

Sub-second granularitySub-second granularityDrill-down into applicationsDrill-down into applications

To packet decode

To packet decode

Drill-down to ConversationsDrill-down to

ConversationsTo bounce

diagramTo bounce

diagram

Graphically navigate through to find the ultimate root cause of incidents – get detailed

evidence into the application

Graphically navigate through to find the ultimate root cause of incidents – get detailed

evidence into the application

AutomationGoal: Reduce time setting manual thresholdsGoal: Reduce number of false alarmsGoal: Detect, diagnose and take corrective action in order to prevent incident from impacting customers Ultimate goal: Minimization of business-impacting incidents and efficient use of staff timenGenius Facilitates…– Automatic identification and communication of performance

anomalies and threshold violations – An early warning event that automatically provides incident

diagnosis – you don’t have to start troubleshooting from scratch

Early Warning with Indication of Impending Incident

No need to manually set alarm thresholds: Automatically learns normal patterns of usage

Automatically detects anomalous behaviorAutomatically to diagnoses anomalies to offending applications

No need to manually set alarm thresholds: Automatically learns normal patterns of usage

Automatically detects anomalous behaviorAutomatically to diagnoses anomalies to offending applications

Streamlining Workflow

Goal: Create a more efficient troubleshooting processGoal: Staff can focus on more strategic projectsUltimate goal: Reduce MTTR and provide strategic services to the businessnGenius Facilitates – Top-down approach to quickly get information required to restore

service and get at problem root cause– Seamless and contextual integration across products and

functionality via robust and scalable architecture• Highly intelligent performance events sent to EMS• Network/performance context for device and application exceptions

in EMS

Streamlining the Workflow for seamless troubleshooting

nGenius Architecture enables correlation of all key data sets so you can pull up any set of

metrics needed to see the context of an incident in order to quickly restore service

nGenius Architecture enables correlation of all key data sets so you can pull up any set of

metrics needed to see the context of an incident in order to quickly restore service

Capacity Management

Goal: Reduce number of capacity-related incidentsGoal: Reduce number of unplanned “acquisitions”Ultimate goal: cost justifiable capacity managementnGenius Facilitates…– Identification of the most- and least-utilized segments,

circuits, switch ports in order to optimize usage across the enterprise

– Proactively forecasting segment, circuit and app growth so you don’t get caught unaware

– Identification of the applications that consume bandwidth

“Most-utilized” indicate bottlenecks, “least-utilized” indicate over capacity: Make a goal to optimize traffic by redistributing

load, eliminating undesired traffic, rescheduling processes, redistributing load, and adding new bandwidth where required

“Most-utilized” indicate bottlenecks, “least-utilized” indicate over capacity: Make a goal to optimize traffic by redistributing

load, eliminating undesired traffic, rescheduling processes, redistributing load, and adding new bandwidth where required

Knowledge Sharing & CollaborationGoal: to reduce the need for support escalationGoal: have experts spend more time on strategic projectsGoal: greater job satisfactionUltimate goal: faster service restoration and more strategic service from ITnGenius Facilitates…– Unified tool supporting multiple IT functions: multiple colleagues can use

the same tool and speak to one another from the same base of network understanding

– Web-based access to collaborate with colleagues around the globe to get best resources on the case

– Sharing Workspaces so experts can demonstrate what info is critical when troubleshooting particular incident types

– Cross-IT collaboration ability to share captured evidence showing the root cause of a complex application problem

Application Volume and Utilization Stats

Application Volume and Utilization Stats

VoIP Call StatsVoIP Call Stats

Link StatsLink Stats

Response TimeResponse Time Device CPU and MemoryDevice CPU and Memory

With various types of performance metrics, this product can serve

multiple tasks and personnel in the IT organization.

With various types of performance metrics, this product can serve

multiple tasks and personnel in the IT organization.

Transfer knowledge: Is this the type of information needed on a regular basis for the operations team? Save as a shared Workspace so all team members

can work off the same information.

Transfer knowledge: Is this the type of information needed on a regular basis for the operations team? Save as a shared Workspace so all team members

can work off the same information.

Enhancing Communication

Goal: Demonstrate value of IT / service improvements to the business Goal: Deliver only job-relevant information to many people with individual needs – with minimal effortnGenius Facilitates…– Reporting to business/executives that everything is under

control– Support IT decision making– Intuitive creation of custom reports

• Job title: enterprise-wide summaries down to meticulous details• IT function: real-time and historical• Organizational structure – e.g., by location, department, business unit• Scheduled reports, on-demand reports, data export

Scheduled reports with summarized and detailed

information. Easily customizable to reflect

individual needs

Scheduled reports with summarized and detailed

information. Easily customizable to reflect

individual needs

On-demand reports created from Workspace

On-demand reports created from your Workspace. Personalize by adding a note or renaming graphs

for business audiences

On-demand reports created from your Workspace. Personalize by adding a note or renaming graphs

for business audiences

WAN Probes NetFlow Collectors LAN Probes Application Fabric Monitors

The nGenius® Performance Management Solution

The nGenius® Performance Management Solution

Increase visibility into the network traffic flows to ensure business continuity– Quickly restore service, manage capacity and understand the

users’ quality of experience– Expedite incident resolution – Optimize infrastructure/bandwidth consumption– Proactively plan for new IT services

Facilitate IT’s intradepartmental process integration and communication and lower your TCO– Unified performance management

Streamline your workflow in support of process improvements

THANK YOU!

Facilitating ITIL Best Practices with the nGenius® Performance

Management Solution