At the Cherwell Global Conference 2018 last week, held in historic Colorado Springs, Colorado, a new kind of history was being formed. Automation was the theme that emerged in my conversations with customers, partners, and industry leaders.
Eventually, the talks would often lead to how tickets — mostly manually created and encompassed everything from facilities, HR, general requests and IT services — were getting created and processed within Cherwell. As the conversations narrowed down to IT services, I wanted to understand more about how infrastructure and application issues surfaced into Cherwell and any challenges around that process.
Here are some themes gathered from the discussions:
- Too many email alerts, which cause recipients to ignore the messages
- A high number of in-actionable tickets coming from IT Operations
- Manual workflow processes from monitoring events to ticketing
As digital transformations proceed, the threat is that projects reach a point off stalling out and losing momentum.
The systemic issue is the need to provide more automation into the monitoring, event management, and ticketing process. Most of the attendees agreed that they had plenty of monitoring and, in many cases, overlapping capabilities of monitoring tools. The plethora of monitoring tools provides high volumes of events, creating a lot of emails and tickets. The back-end churn of people managing this process is resulting in lengthy end user service impacts and rising costs to the business.
Automation Reduces Cost
Moogsoft is uniquely positioned to help improve the economics of IT Operations by reducing costs, improving service quality, and helping to enable and accelerate the momentum of digital transformation projects.
By continuously ingesting the monitoring data, Moogsoft removes the human element of manually analyzing thousands, millions, or billions of events per day. Our human minds just can’t keep up with the volumes of data. By using algorithms to reduce noise, cluster alerts across domains, and create Situations (items that become tickets) the resulting tickets are more meaningful and actionable. It’s the continuous automation of the data ingestion, algorithmic data analysis, collaborative workflow, and eco-system integrations that helps bring the economic value of IT Operations to organizations.
AWS & Cherwell: Resource Provisioning Automation
Many great and insightful speaker sessions occurred throughout the week as well.
I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the session, “AWS & Cherwell: Easier Provisioning of AWS Resources using Cherwell’s Web Portal” by Matthew Peeples of Cherwell and MaSonya Scott of AWS. They talked about how the Cherwell web portal could be used to automate the provisioning of AWS services.
The integration provides the capability for Cherwell users to request, govern and fulfil the request for new AWS services. Once the request is made and approved from Cherwell, AWS provisions the requested resources and provides inventory data back to the Cherwell CMDB. AWS also uses CloudWatch to send resource issues back to Cherwell to begin the incident process.
The benefits of this automation decrease the lead time to provision new resources, speeds up the application development process and provides guard rails to ensure that the right people can get the resources they need when they need them.
In my opinion, I believe that there is an impending expiration date on every company and its services for those who do not engage in the iterative process to automate in their digital transformation journey.
My sentiment is shared by MaSonya Scott of AWS, who said at the Cherwell conference, “Design with operations in mind to prevent the cloud migration stall.”
As digital transformations proceed, the threat is that projects reach a point off stalling out and losing momentum. At Moogsoft, we have heard from our prospects that IT Operations can become one of those stall points. If they are left out of the process and not considered with how this new environment will affect them, momentum can be lost. IT Operations teams already have an overwhelming amount of data and workflow inefficiencies to overcome due to emerging technologies.
Considering the integration from AWS and Cherwell, I agree with MaSonya about keeping operations involved. This is where Moogsoft can be a value multiplier to the existing AWS and Cherwell integration. With Moogsoft in the mix, the AWS Cloudwatch events could be consumed along with all of the other events from the on-premise environment. Remediations could be initiated by Moogsoft into the AWS Systems Manager. Cherwell CMDB information would enrich the raw events in Moogsoft, giving more context to the events. Tickets would then be opened by Moogsoft into Cherwell leveraging the two-way integration.
It’s this type of automation that helps our joint customers move faster and more reliably with their digital transformations and prevent stall.
