IT Dashboards and Templates
Below is the continuation of the transcript from a Webcast video from InetSoft Technology. The speaker is Mark Flaherty, Vice President of Marketing at InetSoft.
Bord: Do we have actual downloadable IT dashboards and templates? And does the whitepaper show how any IT pro can sit down with their systems center infrastructure and design this IT dashboard system and build it out?
Flaherty: Yes and no. So we didn’t want to just leave it at whitepaper because there were a lot of findings, a lot of really good hints that we came up with. We figured out that extracting information from this data warehouse might not be necessarily transparent to most IT pros if you don’t have an understanding or workings of the system. We laid that all out in this whitepaper, but then we have gone the extra step and packaged up some of these preconfigured ETL packages, the dashboards, the cubes so that with a one pager, install instruction type of manual, an IT pro can get it up and running, see what's there, what's possible, get some immediate value. And then in the whitepaper if they want to expand it out, grow it to meet their individual needs, then they can do that in a expedited way.
Bord: You mentioned one particular audience that we have kind of had to focus on a lot here at InetSoft which is that of the IT pro manager, right. Where is the significant value in this solution for the IT manager?
Flaherty: The IT manager is going to have a better understanding of how his IT department is performing, if it’s optimized, as well as being able to track things such as service level agreements. As part of the solution you can create a scorecard that matches all of the metrics and targets of the whole service agreement and then you can track how your department is doing against those service level agreements and where the problem areas are. If there are problem areas, then you can dive into the root causes of those problem areas.
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Bord: And I would imagine there is some pretty significant customization that can occur on those scorecards to kind of help tailor them for a particular environment?
Flaherty: Absolutely, it’s all customizable. The nice thing is that the data warehouse that is fed off of the operations manager database.
Bord: And so do you have customers who have kind of run this in test phases or beta phases already?
Flaherty: Yeah we do, we have a couple of very large customers that have had a need for this and we have been working with them to tweak the system to get it up and running and they are running it now sort of in a test environment to see how it operates and it seems to work.
Bord: And what is their response to this?
Flaherty: They are very happy, yes. They love getting more of this critical performance information and having it at their finger tips.
Bord: So this solution is going beyond just reporting out the information coming from the servers, it’s turning it into performance management and some degree of predictive analytics, being able to see into the future.
Flaherty: Yes, it has a lot of trending functionality so the history of what the systems have done in the past can be compare to current performance, so you can see where spikes should or shouldn’t occur at what times. There is also a predictive element to it because our library of BI functions is robust, and there are lot of data mining capabilities. You can actually data mine through this data and get some predictive capabilities which is something that has been difficult to do with the data in the past.