Streamlining ITSM Operations Reduces Costs
IT Service Management
When using Microsoft 365 services the main benefit of having a monitoring tool that can assess performance quality and identify issues is that it sends alerts into a ticketing tool such as ServiceNow for example, to initiate the process of remediating the problem. When you don’t have a monitoring tool in place then support tickets aren’t automatically sent and users must identify issues and send in tickets manually with little to no information on where the problem came from. Without sufficient data on the Microsoft 365 service issue, the user is immediately challenged and must fight an uphill battle to both uncover and fix the problem. This blog will examine the importance of implementing the right monitoring tool to help streamline your organization’s ITSM operations and help reduce service remediation costs.
Microsoft Limitations
The Microsoft call quality dashboard is a useful tool that provides valuable information about Microsoft Teams voice data; however, it does not alert or integrates with other ITSM tools and processes. It also does not assess service tickets related to Teams’ issues, prioritize what those issues are, or send them to the appropriate teams for remediation. Microsoft does provide Microsoft 365 health alerts but they only pertain to issues that Microsoft may have. This is good information to have but there is only so much an organization can do when the problem is out of its control. The less data a user has regarding a Microsoft 365 service issue, the more difficult it is to properly identify and fix the problem. Most performance issues stem from the route to the Microsoft global network, and this is where ITSM has very little visibility without a proper Microsoft 365 monitoring tool. This is where Martello’s Vantage DX solution comes in.
Martello Solution
Martello’s solution not only helps identify service issues it helps provide meaningful data on the issue itself, specific to the workload and problem. There’s no need for a user to manually try to decipher what may be happening. Below we examine our solution’s process steps.
Detection
Our solution tests the Microsoft 365 service 24/7 and detects (in real-time) overall service degradation for Microsoft Teams and other Microsoft 365 workloads, and sends alerts directly to the ITSM tools. ITSM received alerts on the service before it impacts users. Alerts include details about the route to the cloud for incidents on Microsoft Teams, allowing ITSM to know where an issue is occurring and contact the owner directly. Our real user monitoring tool provides alerts on Teams’ service quality issues at the user level with group alerts (allows you to group your users based on specific criteria relevant to your needs).
Troubleshooting
Our digital experience monitoring robots are used 24/7 to qualify and prioritize any issue. The active network path monitoring tool helps to qualify latency issues by identifying who/what is responsible for creating it in the first place (internal, ISP, Microsoft, etc.) so the ITSM knows exactly who to contact to remedy the issue. ITSM, Service Desk, and Helpdesk then know exactly which users are impacted by the service issue and can warn them or provide a workaround, limiting the impact to the business.
Improvement
Our single pane of glass correlates all Vantage DX alerts with existing monitoring tool alerts into service incident tickets synchronized with the ITSM, allowing you to see all active issues affecting the service. This reduces alert noise for ITSM, makes them more efficient, reduces MTTR for all Microsoft 365 services, and improves the productivity for your business lines and overall user satisfaction.
With Martello, you can empower your organization’s ITSM to work more effectively with cloud services and streamline the overall experience for everyone involved. This proactive approach provides more specific data focused on the issues allowing for resources to be more efficiently used in remediation and less potential impact on your business.
