The company had established a group to help customers improve system uptime and availability and reduce incident volume and cost. When known system problems arose, the group issued static documents to its customers that documented the symptoms of specific hardware and software configuration issues. The company had built its own engine for managing the rules that prompted these alerts. As the number of products and product versions increased, maintaining this system became increasingly difficult. In particular, the hardware experts who established the rules couldn't create or maintain them, programmers had to interpret the rules for them, and managing the many rules required for the company's broader product base and more complex customer environments was more difficult.
An Enterprise Information Integration (EII) environment brings together data from the company's systems and customers' systems. This information feeds into a decision service that applies the business rules that associate classes of knowledge and symptoms. The service handles hardware, software, and patch-level assessment and examines a variety of other critical systems' data to identify potential problems. It also combines information on symptoms, issues, diagnostics, and configuration to recommend software and hardware versions based on maintenance releases and compatibility. The service also manages event conditions and actions and detection of failovers and failures.
More than 9,000 employees and customers use the decision service to identify and mediate potential problems before they cause downtime. In addition, the patch release management process uses the service to identify specific patches that apply to a customer's software or hardware. All business rules are entered and managed directly by engineers who understand the symptoms, problems, and products. No IT resources are required to make updates, so changes and improvements are made quickly and inexpensively.
Benefits