Intercept Studio and ITIL:

Automating IT Best Practices

A customizable framework of best practice approaches, the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) provides guidance for the delivery of IT services including incident management, problem management, release management, service level management, and availability management. Adhering to ITIL principles can help organizations better develop, manage, and deliver applications and services that address the business needs of an organization, while improving quality and reducing associated costs.

Intercept Studio Helps Organizations Implement ITIL Best Practices
Intercept Studio provides a framework that assists organizations in implementing ITIL best practices. Intercept Studio’s real-time, always-on monitoring helps ensure and improve application quality throughout the application lifecycle. Organizations worldwide now rely on Intercept Studio to help enable ITIL best practices related to both service support and delivery.

Enabling ITIL Principles for Service Support
Adherence to best practices for Service Support functions, including incident management, problem management, and release management, is advanced by Intercept Studio.

Incident Management
An incident, in ITIL terms, is any event that deviates from standard operation and causes or may cause an interruption or reduction in service. Best practices for incident management are intended to restore normal operations as quickly as possible with minimal service disruption.

With Intercept Studio, organizations have a consistent and standard means for detecting incidents as they occur. Intercept Studio proactively alerts IT teams to an incident, eliminating the need for users to report errors and ensuring faster response from support teams, oftentimes before business is adversely affected. Intercept Studio also allows organizations to correlate errors by type, root cause, and time, providing meaningful trends for analysis and problem diagnosis.

Problem Management
A problem, in ITIL terms, is an unknown cause of an incident or multiple incidents. When an incident occurs, Intercept Studio automatically classifies the incident by problem type: application failure, performance bottleneck, security or connectivity issue. This classification helps enable fast triage, resulting in faster time to problem resolution. In addition, Intercept Studio collects all of the diagnostic information required to definitively identify the root cause of a problem. This diagnosis allows appropriate personnel to address the precise underlying cause of an incident in order to resolve and prevent the same problem from reoccurring.

Intercept Studio is ideally suited for in-production monitoring, so real problems are easily and proactively identified and diagnosed. In addition, Intercept Studio facilitates communication between operations, development, and support teams to make sure the right team has the right information to resolve the problem as quickly as possible. As with incidents, Intercept Studio delivers the ability to correlate problems by root cause and with system performance counters to provide a complete view of application behavior and application health trends. Intercept Studio’s customizable hotspot reports also help organizations identify the most business-critical problems, enabling appropriate prioritization for troubleshooting resources.

Release Management
A release, in ITIL terms, comprises the entire process of designing, building, testing, and deploying of software. Intercept Studio assists in release management by enabling a comparison of detected failures and performance issues between software releases. Through a detailed trends analysis, Intercept Studio provides a “new vs. known alert” report.

This report gives both operations and development managers an understanding of the impact of a new application release or update. Operations managers are able to ensure the updated release is performing at the same or better level than the previous release; and development managers can ensure all known issues are resolved in the new release. In this manner, operations and development managers can use Intercept Studio to help manage and meet end user expectations of new releases.

Enabling ITIL Principles for Service Delivery
Adherence to best practices for Service Delivery functions, including service level management and availability management, is also advanced by Intercept Studio.

Service Level Management
The goal of service level management, in ITIL terms, is to maintain and improve IT services and their quality. Service level management best practices ensure service level agreements (SLAs) are documented, monitored, and adhered to.

Intercept Studio is a highly configurable and flexible solution for monitoring application performance levels. With Intercept Studio, performance thresholds can be customized to allow for definition of SLAs down to the individual resource call. Users can set and manage SLAs for ASP.NET pages, Web Service calls, Custom Functions, and Windows Form calls. In addition, Intercept Studio can be used to benchmark application performance, providing detailed insight into how an application should behave. This insight enables organizations to appropriately set and manage service level expectations and thresholds.

Availability Management
The goal of availability management, in ITIL terms, is to optimize systems and infrastructure in order to ensure cost-effective and consistent levels of availability. By properly managing and ensuring application and service availability, business needs are met. Essential to availability management is the ability to monitor and report on application health.

Because Intercept Studio captures application failures and performance bottlenecks as they occur, and proactively reports on the problem and root cause, organizations are best-equipped to rapidly and effectively troubleshoot their applications. This ensures optimum availability and reliability of business-critical systems. In addition, Intercept Studio provides detailed reporting and trending analysis that is essential to ensuring availability requirements are met and to predicting future levels of availability. With in-depth insight into application availability history and real-time availability data, organizations can monitor and measure performance against established SLAs while also continually reviewing performance in an effort to improve availability.

To test drive Intercept Studio for yourself and see how AVIcode can help your organization implement ITIL best practices, click here.