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Photography: Jonas Mertens

FROM HUGE LOGfILE TO CONVENIENT REPORT

Managing countless servers is not easy. How do you search all logles and create convenient reports of this information? Over the past year, Dutch health insurance provider CZ Tilburg has been using the SCOM-TOPdesk link to manage their IT infrastructure from TOPdesk.

Text: Stefanie Klaassen

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Tom Taminiau, technical application manager for CZ

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The how and why of SCOM

Tom Taminiau is a specialist in the Technical Application Management department. Here he works with the SCOM (Microsoft System Center Operations Manager)-TOPdesk link and makes sure that the application runs properly. Taminiaus department is part of a larger IT department. There are about 180 of us, says Taminiau, but CZ is a big company with over 3,000 employees in total. Here at the IT department we do everything ourselves. We maintain our own website, manage workows and have our own server park here in Tilburg, with another park of almost the same size in a nearby city. At a certain point the decision was made to have SCOM feature more prominently within the company. At CZ we pay close attention to the processes and monitoring is very important, but it takes a lot of time and manpower, says Taminiau. That is why we started using this tool. If something goes wrong in the middle of the night, SCOM sends you a text message so you can x the problem before the workday starts. TOPdesk and partner 3Fty created the link in two days.

the link grants us insight into these processes and we can send monthly reports. This lets the management immediately see what is going well and what isnt.

Relief for the service desk

The TOPdesk-SCOM link has resulted in a lower workload for the service desk at CZ and a more efcient registration procedure. Before we, meaning the IT department, had to email the helpdesk to create a ticket for ourselves in TOPdesk whenever we received an alert in SCOM, explains Taminiau. This then had to be put through to the right person within our IT department. This is no longer necessary. TOPdesk knows which user is linked to the incident type and automatically assigns the incident to this person. The incident is put through and processed in TOPdesk. Taminiau says, Every day we receive various types of incidents for different clusters, persons or departments. For instance, if we receive an incident relating to Exchange, it is automatically sent to the Exchange manager. This burdens fewer people: fewer people are now involved with the incident process.

THE LINES IN OUR REGISTRATION PROCESS ARE SHORTER AND EVERYTHING IS MUCH FASTER

help maintain the overview. We only register such incidents via SCOM. Previously this process was not only timeconsuming, but a lot of knowledge was also lost. The help desk information was not always as complete as you would want: they cannot know the technical details of everything, so they are not always able to properly explain the situation. With TOPdesk, this step is now removed. One click and everything is sent to TOPdesk, and you immediately have all the information you need right there on your screen.

Straightforward reporting
SCOM lets organizations see server error messages. Thanks to the TOPdesk-SCOM link, these can be put through to TOPdesk in two clicks. But why do this in TOPdesk, if SCOM has already indicated that something has gone wrong in the IT infrastructure? Taminiau explains. We want to register everything. If a hard disk breaks or is full, SCOM lets us know. But we did not have a clear view of the number of errors that were generated for things that broke or did not go well. Now everything is clearly registered in TOPdesk,

Shorter lines
Now the lines in our registration process are so much shorter, everything is faster, explains Taminiau. This saves time for the helpdesk, but also for us. This lets us get straight back to our work. In the morning we log in and put the most important alerts through to TOPdesk. After registration we process it straight away. At rst you were dependent on the duration of the helpdesk when an incident was assigned to you. For that matter, we do not register incidents in TOPdesk ourselves, to

All in all
Taminiau says that the TOPdesk link with SCOM has made his work a lot easier. He believes that every organization that uses both tools should have this link. Its simple, he says. If you use SCOM and have TOPdesk, this link is a solution. You can seamlessly integrate your service management and your system management. Soon we will be upgrading SCOM and switching to the newest version of TOPdesk. We are very satised with how things are going now.

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SCOM IN FAcTs
The server park in Tilburg comprises about 1,000

registered machines.
On average we receive 250

to 300 system messages per day. But that is not to say

that these messages are always acute. For instance, we currently have

94 critical alerts, of which only 1 is vital.

An agent goes through the

server logfiles and any

handmade monitors, and reports on errors or anomalies. SCOM checks

what should text

happen with the incident:

should an email be sent, or is it so urgent that it requires a

message?