How Root Cause Analysis Software Fits into ITIL Problem Management
After digesting last week’s blog, you have already identified a leading-edge platform that has the capability to not only monitor the tidal wave of events in your entire end-to-end infrastructure but to comprehend the state of your network.
But you’re not off the hook yet. At this phase, a whole new set of questions emerges:
- Once you know root cause of an IT issue, how exactly do you go about fixing it?
- Are you sure that the root cause is still the source of the problem?
- Are you dependent on “tribal” knowledge – information closely held by a few key employees – to determine remediation steps?
- Are you able to communicate to your team exactly what the business impact of the problem is?
- When you say a certain infrastructure element is compromised, do both users and your management understand what services are impacted?
- Are you properly utilizing root cause analysis software to effectively diagnose the problem?
As it turns out, identifying root cause is just the start. The next helpful thing to know is that the root cause of the problem is real.
Focusing Your ITIL Problem Management on What Matters
Since time is always of the essence in these situations, you don’t want to expand your efforts fixing the wrong issues in the wrong order. At this point, it is essential for you to:
- Know the correct set of steps to fix the problem the first time.
- Understand the services impacted from a business point of view.
The Optanix Platform’s patented snapshot processing technology rapidly identifies meaningful data, and advanced correlation techniques identify through root cause analysis software events that drive problems in the network.
From there, the platform’s decision engine uses built-in workflows to help you troubleshoot the problem. The decision engine works through different failure scenarios to verify and validate the root cause. This drives down support costs and accelerates remediation by automating time-consuming investigative work.
By confirming the true nature and the exact reason behind service and infrastructure outages, no time is wasted chasing down the wrong path. This reduces the “remediation churn” that typically is found in IT infrastructure monitoring solutions.
Once the problem is clearly identified, verified and validated, further automated workflows dig into the Optanix Platform’s knowledge base to identify the appropriate remediation activities. Support staff can trigger these remediation activities separately, or, if configured to do so, the Optanix Platform can perform them automatically.
Going Beyond Root Cause Analysis Software
The Optanix Platform also provides the ability to knit together network devices and infrastructure elements to define the business services they support, so when an issue occurs, these entities provide a real understanding of the business services affected.
This ability to abstract infrastructure elements onto the corresponding business service provides powerful visualization capabilities. Now you are able to understand which services are affected when a particular part of the infrastructure – or even a single device – goes down.
Rather than being told a particular device is down, IT teams, users and management get a clear idea what the actual impact to the business is.
In this way, the Optanix Platform goes well beyond just identifying root cause analysis. The ability to focus on what matters brings about orders of magnitude efficiencies in issue resolution and problem management.
In addition, the next time someone asks what exactly is affected, the Optanix Platform is able to provide the information – in a manner indicating the true impact to the business.
By encapsulating best practices within the Optanix Platform, playbooks and scenarios are rapidly invoked to verify, validate root cause and determine the most appropriate remediation to fix the issues the first time every time.
All of this is powered by Optanix’s patented Automated Logic Profiles, the intelligence behind the platform. More on these in next week’s blog.
In the meantime, discover how to advance your ITIL Problem Management with Optanix’s Root Cause Analysis Software.