Services

Here is an overview of the services I provide.

• Monitoring tool selection
  • Determining which product or combinations of products best matches your requirements
  • What to expect from a pilot implemention
  • Comparing product maturity by features
• Monitoring process audit
  • Integration with Service Desk process or tool
  • Correlation with CMDB or other non-integrated asset inventories
  • Identification of monitoring capabilities to business service maps
• Monitoring tool deployment and upgrade
  • Evaluation and accomodation of systems customizations/idiosyncracies
  • Integration with available software distribution tools
• Monitoring tool integration and customization
  • One-way or two-way integration with MOMs (manager of managers)
  • Population of reporting and internal dashboard
  • Population of central CMDB or other asset inventory tools
• Training on client platform
  • How to communicate to users professionally
  • How to administer the system for long-term integrity and growth
  • Hands-on demonstrations of incident detection, escalations and fine-tuning
  • Review of monitoring topology and inter-connections with other ITSM tools
• Documentation
  • Coverage of both plain vanilla and cutomized features in SOP documentation
  • Procedures for incident management and problem management

Services I Decline

Many consultancies offer services on a range of IT tasks, and keep extending their portfolio as new product areas evolve.  While some of these claims may be true some of the time, I have always restricted my practice to a single focus:  Systems Management for servers, networks and applications.  This focus has allowed me to maintain my technical expertise across several Systems Management products, and this strategy has worked really well--I would recommend it to anyone starting a service business.

Here then are some services that I don't provide:

• Software resales
• Routine administration of servers, desktops, networks or applications
• Security and Compliance
• Networking administration
• Installation or administration of storage and virtualization platforms

To paraphrase an old commercial for the Archer Daniels Midland company, "I don't make these monitoring products, I help you use them better."