“Who installed that software on my server?”
If you’re an IT Ops manager, you know those words can derail an entire afternoon, or worse, as you sift through log files, jump on conference calls, and listen to claims of plausible deniability.
We recently spoke with a OpsRamp customer who not only came out of this situation unscathed, but as the hero after resolving the issue in 15 minutes. A client called Joe* about unapproved software that was installed on one of their servers. Joe used OpsRamp’s audit recording feature to identify the culprit, quickly troubleshoot, and prevent a customer satisfaction issue.
Typically, unapproved software being installed on a client server kicks off an ugly game of finger pointing. As an IT operations manager, you only have log files to find out what really happened. Logs can get overwritten, are difficult to navigate, and may not be of help if you use shared administrative accounts.
Busy IT teams might not have time to dig that deep. OpsRamp’s audit recording capability automatically records every console session at the protocol level. You can retrieve playback in the device history, much like your favorite show on your DVR. The recording captures the session right from login to every step that the engineer makes on the device, meaning every mouse click and every key stroke. OpsRamp also tells you when something happened, for how long, by which protocol and any tickets the session was associated with.
Ops managers can determine next steps based on pure facts. It can be challenging at times to own up to a mistake, or even realize that one was responsible for an error. OpsRamp’s console recordings remove trust issues and information flow challenges in sensitive situations to get to what really happened and fix it quickly to reduce any impact on the business.
Such challenges are common whether you are managing IT operations in an enterprise for internal clients or on behalf of a customer as a Managed Service Provider (MSP). MSPs have an additional layer of complexity as they work alongside their customers in a co-sourced model. We often hear of OpsRamp customers who leverage console recordings as a key part of compliance and audit processes.
There’s an additional side benefit from recording your engineer’s work. You may have technically brilliant staff who implement the same solution a little differently because every business problem is unique and subtle configuration settings are required to solve a particular problem.
From a knowledge management standpoint, it’s important to document knowledge for future reference. From a Resource Management standpoint, it’s even more important to utilize your engineering resources for solving problems rather than authoring documents.
As an Ops Manager, don’t get caught in this dilemma by taking advantage of OpsRamp’s recording technology which is your assistant for knowledge capture and dissemination. You may have Standard Operating Procedures but your L1 engineers can learn much more from watching what the L3 engineer did on screen than by reading any doc.
