Connected Data to Drive Service Assurance in IT

IT Service Management (ITSM) staff have a unique challenge to provide service assurance across a broad and diverse technology ecosystem. Connected data is essential to enable them to do their job effectively. Your incident and problem management staff don’t know what they don’t know. They can only see the data that is made available to them through your ITSM system and other administrative consoles. If the data they are looking at is incomplete or fragmented, it is difficult for them to know where things are broken and need attention. All the while, your business processes, employees, and potentially your customers are being affected. Connected data is the key to service assurance in IT.

Doesn’t My ITSM Platform Take Care of This Already?

Modern ITSM platforms from companies like ServiceNow, Cherwell, BMC, and FreshWorks have a lot of great capabilities to help you orchestrate your incident and problem management workflows. They also have some slick visualizations to provide the “single pane of glass” user experience that your ITSM staff needs. But what is that single pane of glass showing, and where is that data coming from?  Often the data comes from other systems such as your operations management tools, cloud dashboards, synthetic transaction monitors, and other utility-type services and devices deployed across your IT environment.

The large ITSM platform products have many out-of-the-box connectors. However, there are often many missing that you need to address on your own. This is understandable. An ITSM platform vendor isn’t going to know all of the different technologies you have deployed in your IT environment, or what management and diagnostic tools you have available to support them. Even if they did understand your needs, they would need time to develop the connectors, test them, and build them into their product release cycle. Eventually, you might get what you need, but relying entirely on your ITSM vendor for integration doesn’t give the flexibility and agility that most companies need.

DataConnect Provides a Flexible Solution to Connecting Your IT Data

This is where a platform like Actian DataConnect can help. Offered as an Integration Platform as a Service (IPaaS), DataConnect supplies a flexible and easy-to-implement platform that enables you to design, deploy, and execute data integrators across your whole IT environment. Do you have streaming data from monitoring tools? No problem! Do you have administrative console data that you want to make available in your ITSM system? DataConnect can help you do that. Do you have embedded telemetry built into your in-house developed applications? Your ITSM vendor doesn’t even know about those data sources, but with DataConnect, you can add them to your IT monitoring solution. Are you leveraging services, SaaS, network infrastructure that is managed by 3^rd parties? DataConnect can make those data sources available too. The DataConnect platform gives you the flexibility to source data from almost anywhere (inside or outside your company), and if you need to add something, you can just add it.

Ease of Deployment

Application development teams and IT project teams deploying new 3^rd party systems can stream telemetry data to your ITSM system from day-1 that you release the system, without a lot of custom coding or waiting for the ITSM vendor to build/update a connector.  If you have existing components and services deployed in your IT environment that aren’t currently sending data to your ITSM system, you can use DataConnect to get them connected and make their telemetry data available quickly.  By combining the data integration capabilities of Actian DataConnect with the single pane of glass and workflow orchestration capabilities of your ITSM platform, you have the opportunity to give your IT staff access to the rich, accurate and connected data that they need to do their job effectively.

To learn more about Actian DataConnect and how it can help solve your connected data challenges in IT and across your company, visit www.actian.com/dataconnect

About Traci Curran

Traci Curran serves as Director of Product Marketing at Actian focused on the Actian Data Platform. With more than 20 years of experience in technology marketing, Traci has previously held senior marketing roles at CloudBolt Software, Racemi (acquired by DXC Corporation), as well as some of the world’s most innovative startups. Traci is passionate about helping customers understand how they can accelerate innovation and gain competitive advantage by leveraging digital transformation and cloud technologies.