IT Service Management Best Practices with ConsoleWorks
By Pam Johnson 
ConsoleWorks plays an important role in the ongoing support, operation, maintenance, and management of the foundation of the IT infrastructure. By automating and optimizing specific sub-processes that commonly exist in all organizations, ConsoleWorks creates added value for the IT Service Management (ITSM) practice.
These sub-processes directly impact reliability, availability, security, compliance, and the cost of operations – and they either directly relate to ITSM best practices or indirectly contribute to the stated goals of these practices. ConsoleWorks automates and optimizes ITSM best practices into a far leaner and more comprehensive process in areas where there are disparate tools (or no tools) and manual processes. The result is a considerable improvement in key performance measures such as elapsed time, touch time, cost, and Mean Time to Repair (MTTR).
ConsoleWorks offers these value-added ITSM practices through an integrated software environment that includes a knowledge base used for event detection, prioritization, and diagnosis to form a robust end-to-end closed loop remediation practice. With ConsoleWorks, the “tools of the trade” that normally exist as many independent tools are consolidated into a seamlessly integrated software application.
For more information on ConsoleWorks and IT Service Management, read the Whitepaper: ConsoleWorks for IT Service Management
A Year in Review
By Pam Johnson
2012 was a busy year for us here at TDi Technologies. We’ve been hard at work, adding new features and making significant improvements to our products and services. Take a look at a few of the major projects we completed over the year:
New and Improved ConsoleWorks Support Website : We’ve improved the ConsoleWorks Support website so it’s easier to navigate and find exactly what you’re looking for. The Support website features online help, video tutorials, user forums, and the new Knowledge Base, where you can find helpful articles on configuring and using ConsoleWorks.
New website feature: Frequently Asked Questions: Our newest website feature, the TDi Technologies FAQ seeks to answer any questions you might have about ConsoleWorks and IT Foundation Management.
Release of ConsoleWorks Version 4.6: ConsoleWorks version 4.6 marked one of the most significant releases in recent history. Check out this article for the highlights from ConsoleWorks 4.6: What’s New in ConsoleWorks 4.6?
The ConsoleWorks Certificate Program: The ConsoleWorks Certificate Program is a program to assist TDi customers in employee recruitment, retention, training, and development. The online exams are now available for the ConsoleWorks Operator Certificate and ConsoleWorks Administrator Certificate. For more information and links to the exams, go to support.tditechnologies.com.
Release of the ConsoleWorks HobbyKit: The ConsoleWorks hobby kit program gives IT professionals the opportunity to use a full-featured version of ConsoleWorks (in a non-production environment).
2012 also saw the addition of web content, including blog articles, whitepapers, solution briefs, and more. Below you will find our most popular articles and downloads for the year:
Top Blog Articles
- PCI-DSS Requirement 10: Configuration Port Security
- From the Control Room to the Substation to the Pole
- Automating Baseline Configuration Management
- Configuration Port Security and NERC Compliance
- Privileged Access Management with ConsoleWorks
Top Downloads
Fault Tolerant Monitoring & Logging
By Pam Johnson
A Redundant Automatic Failover configuration consists of two ConsoleWorks invocations, which under normal operating conditions are simultaneously connected to each managed device in the environment, making the solution fully redundant with no single point of failure. If the primary invocation fails, the secondary invocation continues to monitor and manage the enterprise.
Under this scenario, to be completely assured that there is no gap in monitoring and logging, a pair of ConsoleWorks servers duplicate systems monitoring and logging such that at least one server would receive the logging information and send the necessary notifications under all operating conditions and in accordance with designated severity levels.
Either of the servers can be down due to a scheduled maintenance or failure, but logging and alerting remains continuous as required by the standard.
The failover process for ConsoleWorks maximizes availability and eliminates loss of critical security status monitoring, event logging, and compliance reporting for strict compliance requirements.
For more information, read The ConsoleWorks® Difference – Fault Tolerant Monitoring & Logging
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By Pam Johnson TDi Technologies recently released three whitepapers on NERC-CIP that have proven to be extremely valuable to the Utilities industry at large. These
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