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
The ConsoleWorks Difference
By Pam Johnson
ConsoleWorks® is the leading IT foundation management solution on the market. The ConsoleWorks Server is the high-performance engine that handles information flow processing, business rule execution, pattern-matching, role-based security, and signed log-file generation. It handles all input and output across the enterprise on the devices and application that it manages, serving this data up as needed.
ConsoleWorks is capable of managing more than 1000 connections per server invocation. The ConsoleWorks Server is a complete solution package for managing the IT foundation of the enterprise.
Some of the key features of ConsoleWorks include role-based access and control, secure remote management and monitoring, in-band and out-of-band management, bi-directional data capture, digitally signed logs and forensic files, and comprehensive automation. ConsoleWorks is also agentless and persistent to facilitate IT operations, enforce security, and maintain comprehensive audit trails.
For more information, read The ConsoleWorks® Difference
Security and Compliance in Virtual Environments
By Tom Kearns 
The use of Virtual Machines (VMs) in IT introduces a new layer of complexity in the IT infrastructure, and adds new challenges to IT operations, security, and compliance. ConsoleWorks is unique in that it delivers the same simplification, automation, documentation, and security benefits to virtualized environments as it does to physical ones.
ConsoleWorks maintains console connections in all modes of operation – including during VM migrations. ConsoleWorks uses persistent connections that move with VMs, keeping operations, compliance, and security practices over privileged interfaces consistent and effective.
In addition to maintaining the IT infrastructure security model over privileged interfaces (such as consoles and virtual serial ports), ConsoleWorks is also able to capture all log file data generated by hypervisors (including VM logs). The records produced are accurate, consistent, and comprehensive – and they remain so, even when VMs move from host to host. This comprehensive data collection can support even the most rigorous compliance requirements and provide the transparency needed to meet audits.
For more information, read
The ConsoleWorks® Difference – Virtual Machines
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