Integrating ConsoleWorks with Caché

By Pam Johnson

Intelligent Event Modules (IEMs) extend the ConsoleWorks Server to include vendor domain knowledge on a wide range of IT components. Today I’m going to be discussing the InterSystems Caché IEM, which enables automatic prioritization and provides human-readable descriptions and explanations for over 4,000 Cache’ errors, dramatically improving issue isolation, root-cause analysis, and remediation.

InterSystems Caché is a high performance object database deployed on more than 100,000 systems ranging from two to over 50,000 users. Caché is a “mission critical” system for many of these users, requiring that issues be addressed promptly and efficiently.

ConsoleWorks’ integration with Caché includes severity levels for all of its events so that the IT organization can quickly distinguish between events requiring immediate attention and those that are warnings or informative in nature. Human-readable descriptions that describe the nature of each event are also provided, to avoid the often time-consuming step of hunting for the appropriate documentation to look up an error code.

For more information about the InterSystems Caché IEM, read
The ConsoleWorks® Difference – Caché

Caché is a registered trademark of InterSystems Corporation.

Efficient and Effective Incident Remediation

By Pam Johnson

When an incident ticket is generated, additional information is often needed to effectively isolate the issue and diagnose the problem. This information can be very challenging to track down manually. Additionally, if the incident results in server failure, traditional network services may not be sufficient to access the server at all.

This video demonstration (IT Operations: Incident Remediation) contrasts the traditional approach to incident remediation with the ConsoleWorks approach. The video demonstrates the ability of ConsoleWorks to fill in the gaps left by traditional incident management and performance monitoring systems.

While an incident ticket typically includes information such as what device the message refers to and the nature of the issue, it often does not include enough information to identify the exact problem. With ConsoleWorks, you have a persistent connection to the ILOM controller, which can be used to review console logs and find out what actually happened. This persistent connection also allows you to access the server in all modes, even single-user, standby or fault condition, to address the problem and reboot the machine.

Additional product demonstrations are available here: ITFM in Action

Simple and Consistent Remediation with IT Foundation Management

By Pam Johnson

Many of today’s monitoring solutions don’t provide for a simple way to perform remediation. Users are often required to keep lists of computer names, IP addresses, log locations, and terminal server port numbers. In addition, they must maintain definitions of the thousands of, often cryptic, error messages each device may issue. These lists are often out of date and kept by individuals, making shared remediation responsibilities problematic.

When a problem occurs with a system, administrators have to find the required remediation information from many sources. They then must isolate and connect to the suspected failed devices. In many cases, they have to physically go to the data center, find the failed device among the many others, find the equipment required to connect to the failed device, then connect to the hardware management interface to first determine what the problem might be, then remediate.

All of this wastes valuable time – and a considerable amount of money.

With IT Foundation Management, receive real-time notification when a problem occurs – including root causes – via email, cell phone, and text message. ConsoleWorks from TDi Technologies provides centralized, digitally signed, time-stamped logs of all device activity, including who has connected, when they connected, and what they did, keystroke by keystroke. ConsoleWorks provides a clear understanding of the vendor error messages with best practices, internal links to operations procedures manuals, and complete examples of previous remediation for the same event.

With ConsoleWorks, time to remediate is significantly reduced (also cutting costly downtime). In addition, remediation is performed in a consistent manner, eliminating unanticipated negative impacts on other systems.

The following videos demonstrate some of the Remediation capabilities of ConsoleWorks:
Incident Remediation
Creating a Knowledge Base of Remediation Best Practices