Managed Services

ZIF Endpoint Management – DX+

Atul Jadhav — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 13:10:12 +0000

According to Statista, there are 182 million laptops in use worldwide and expected to reach 202 million by 2028. With the growing need of laptops and other endpoints (Desktops and VDIs), irrespective of whether it is for personal use or professional use, the day-to-day challenge in Endpoints increases considerably.

Highlights of Neurealm’ Culture

From an organization’s point of view, IT team must ensure the smooth day-to-day operations of Endpoints. Given below are a few challenges on various categories.

Hardware

Laptop Heating issue
Laptop battery not yielding backup
Laptop battery not charging
Device Driver conflict/Disabled
USB malfunction
Firmware issue
Disk failure
Random Reboot issue & improper shutdown
Hardware changes (Removal of RAM)
Date & time not in sync
Application & OS Patches are not up-to-date
Usage of unauthorized software against organization policy
Endpoints missing mandatory software

In a normal situation, most of these problems are not known at early stage and cause serious showstopper. Only after the situation is bad, the IT department receive complaints from the users and then the IT support team looks for solutions and fixes the problems.

So, what is the impact of fixing the problem at its own pace? Well, this is reactive and due to the turn-around time, this impacts the productivity of the user and ultimately impacts the organization in terms of achieving its goal.

Proactive Situation Wouldn’t it be great if there is a single solution that can identify proactively, suggest, and fix the above scenarios?

ZIF Endpoint Management, a Digital Experience (DX+) is a proactive solution. To achieve this, DX+ monitors the resources at Endpoint, compliance and change of state at Endpoints. If there are gaps and issues, ZIF DX+ automatically applies the necessary self-healing, some of them are listed below. In addition to that, ZIF DX+ provides the remote console, where the IT admin can remotely debug the Endpoints without disturbing the user.

Resource Monitoring

Resource Utilization – Helps to understand the resource (CPU, Memory, Disk, Network IO) utilization
Resource Optimization – Helps know the available resource capacity (CPU, Memory, Disk) across single or group of machines
Hardware Monitoring – CMOS Battery Monitoring, Fan speed, Temperature, Firmware

Compliance

Compliance – Understand the unwanted application or process running at endpoints
Software, License & Patch updates – Get notified about the software which is not required to be installed or outdated as per org standard
Application Inventory – Understand the inventory of software installed on each endpoint
Authenticity – Ensure the right member is using the endpoint device

Change Of State

Change in behavior
Change in Communication
Change in target
Change in Pattern of data
Unauthorized usage of application

Self-healing

Monitor the availability of mandatory software, if not, install
Apply the GP and Patches, KBs
Monitor the non-standard software, if any, uninstall
Killing unwanted process/application
Disk Defragmentation & Disk Cleaning

In summary, DX+ acts proactively to know the symptoms and take necessary action. For e.g., a patch that is missing in an Endpoint can cause massive impact if not taken care of at right time, with DX+ in place, it automatically identifies the gap and applies the recommended patch. Similarly, wherever there are brewing issues, they are identified and addressed. Available as SaaS https://zifdx.zif.ai/ and on-premises version, user can register, download and install the DX+ and get these benefits. DX+ plays a crucial role in Endpoint Security Management, we will see those in upcoming article.

Sources:
https://www.statista.com/outlook/cmo/consumer-electronics/computing/laptops/worldwide#volume

Author

Suresh Kumar Ramasamy

Suresh has 20 years of experience in Native Applications, Web, Cloud and Hybrid platforms from Engineering to Product & Program Management. He has designed & hosted the monitoring solutions. He has been instrumental in amalgamating components to structure the Environment Performance Management suite of ZIF Monitor. He heads the ZIF Monitoring & ZIF Discovery Platform.

Suresh enjoys playing badminton with his children. He is passionate about gardening, especially medicinal plants.

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The post ZIF Endpoint Management – DX+ appeared first on Neurealm.

Here’s Why Your Cloud Migration Strategy Needs AIOps

Atul Jadhav — Tue, 08 Feb 2022 12:59:21 +0000

Majority of businesses employ cloud enablement services to boost productivity and cut costs. For IT infrastructure and resources, a cloud environment is essential. Therefore, companies from various industries are moving their data to cloud storage. Businesses can extend their databases without sacrificing service quality by migrating to the cloud. There are specialized migration procedures in place, and the use of AIOps has become critical.

What role does AIOps play in cloud migration?

Every company is coping with digitization and technology advancements at a rapid pace. Businesses must move away from conventional methods of data storage and toward cloud computing to continue delivering profitable services to users. Because cloud models and on-premise platforms have different designs, digitalization and data migration might be problematic. Using automated solutions, AIOps eliminates the need for human intervention. Automation speeds up the migration process and lowers errors, and data is formatted to work with cloud-native infrastructure. Therefore, companies should invest in AIOps.

AIOps can help with data migration in a variety of ways, including:

Hybrid or Multi-vendor Environment

Usually, certain critical services offered by a company are stored in the data center. With AIOps, professionals or teams in charge of monitoring the data can use a specific cloud migration assessment tool for business. AIOps for monitoring also enables the involvement of various cloud migration toolsets and on-premise platforms. For on-premise old data, a certain degree of grooming is necessary before migration. Noise reduction algorithms can be applied to such data before it is integrated with operational data in cloud storage. This improves all services and helps to reduce the risks involved in migration.

Critical and Sensitive Business Services Transfer

With various new applications and services being developed, businesses need to focus on accelerating the movement of data to cloud storage. AIOps tools allow easy migration of legacy applications and eliminate the risk of delivery to cloud computing models. The use of AIOps for cloud migration can reduce the cost of data transfer and storage and help to completely avoid redundancy. If any issues had risen when the data was stored within on-premise infrastructure, the same problems can occur when the data is transferred to the cloud. If these issues occur when the migration is complete, it can be difficult to troubleshoot. This is because cloud resources change very quickly. Problems may even occur if the migration is rushed and there is a lack of thorough monitoring. However, the implementation of AIOps helps operations teams to automate the migration process and thus reduce error. The transition of data from on-premise architecture to the cloud computing model is smooth and helps to provide optimized service delivery to all end users.

Redesigning Microservices and Applications

At the time of data migration from on-premise architectures to cloud computing models, operations teams may find certain anomalies. This is because the application designs are not compatible with cloud storage. Therefore, all critical services and applications should be checked before migration. Redesigning these services and applications may be necessary to suit the native architecture of a particular cloud computing model. Apart from applications, microservices and new forms of monitoring are also essential. AIOps enables such redesigning and ensures seamless migration and integration of data. AIOps tools work as accelerants for the monitoring of microservices. The processes are extremely fast-paced, and every operations team needs to deal with a large volume of data at once. AIOps is ideal for a smooth transition of data as it enables event correlation across domains. All workflows can be easily maintained, and various different teams can collaborate to reduce error. Automation and remediation of all critical services and systems are made possible by AIOps tools.

AIOps at Various Stages of Cloud Migration

Companies must concentrate on finding the top AIOps platforms software for data migration to the cloud. There is a massive influx of data during migration, and the entire volume of data must be processed without appropriate visibility. Operations teams may have a better understanding of the migration process across the platform by using AIOps. AIOps also aids in the identification of areas that require further optimization. These insights can be used to improve the migration process and deliver better service.

AIOps tools can help with every phase of the cloud migration process, including:

Pre-Migration Phase

At the pre-migration stage, all applications should be tested for performance issues. The metrics will give insight into the applications that need optimization and what the performance goals after migration should be. AIOps tools can be used to accurately predict how the cloud migration will impact the entire IT structure of the company. Since AIOps improves visibility, it is easier to see the performance of applications before the migration process begins.

Migration

While AIOps assists in the entire process of migration, it also helps in monitoring resources that are not used frequently. During migration, the primary function of AIOps is to make sure the data is suitable for the cloud-native infrastructure. But tools like artificial intelligence and machine learning can be applied to various applications as well. This will reveal how the underused applications and resources can be used for the benefit of the business.

Post-Migration Phase

After the migration process is complete, AIOps can be utilized to monitor the performance of services. This helps to understand how the cloud migration has impacted the services and what user response can be expected. Since user preferences may change, integrating AIOps with cloud migration can help to automate the adaptation process. Instead of modifying specific services, AIOps tools can help all services adapt to the requirements once the migration has been completed.

Conclusion

The usage of cloud storage for data and services has aided businesses in optimizing their processes. The use of AIOps in cloud migration can help improve product and service performance. Users will be more engaged, and businesses will be able to make more revenue as a result.

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The post Here’s Why Your Cloud Migration Strategy Needs AIOps appeared first on Neurealm.

AIOps for Device Failure Prediction

Atul Jadhav — Tue, 08 Feb 2022 12:48:58 +0000

In today’s digital world, businesses rely on software systems to provide services to their customers. Over the years, the number of software systems utilised by businesses has expanded. In addition, the complexity of software systems has grown over time. There is a risk of low service availability if corporate organisations do not monitor the performance of their software systems.

The software systems related to the IT infrastructure are essential to critical business operations. If one of the critical software systems fails, the service’s reliability and availability will suffer. Continue reading to see how AIOps can aid in the prediction of device failure and the maintenance of high service availability.

Predicting Device/App Failures Challenges

With legacy tools, it’s difficult to foresee device failures due to the rising complexity of business apps and software systems. Performance monitoring tools from the past are no longer relevant for modern software systems. It is why business organizations are moving towards new-age technologies for device performance monitoring. Application performance monitoring with AIOps is the new trend in the industry. Some of the challenges faced by business organizations for application performance monitoring with legacy tools are as follows:

Due to increased demands, development cycles of software systems are getting shorter. Development teams must provide fast feedback regarding device performance. Traditional monitoring tools do not provide expansive insights to generate feedbacks quickly.
The data generated by business organizations is more than ever. Since organizations cannot bring all types of data to one place, silos are formed. It is never easy to perform real-time performance monitoring when there are many data silos.
Traditional application performance monitoring tools can inform about a device failure after it has occurred. Since organizations cannot predict performance issues, they will only act after an incident has hampered the service availability.
Since more customers are using business apps, it is hard to keep track of the customer data. Let alone fixing app performance issues in real-time to satisfy customers.
Business organizations must review many IT incidents in a day. It is hard to prioritize incidents with an outdated monitoring system. The traditional monitoring systems do not aid in prioritizing IT incidents based on their impacts on service availability.
Business organizations use many digital channels to provide services to clients and customers. It is hard to perform RUM (Real User Monitoring) and synthetic monitoring when many customers are using the digital channels at once.
Business organizations do not know about their software systems as well as they should know. Due to low observability, businesses cannot know about the internal states of their software systems.
The performance of a software system slowly degrades with time. If one cannot know about the performance degradation, a software system may stop working suddenly.

Understanding how AIOps has changed Application Performance Monitoring?

Predictive analytics models are used by AI-based tools to predict device failures and performance issues. The top AIOps tools and applications can gather data from multiple sources and consolidate it in one place. AIOps is a centralised monitoring solution for your company. It studies the relationships between data sets to identify anomalies. Whenever an anomaly occurs, it informs the system administrator by generating an alert. AIOps makes sure that crucial software systems in your IT setup never stop working. Based on the performance metrics, AIOps can predict device failures. A business organization can take proactive steps to ensure device failures never occur.

AIOps collects data from digital channels and software systems. It then brings the data together in one place for analysis and reporting. AIOps can know about the internal state of business apps and software systems by studying the external factors. With high observability, you can know about performance degradation beforehand. You will have ample time to work on the performance issues and avoid device failures. A business organization can scale its software systems and digital channels according to the demands of the customer. Your crucial business apps and software systems will be up and running all the time. When the uptime of your software system increases, service availability also increases.

What Are the Benefits of AIOps for Incident Management?

The monitoring system raises an alarm when a performance issue arises. Each IT incident is assigned a ticket by IT teams in order to identify it. Occasionally, multiple tickets are issued for the same performance issue. Consider the case when your business app’s or website’s feedback feature isn’t working. Multiple users have reported the same problem, and each time a new ticket is produced. IT personnel will lose time detecting redundant tickets, causing service reliability to suffer. It’s here that AIOps comes in, removing duplicate tickets for the same performance issue. The following is how AIOps improves incident management:

The best AIOps tools and products perform real-time monitoring of complex software systems. If a performance issue occurs, you will know immediately. AIOps can also predict performance hassles based on performance metrics and historical data.
Once a performance issue occurs, AIOps based analytics platforms identify its impact on the service reliability. If the possible impact on service availability is high, you can start fixing the performance issue right away.
If numerous performance issues occur simultaneously, AIOps will aid in ranking them based on their impacts on business continuity. The most crucial performance issues will be fixed first by IT teams.
AIOps will aid in finding the person responsible for fixing any performance issue. Business organizations have successfully decreased their MTTA (Mean Time to Acknowledge) after using AIOps based analytics platforms.
AIOps will also provide actionable insights to fix performance issues faster. Once a performance issue has occurred, AIOps will remember it forever. Next time the same performance issue occurs, AIOps will help in fixing it faster.

Conclusion

Many businesses invested in AIOps to improve their remote IT infrastructures during the recent COVID pandemic. By 2030, the AIOps business will have a global turnover of more than USD 500 billion. AIOps can also help you improve the uptime of your software systems. AIOps can help you fix performance issues and increase service availability.

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The post AIOps for Device Failure Prediction appeared first on Neurealm.

Impact of the Unknown – Identifying the Blind Spots

Atul Jadhav — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 12:18:08 +0000

We know that there are blind spots on the road for any driver. As shown in the image above, the red colored areas are blind spots, that evade the driver’s vision and the impact of it can be of huge…

Do you know there are such blind spots in an IT Environment as well? Yes, there are many blind spots and the impact of it can be on various levels. The impact results in additional spending of money, effort, impact on performance, causes security compromise, impacts end-user experience and satisfaction and so on.

Let us understand some of those blind spots and the impact of it in an IT Environment,

Applications that are not expected to run on a server

In a server, for e.g., a web server, there could be a lot of applications running without the knowledge of the Application Owner or the Server Owner. These applications, either background or foreground processes consume CPU, Memory and Disk space, which are originally allocated and planned for the actual business application that is intended to run in that web server. This results in performance bottlenecks and even server crashes.

Unusual and new communication between server and devices

It is important to be watchful of the inflow and outflow communication between servers and devices. This may unearth new devices and new servers which are not under the purview of the server and application owner. This helps in planning the landscape, which otherwise are completely out of sight.

Whenever there is an unusual communication, appropriate measures must be taken, for e.g., if there is unusual transformation of bytes, or if there is a communication to a new port on a different server, measures must be taken to avoid potential risks.

Software licenses usage that are beyond the organization’s budget

Software licenses are brought for specific purposes, but when it is not managed or tracked properly, the licensed software could be running on those servers or desktops or laptops in which the software is no longer needed. The impact of that is that the organization may end up paying for additional licenses.

Server and Device Ports that are not supposed to be open

All ports in a server are properly restricted as part of hardening. Over time, due to various change requests ports are opened for new requirements. However, after the requirements are closed the ports are left unused and unnoticed. These open ports are vulnerable to hacking.

Vulnerable software and open sources which have permeated

As server, laptop and desktop owners install the software from OEM and open sources, the number of applications, software in a device can increase manifold. And when these software and open sources face vulnerabilities, it is practically not possible to identify the specific version across all servers, desktops and laptops. Even before the organization takes measures on the vulnerability front, these assets are compromised by hackers.

Unused devices, compute and storage

Either physical or virtual server, the compute and storage must be watched for optimal usage. Many times, few servers in an environment are over utilized whereas there are lot of servers left under-utilized. This could result in performance impact due to lack of resources. The same could happen in a VDI environment, there are users who need higher configuration of compute which can be adjusted with those users who are not using their VDI resources effectively.

Change in hardware, firmware and software

When there are changes in RAM, number of CPU cores, in disk or mount volume, installation of new software, or upgrade of existing package, installation of new patch, firmware auto upgrade, etc. it is important to know the impact of these in the upstream and downstream of the environment. These changes could cause server failure, and it can impact or cause failure in the end-to-end journey of the application transaction and so on.

How to overcome this?

It is important to have full control of your IT environment, so that you can identify the blind spots and take necessary proactive actions on them. In order to uncover these blind spots, end-to-end discovery of environment is required, ZIF^TM‘s Discovery module provides the agentless discover for

1) Devices and its relationship

2) Servers and its relationship

3) Applications and its relationship between servers and network devices

4) Control over Inventory and asset

5) Be aware of change in hardware, firmware and software

Watch out this space of for series of article on Discovery and how it can help organization to overcome the impact of blind spots.

Author

Suresh Kumar Ramasamy

Suresh has 20 years of experience in Native Applications, Web, Cloud and Hybrid platforms from Engineering to Product & Program Management. He has designed and hosted monitoring solutions. At Neurealm, he heads the ZIF Monitoring and ZIF Discovery Platform. He has been instrumental in amalgamating components to structure the Environment Performance Management suite of ZIF Monitor.

Suresh enjoys playing badminton with his children. He is passionate about gardening, especially medicinal plants.