Gunakan OpManager free untuk monitoring jaringan Anda

Enterprise software vendors often offer free versions of their tools, typically geared toward smaller organizations with limited budgets. ManageEngine OpManager is a monitoring tool that's available in free and paid versions. OpManager Free Edition, which can be licensed to manage up to 10 devices, provides useful information about servers and other monitoring devices. Here's a look at how it works:

After downloading OpManager Free Edition online and installing it on your machine, inform the Setup wizard that you want the Free Edition. Otherwise, it defaults to a 30-day trial version. Next, choose the devices you want to monitor. To do this, enter an IP address (or an IP address range) and a set of credentials.

OpManager uses authentication credentials -- ones not requiring agents -- to connect to monitored devices. The software supports the use of SNMP (versions 1, 2, and 3), Windows/WMI, Telnet/SSH, and VMware. Figure 1 shows a breakdown of CPU and memory use across monitored devices.

Figure 1. OpManager provides resource utilization data.

One useful thing about the monitoring data OpManager provides is that ManageEngine provides the tools needed to make the data available from outside the OpManager console. In Figure 2, OpManager provides a block of HTML code that corresponds to the top 10 CPU utilization data. You can embed this code into a SharePoint site or any other website to access monitoring data outside of the OpManager console.

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Figure 2. OpManager provides you with code to display monitoring data on a website of your choosing.

In addition to statistics, OpManager also has a robust workflow engine. Admins can manually run workflows, or they can set them to respond to an alarm or run on a specific schedule. For example, a workflow might launch when a process stops or has violated a threshold requirement. Figure 3 shows some of the available triggers.

Figure 3. Workflows can be executed in response to a number of different conditions.

Workflows are easy to build and are flexible. OpManager uses a Visio-style interface that lets an administrator drag and drop various actions and conditions to a workspace. Actions are divided into categories. For example, there are actions related to devices, Windows services, processes, HTTP and FTP, files, folders, VMware, and OpManager. Figure 4 shows the workflow construction process.

Figure 4. OpManager also has a decent reporting engine.

Many of the built-in reports display the same types of information you can view through various dashboards, but the software allows you build your own reports.  The reporting engine is shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5. OpManager has a built-in reporting engine.

This was first published in January 2015

Bagaimana IT Decision Maker gunakan Workload Automation ?

In a relatively short time, workload automation has evolved from static job scheduling to a fullyarchitectural solution that spans the breadth of IT Operations. Now, modern automation solutions are swiftly making themselves a valuable resource in today’s emerging areas such as DevOps, cloud computing, and Big Data. 

In an effort to measure how top IT decision makers view the changing role of workload automation software in their organizations, Advanced Systems Concepts conducted a survey of CIOs and other IT decision makers at over 100 of the top companies in the United States. Our findings show:

Workload Automation is Now a Core Enterprise Application:

Among those surveyed, 63%—nearly 2 out of 3 CIO respondents—reported that their automation software is an integral part of their operations and that they individually access it on a daily basis. Nearly 9 out of 10 organizations reported working with automation software at least several times each week.

As businesses increasingly move towards digitalization, IT automation must act as a cornerstone, optimizing resources and workloads in heterogeneous environments composed of diverse applications and technologies.

We anticipate that the steady use of an automation solution will only continue to grow as individuals and departments both inside and outside of Operations will increasingly utilize the rapidly expanding capabilities of modern automation solutions.

As organizations continue to require fast and timely deployment of IT solutions and updates, we foresee a trend in putting the power directly in the employees’ hands. 

For example, Human Resources users can now initiate the on-boarding process for new employees, as well as for employees who change roles or leave the organization, by automating the creation of an Active Directory account, assigning them to groups, provisioning resources for a new machine, and setting up an email account as well as distribution lists- all with one click of a button. In addition to reducing the downtime of an employee having to wait for IT to solve their issue or build a workflow, this also takes some of the burden off of IT, allowing them to focus on higher level tasks.

Workload Automation Brings Efficiency to More Processes Than Ever Before:

When asked what types of processes they use their IT automation platform to manage, respondents overwhelmingly chose Scripts as the number one process (mentioned by 85% of respondents). This was followed by Batch Processes (84%), File Operations (77%), Managed File Transfers (73%), Business Processes (68%), IT Operations (64%), Reporting/BI (50%), ETL/Data Warehousing (47%), Data Center Processes/Backups (40%), Runbook Automation (39%), and DevOps/QA/Release Management (17%).

Creating new workflows and maintaining business and IT processes is a key function of most IT departments. Intelligent IT automation simplifies the creation of workflows and is more adaptable to changes in the competitive, regulatory, and business environments that continue to affect companies with increasing velocity.

While scripting is always going to be present, CIOs are using automation capabilities, such as better lifecycle management with revision control, to ensure script integrity and more reliable and secure production environments. In addition to this, with the advent of pre-templated job steps and anIntegrated Jobs Library, developers no longer have to perform time-consuming and error-prone custom scripting in order to initiate new processes or fix processes that are defunct because of old scripts.

Although DevOps is lower on the list, it is an emerging movement that is being implemented by a growing number of development and operations teams of all sizes. We think it's likely that Directors and other IT decision makers will start using automation software to facilitate DevOps and other agile methodologies (SCRUM, Lean, Kanban, etc.).

Automation software can help in the DevOps area by automating build and deploy processes quickly and reliably to enable better collaboration and coordination. For example, organizations using SCRUM can create workflows that generate new stories when tests fail. Once these stories are triaged and prioritized, developers will know right away if they break something, creating a quick feedback loop that makes the development cycle more agile and allows for more visibility and control for the team as a whole.

Based on the proliferation of emerging enterprise technologies and organizations’ need for fast-paced IT solutions, we think the new era of IT automation will be key in simplifying the inherent complexities of digitalized businesses with disparate applications, technologies, and platforms.

Automagic - pendekatan Gartner untuk IT Automation

Automation “Automagic"...Gartner’s Approach to IT Automation in the Data Center

Posted by Kaitlin Olcott on Wed, Dec 17, 2014 @ 09:12 AM

This month we had the pleasure of attending the Gartner Data Center, Infrastructure & Operations Management Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. In addition to speaking with attendees and customers, we were able to attend several sessions from leading Gartner analysts. One of the presentations we thought would be of interest to readers of the IT Automation blog was Gartner VP and Distinguished Analyst Ronni Colville and Research Director Robert Naegle’s presentation, Automation: Big Benefits for Today’s and Tomorrow’s Data Center, But Is It Really That “Automagic”?

Colville and Naegle started off the presentation emphasizing that a strong I&O foundation is required to meet the diverse demands of today’s digital businesses. Naegle said, “automation is the glue for digital business.” And picking the right glue is key to developing a successful automation strategy in your data center.

But when it comes to how many tools or what kinds of tools organizations are using, there is no one size fits all strategy. The first live poll of the presentation asked attendees how many IT automation tools they anticipated managing in their ideal environment. The live poll generated a mix of responses from over 200 attendees with “3 to 4” taking the top spot, followed by “5 to 7”, “8 or more”, “1 to 2”, and very little respondents choosing “Don’t Know” or “No current plans to automate”. Colville remarked that most organizations probably have 8 or more.

Gartner predicts that by 2017, 75% of enterprises will have more than four diverse automation technologies within their IT management portfolio, up from less than 20% in 2014.

Colville explained there is no single consistent automation. Scripts are the most common, with newcomers like application release automation entering the fold. Colville advocated asking fundamental questions such as “what do we have?” and “is what you have extensible?” to build a better automation strategy moving forward.

Approach to Automation: Opportunistic v. Systematic

Naegle emphasized that with more tools comes more risk as individuals in the organization are doing different things with different tools. For example, the network team might buy a different automation tool than the server team and the database team might buy a different tool than the storage team, resulting in the organization using 4 tools when 1 or 2 was actually possible. Because there is no coordinated effort between departments or individuals, organizations are taking an ad hoc approach, resulting in islands of automation.

This ad hoc or “opportunistic approach” is characteristic of most organizations today and is not scalable, says Colville. It introduces increasing levels of complexity, higher TCO, and lacks any form of enterprise-wide governance. Instead, Colville advocates a systematic approach in which the organization employs a “process first, technology next” philosophy that creates improved governance and better end-to-end automation.

We presented a very similar idea in an earlier post. As we’ve previously said, rather than taking an “elemental” or “opportunistic” approach, organizations must adopt an “architectural” strategy where individual tools are unified within an enterprise automation solution. An “architectural” strategy lays the foundation for a policy-driven strategy that drives better governance with more visibility and control across the organization. 

Why Automation?

Organizations look to automation for a number of reasons. Colville listed off a few: people don’t scale, scripts are fragile, processes are more complex, and knowledge does not transfer easily. While we were at Data Center, several attendees said a major sore point for their organizations was scripting. For a lot of attendees, it wasn’t just the time they were spending on scripting, but rather the difficulty in managing their human capital investment.

“What’s driving automation is the fact that you absolutely have to get better faster and the only way to do that is by using automation.” 
                                                                                           -- Ronni Colville
                                                                                   Gartner VP and Distinguished Analyst

For example, one IT Manager mentioned how her organization had one person who exclusively wrote Python scripts, and that he recently announced he would be retiring at the end of the year. The IT Manager expressed how she didn’t have the budget to hire a replacement since they had recently bought a new software, but that no one on her team had the knowledge to take over the existing Python scripts, nor did they want the headache of maintaining scripts they didn’t write in the first place.

Organizations who rely so heavily on scripting are exposed to significant risk since the individual writing the script may leave or go on vacation, leaving a critical knowledge gap over time as scripts must be maintained and updated. In addition to this,, most of the time developers don’t want to take on someone else’s script anyway.

Colville said, “scripts are one-offs- there is no place to put or manage them.” Modern workload automation tools like ActiveBatch offer a script vault or content library for scripts so that you can protect your existing investment in scripts and have a central location for storing all of your scripts.We talked to a lot of attendees who were very interested in protecting their scripts and liked capabilities such as lifecycle management and revision history, which gives users greater control and visibility by showing them who last edited the script and when, while also providing an option to restore to a previous version. As organizations move away from scripting, unique capabilities like the Integrated Jobs Library, which provide templated job steps with built-in logic, become key to mitigating risk and reducing manual errors.

What’s Next?

Colville and Naegle predict the future of IT automation will take a heuristic approach, driven by intelligent tools. Heuristic tools will rely less on a process-driven approach, and will be able to dynamically act in response to available resources or conditions and events. As Naegle said, our world is not static. Business regulations like HIPPA or the Patriot Act introduce frequent changes for the IT organization, thereby requiring constant updates to processes and workflows. Having intelligent tools with built-in knowledge makes it easier to update processes and workflows so that regulations aren’t breached by IT.

5 prediksi IT Automation di 2015

Five IT Automation Predictions for 2015

Posted by Kaitlin Olcott on Tue, Dec 09, 2014 @ 09:12 AM

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2014 has been another year of growth and change for the workload automation industry. As the industry continues to evolve and mature, we are seeing workload automation becoming a key staple for most enterprises. According to leading technology analysts, 2015 promises to continue the trend of digitalizing business. From cloud computing and big data analytics to the Internet of Things, digitalization is expanding into every corner of our business and personal lives.

As a result of this digitalization, IT is continuing to play an integral role in today’s accelerating rate of business. Real-time data demands, SLA requirements, and software-defined applications and infrastructure all require more flexible and nimble IT Operations. To keep up with business demands and handle the diversity of technologies and applications, IT automation is responding with new solutions and capabilities. Here are our top predictions for workload automation in 2015:

Consolidation of Point Tools

In Gartner's Market Guide for Workload Automation, Gartner estimates that most large organizations have more than three workload automation tools implemented in their environment. The biggest problem for organizations with this kind of strategy is that they implement automation as silos, resulting in higher costs and a lack of agility. For example, organizations may use a job scheduling tool for batch processes, a runbook automation tool for IT operations, and an HR tool for onboarding and offboarding employees.

Organizations will move away from this disjointed, elemental approach and adopt an architectural strategy with a comprehensive automation solution that can handle end-to-end workflows across the various platforms, applications, and technologies that comprise the IT organization as a whole. Organizations will move away from legacy schedulers with a script-based approach in favor of solutions that can accommodate their existing scripts and also provide production-ready templates where the logic has already been tested. 

Cloud Resource Management Capabilities

Virtual and cloud computing will continue to gain ground and more businesses will adopt a hybrid cloud strategy, replacing some of their on premise computing with virtual/cloud resources. As the infrastructure changes, so will the methods and tools IT must use to manage the way they consume virtual and cloud resources.IT automation is expanding beyond the traditional scheduling of workflows and executing processes by focusing on identifying the amount of resources that are needed to successfully complete the workflow.

Just as smart thermostat systems raise and lower the temperature according to your activities, an intelligent automation solution can essentially spin up more machines when more computing power is needed to complete jobs as well as spin down machines during idle times. IT automation is combining predictive and reactive formsof resource management not only to schedule workflows, but also to proactively provision, schedule, and distribute the necessary virtual and cloud resources on the fly. The future holds even more possibilities in this area as automation can take factors such as your public cloud budget and provision resources so as to stay within that budget. 

DevOps and Improved Collaboration

DevOps and agile methodologies are leading the way in shortening application release cycles so businesses can achieve improved deployment frequency with lower failure rates. In order to do this consistently and effectively, automation is required to ensure repeatability of deployment tasks and minimize manual intervention. IT automation solutions will help with streamlining and automating DevOps processes to facilitate collaboration between Developers and Operations. Using pre-templated job steps and reference plans minimizes time spent scripting and performing repetitive processes. Advanced capabilities such as allowing multiple contributors to work on one or more objects together will allow faster collaboration with improved access.

Self Service Automation

Self Service is pushing the boundaries of traditional automation by putting the power in the hands of the users. Allowing business end users to initiate a process or workflow, without involving someone from IT, minimizes the burden on IT’s shoulders, thereby improving IT service levels for the business overall. For example, Human Resources could initiate the onboarding and offboarding of employees in batches or singularly, adding them to a user group, setting permissions, and creating an Exchange account with a simple, repeatable process that requires just a few drag and drop steps.Advanced user interfaces will allow for greater visibility across the organizations so that business end users can more easily gain insight into their application processing. Additionally, web and mobile capabilities will provide IT and business users with better accessibility and flexibility in executing workflows.

Improved Data Analytics

The pervasiveness of data collection in our society has grown exponentially. From social media to wearables, data is becoming deeply embedded in our everyday lives. As businesses enter the world of big data and big data analytics, automation must respond. To keep track of the various dependencies, constraints, and workflows, organizations need a centralized view that will give them a high level of control and visibility over Operations. Additionally, automation will have to react even faster by reliably executing complex workflows needed to process unstructured and structured data.

9 Ways to Convince Users to Adopt Your Self-Service Portal

Dec 22POSTED BY Siddanth | ServiceDesk Plus

Today’s IT environment is changing rapidly and so are your customers. They are increasingly demanding and are looking for instant resolution of their tickets as well as instant access to information on your services.

Sometimes your service desk might get bombarded with calls when a user faces issues or requires a service to be delivered.This may lead to service desk missed calls or being stuck in the waiting queue.

If you’ve already invested in a self-service portal — or plan to make such an investment — now might be a good time to consider the best ways to encourage its widespread adoption by your end users. Here are nine different ways to convince your users to use the self-service portal.

1. ​Make self service a “must or recommended” use rather than an optional way of contacting service desk: Most users tend to call tech agents for help when any service goes down rather than using the self-service portal. As a result, the number of calls to your service desk ​increases. This in turn, increases the load on your help desk agents. For your help desk to perform efficiently, it is better to recommend the self-service portal to users and make it clear to them that this is the most preferred method.
2. Keep your knowledge base updated and provide more information to your users: Keep the knowledge base updated with the latest how-to’s, workarounds and solutions to helps users to login to self-service portal and search for solutions before raising a ticket. Make announcements whenever a new solution is added to the knowledge base and invite your users to login into self-service portal and read through the solutions.
   
3. Educate your users on the benefits of using a self-service portal: Users may not be aware of what a self-service portal can do for them. Educate your users on the benefits of a self-service portal such as self-tracking the status of any requests or tickets themselves, see pending approvals, announcements etc. With better knowledge on the benefits comes greater value to your end users.
4. Explain how calls land up in waiting queue: Sometimes, due to high call volumes, a tech agent happens to miss a call and the issue remains unresolved. Tech agents will not be able to track those incidents tickets and document the solutions for future use. They can communicate this problem to their users and explain why ticket creation via portal can be a savior.
5. Prioritize tickets sent via self-service portal: Let users know that their tickets will be handled with a higher priority than tickets sent via email or by phone. This way, users will know their tickets are handled much faster and with greater efficiency.
6. Provide incentives or rewards:​ Providing incentives or rewards to those who use the self-service portal will encourage users to frequently use it rather than call  help desk technicians for help.Rewards may not necessarily be monetary benefits but can be a points-based rewards system to encourage users and to maximize the usage of the self-service portal.
7. Provide a better user experience through the self-service portal: Make it easy for the users to raise incidents or service requests through the self-service portal with custom templates. Have timely conversations to help the users get regular updates on the ticket and to create a great user experience.
8. Educate users of a proper documented help desk policy in place: Let your users know that your help desk has a process in place to have all the information documented and to follow up in a structured and organized manner. Communicate to your users that unless a ticket is created in the system, their request may not be handled. No ticket! No Help!
9. Make your self-service portal mobile and tablet friendly: Having a mobile and tablet optimized self-service portal helps users to submit ticket on the go. Instead of calling techs, users can submit via the mobile/tablet app. Users can track all their requests via the mobile apps anytime, anywhere.

Desktop Central Voted a “Rising Star” by MobileVillage.com Readers

Jan 07POSTED BY Vijay.ch | Desktop Central

​What better way for Desktop Central to start the new year than with a 2014 Mobile Star Award? How about starting the year with two Mobile Star Awards?!

That’s right, we’re kicking off 2015 with two “Rising Star” awards – one for Mobile Device Management andone for Mobile Asset Management. The honor is amplified by the way the Mobile Star Awards program works: winners are chosen by the mobile-savvy readers of MobileVillage.com rather than a small pool of judges or panelists.

As Mobile Star Awards director Gary Thayer says, “[T]he Mobile Star Awards is still the only competition where today’s most exciting new mobile products and companies can compete against established competitors on a more level playing field. A major part of this is because votes are cast by real users who really love the products—these are the mobile early adopters, mobile IT professionals, and tech bloggers who dominate our readership.” 

In addition to our recent awards, we’ve ​recently enhanced the mobile device management features of Desktop Central to include:

• Support for Windows Phones
• iOS VPP license management
• Multi-language support

 We will continue with the same spirit and make the product even better. Thank you all!