Client Spotlight - Canterbury
City Council
PTC Availability gets the green
light from Canterbury City Council
Canterbury City Council take their Business and IT
support very seriously. They have developed a system
called ‘Tommy’, whereby one member of staff
is effectively the duty officer for a period, and it
is Tommy’s responsibility to monitor the health
of their systems, and pass on problems to the relevant
support section. To do this it needed a system that
could watch all areas of its infrastructure and applications,
from network visibility through to overloading of Citrix
Servers, from database accessibility to Web site functionality.
Not for them the easily ignored e-mails, that might
or might not elicit a response and fix from the right
person. They wanted an ‘In Your Face’ system
that Tommy would have on his or her desktop, and just
in case Tommy was away from his or her desk, could be
repeated on the Support Office wall for all to see.
Another prickly problem was the production of figures
showing the availability, frequency of failure, down
time and all the other statistics required for monitoring
and improving Service Levels.
ITIL specifies such statistics as % Availability, Mean
Time Between Failures, Mean Time to Diagnose, Mean Time
to Repair, Mean Time Between System Incidents and others,
which can be difficult to gather, and, if reliant on
an IT technician to enter manually, are often inaccurate
and not borne out by the end users experience.
PTC Availability has provided the Real Time notification
of problems, plus the historic statistics required for
an ITIL implementation.
"Being able to see where our infrastructure is
having problems lets us react swiftly and decisively
to failures. Having a view of the whole infrastructure,
from Routers through to Citrix Servers also helps us
to diagnose the exact root cause of the failure by seeing
what other components are affected at the same time."
Peter Bull, Business Services Manager, Canterbury
City Council
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