Dell Services, the global system integrator and IT outsourcing arm at Dell, provides support, application, cloud, consulting, and many other mission-critical IT services to hundreds of organizations worldwide across many sectors. The company collects and manages massive amounts of data concerning customer infrastructures from simple, high-frequency metrics (such as CPU, memory, and disk utilization) to helpdesk tickets and service requests, including hardware and software asset information.
Using this data to understand and respond to customer needs before they become a problem falls to John M. Johnson, Manager, Capacity Management at Dell Services. In an informal format, Johnson will explain how his team uses OpenText Actuate Information Hub (iHub) to ensure system reliability and keep their customers informed in a free webinar on Tuesday, May 5 at 9:00 a.m. PDT.
Johnson recently spoke with OpenText about the type of data Dell Services collects, and the evolving ways his customers consume that data. He also spoke about how he uses this data to plan for the future.
OpenText: You have a 12-terabyte data warehouse of performance metrics on your customers’ systems and applications. Tell us about that data and how you use it.
Johnson: Our infrastructure reporting data warehouse has been around for seven-plus years. It collects aggregated information about more than a hundred customers, which is just a segment of our base. Originally we started the data warehouse to meet legal retention requirements, and it evolved to become the repository for ticketing data, service request data, and SLA performance data. Now it’s an open warehouse where we continually add information related to our services delivery.
It’s fantastic data, and a fantastic amount of data, but we lacked two things: an automated way to present it, and a consistent process behind its presentation. My twenty capacity planners were spending too much of their valuable time churning out Excel reports to present the data to our clients, and far too little time understanding the data. A little less than two years ago we started using open source BIRT for report automation and to eliminate manual errors, consistency issues, and remove the “personal analysis methods” that each engineer was introducing to the process. The next maturing of the process was to leverage iHub to further automate report generation, delivery and presentation.
OpenText: Some of your customers and users get dynamic dashboards, while others get static reports. How do you decide who gets what?
Johnson: That’s an easy answer: It begins with contract requirements. Those expectations are drawn out and agreed upon by legal counsel on both sides. Once those fundamental requirements are met, the question of, “Who gets what?” is very simply based on how they need and want the data. I have three customer bases: my services customers, and my delivery teams, and peer technical teams who have reporting requirements.
And everybody wants a different mix of data. DBAs want to see what’s going on with their infrastructure – their top databases, hardware configurations, software versions and patch level, clusters performance, and replication stats. Other teams, such as service delivery managers, and the account teams, want to see pictures more on a financial level. They need answers to standard questions like, “What has the customer purchased, and is that service meeting the customer’s expectations?”
In some cases we handle customer applications in addition to their infrastructure. In those cases, the customer needs reports on uptime, availability, performance, user-response time, outstanding trouble tickets, number of users on each system, and various other application metrics married with the infrastructure data. Those are all static reports we typically deliver on a monthly schedule, but we’re looking to make that particular reporting a daily process with iHub Dashboards.
Dashboards will serve three major groups:
1. Application owners, who will see what’s going on with their infrastructure and applications in real-time
2. Our service managers, who coordinate the daily delivery of our services around the world
3. Senior leaders at the director, VP and CxO levels.
That last group has much less interest in a single trouble ticket or server performance, but they do care about service levels and want to know how the infrastructure looks on a daily basis.
I think the executive-level dashboards will be big consumers of data in the future, so we’re evolving and maturing our offering from a technical level – where we have traditionally been engaged – to the business level. Because that’s where people buy.
OpenText: That is an ambitious plan to extend your reporting platform. How do you prioritize your projects, and what advice would you give to peers with similar plans?
Johnson: There’s one overall strategy I try to employ with all my applications: Apply modern, agile software development methodologies to them. You have to stay up-to-date on software patches and capabilities. You have to keep your platform relevant. We keep updates coming rapidly enough that our customers don’t have to create workarounds or manual processes. Fortunately, iHub works well with how we manage upgrades. We manage reports as a unit of work inside of iHub, so I don’t have to make monolithic changes.
When I’m prioritizing projects, I first ask, “Who is my most willing customer?” The customer who’s going to work with you provides the quickest path to success, and that success is the foundation upon which you build. Second is to expect to get your hands dirty and do a lot of the lifting. Most customers are always going to have trouble verbalizing what they need and how they want data to look. So you have to just get that first visualization done and ask, “Does this data presented this way answer your needs?” Don’t be afraid of responses such as, “That is not what I wanted at all. I told you I wanted a report,” and that’s one of the most frustrating things about the job. You have to accept that you are a statistical artist and visual presentation is something you own, and then embrace and drive it. Fortunately, the ease of developing and managing data with iHub means we can respond to these inputs rapidly.
Learn more about how John Johnson and Dell Services automate and present monthly reports and analytics, provide dashboards and performance metrics to CIOs, and perform monitoring, capacity planning, and workload automation in a free OpenText Analytics webinar. Sign up today.