IT Visibility: The key to efficient troubleshooting and swift problem resolution
Table of Contents
- What is IT visibility?
- IT visibility into the core component of IT infrastructure and its impact on fixing problems
- The Impact of IT Visibility on Troubleshooting and Problem Resolution
- IT visibility and troubleshooting with Virima’s IT asset management platform
What if detecting the root cause of an issue becomes as hard as finding a needle in a haystack? If so, the problem resolution time will be longer, the cost will increase, and productivity will be lost.
But this need not be the case if you’ve IT visibility in your IT environment. Simply put, IT visibility will provide you with a comprehensive as well as granular level view of your assets. Also provide their configurations, and interdependencies. As a result, troubleshooting issues and root problem resolution will be efficient.
However, such IT visibility demands the right tools and processes in place. In this blog post, we’ll explore such tools and dive deep into the ways IT visibility enhances troubleshooting. Also, see problem resolution in IT environments. But before moving into that, let’s understand what IT visibility is. Also, what IT visibility into key components of IT infrastructure looks like.
What is IT visibility?
IT visibility refers to the ability to have a clear, comprehensive, and real-time view of your organization’s entire IT infrastructure. This includes all the hardware, software, networks, and other digital assets that make up your IT landscape.
It also encompasses the understanding of how different assets, applications, and services are connected and depend on each other. In essence, it’s like having X-ray vision in your systems, allowing you to see everything that’s going on and pinpoint potential issues more effectively.
IT visibility into the core component of IT infrastructure and its impact on fixing problems
IT visibility into hardware
Hardware includes all the physical devices, such as servers, storage systems. Also, networking equipment such as routers, that power your IT infrastructure. Having visibility into your hardware means being able to monitor, track, and understand its performance. It also means knowing the health, and status of these devices in real-time.
A giant e-commerce website can start to slow down or crash during a big sale. In this case, having IT visibility into hardware allows you to pinpoint the struggling server when handling increased traffic.
By identifying the issue, you can take immediate action. It is like reallocating resources or spinning up additional servers to handle the load. Also, to get your website back up and running smoothly.
Apart from doing immediate action on an issue, being proactive with maintenance and upgrades to prevent an issue is also a big part of troubleshooting and problem resolution. Here IT visibility into hardware through ITAM tools such as Virima ITAM helps. It allows you to monitor the life cycle of your devices, plans for replacements, and even predict when a piece of hardware might fail based on historical performance data.
IT visibility into software
Software, as you know, is the backbone of any IT infrastructure – the applications, operating systems, services, databases, middleware, and systems that keep everything running smoothly. IT visibility into software (or software visibility) would mean an understanding of how different software components interact with each other and impact overall system performance.
With software visibility through ITAM platforms, you can collect and analyze data on application usage, user behavior, and system performance. This information is invaluable for optimizing your software environment. Moreover, this data can be used to proactively troubleshoot issues before they become major headaches.
For instance, an ITAM report can highlight that a particular application is consuming more resources than it should, causing other services to slow down. By analyzing the data, you can identify the cause of the issue (maybe it’s a memory leak or a poorly optimized query) and work on a fix to improve the overall performance of your IT infrastructure.
IT visibility into networks
Networks are the highways that connect all your IT components, enabling them to communicate and work together seamlessly. Having IT visibility into your network means being able to monitor connectivity, bandwidth usage, and potential security vulnerabilities.
For instance, remote employees can start complaining about slow internet connections and dropped video calls. Network visibility will allow you to identify the cause– a congested network link or a misconfigured router causing packet loss. So you’ll be able to take corrective actions.
So network visibility enables you to detect issues, and diagnose their root causes. As a result, you’ll be able to implement solutions like the above scenario and keep your systems running smoothly.
Into relationships and dependencies
Visibility into relationships and dependencies mean having a clear understanding of how various IT assets and services are interconnected and how they rely on one another to function correctly. This includes hardware, software, cloud components, network components, and services that work together to deliver the desired outcomes for your organization.
When troubleshooting an issue, having visibility into these relationships and dependencies is invaluable. This is because issues in one component can often have a domino effect, impacting other connected components.
By understanding these connections, you can quickly identify the root cause of an issue and take targeted action.
When resolving a problem related to high latency with the storage system, IT visibility provided by dependency mapping tools such as Virima can show the critical database server and applications reliant on the storage system. So you’ll be able to plan the problem resolution more effectively. Such as scheduling changes during low-demand times.
IT visibility in case of other digital assets
This also encompasses other digital assets, such as cloud services, virtual environments, and IoT devices. IT visibility of these digital assets would mean monitoring, tracking, and analyzing the performance, health, and status of these resources in real time. Keeping tabs on these assets can help you manage these resources effectively. Just like in the case of hardware software and networks, IT visibility enables you to troubleshoot any issues that arise. Also, it allows you to ensure the identification of performance bottlenecks and security vulnerabilities.
The Impact of IT Visibility on Troubleshooting and Problem Resolution
Proactive monitoring and early issue identification
IT visibility involves continuously keeping an eye on the performance and health of your IT assets as part of proactive monitoring. This includes hardware, software, networks, and other digital resources. By gathering and analyzing data on these assets, you can spot trends, patterns, and anomalies that might indicate an issue is brewing. For instance, you may identify performance issues with a particular application, it might be time to consider upgrading its hardware or optimizing its code.
Tools such as Virima Discovery allow for creating a monitoring profile of an asset (say hardware). When certain criteria are reached for such a monitored asset, the tool sends out a notification to users. In such cases, you have more time to gather information, analyze the situation, and develop a solution when you’re aware of the issues in advance. It paves the way for efficient problem resolution.
Further, the comprehensive view enabled by IT visibility can even help you determine which issues are critical and require immediate attention and which ones can be addressed later. This allows for optimal resource allocation for troubleshooting.
Precise diagnostics and root cause analysis
When an issue arises in your IT environment, it’s crucial to determine what’s causing the problem to fix it effectively. IT visibility plays a vital role in this process by providing you with a comprehensive, real-time view of your IT assets, their configurations (CI details), and most importantly, their interdependencies.
Tools such as Virima Discovery can provide a comprehensive real-time view of IT assets. But when it comes to understanding dependencies and the relationship between those assets for precise diagnostics, visualization tools such as Virima service mapping helps.
An example of a precise diagnosis can be found when you experience a sudden increase in failed login attempts on your company’s internal file-sharing platform. The issue can be due to the authentication server, the user database, or the network infrastructure. After you narrow down the problem-causing asset, the service maps can help you find out the other hardware, network, or applications that depend on it or serve the asset. So you can take these relationships into account and ensure no other service gets impacted when addressing the issue.
For root cause analysis, the IT visibility through CI data on the CMDB can help you examine the configuration of the authentication server (assuming it was the source of the problem). You can also see the resource utilization, and log files to determine if there’s misconfiguration, insufficient resources, or an external factor (such as a denial-of-service attack) causing the issue. All this paves the way for root cause analysis in troubleshooting the issue.
IT visibility and troubleshooting with Virima’s IT asset management platform
Virima IT asset management comes natively integrated with Virima’s IT discovery and the robust ViVID service mapping capabilities. The core functionality of the ITAM platform provides visibility into the health, performance, and usage by creating inventories of all the IT assets– hardware, software, cloud, virtual machines, and IoT devices. Whereas the natively integrated IT discovery discovers all assets across the IT environment– data center, edge, and cloud environment in the first place.
This information about the state of IT assets forms the backbone of any troubleshooting and problem-resolution efforts concerning single or multiple assets. However, without visibility into the network and dependencies between the assets, a precise diagnosis of an issue isn’t possible. That’s where the exclusive ViVID service mapping feature comes into play. It shows the dependencies and interrelations between affected assets help IT teams go into the root cause of an issue and resolve the problem at the very base.
Book a demo today to know how Virima’s robust ITAM platform paired with automated discovery and service mapping enhances troubleshooting and problem resolution by providing IT visibility.
