- VSO’s FogLifter offering mined data from all relevant IT systems to create an interactive and real time dashboard.
- Connected to over 20 different IT reporting systems and covering 40 SLAs and key performance indicators, consolidated into a real-time ServiceNow dashboard.
- VSO provides Agile software development teams through our “Velocity as a Service” offering which allows VSO to deliver specific development objectives at fixed costs with committed timeframes.
Summary
The Client, a nationwide healthcare provider, has multiple service providers managing an IT environment including tens of thousands of servers and network devices, and dozens of petabytes of storage across numerous hospitals, medical offices, and data centers. The Client needed a solution that would provide visibility to IT service performance.
Additionally, the Client had an ongoing challenge in maintaining predictable costs and staffing for their internal DevOps software development and support operations.
Problem
Most super-enterprise customers have seen a proliferation of systems across their IT estate, with predictable confusion as to which systems are the “Systems of Record” for specific pieces of information. Managing the enterprise consistently requires output of systems to the world’s most popular reporting tool-Microsoft Excel. The Client has numerous suppliers of IT services. The client needed dozen business analysts spending two weeks a month to process the data being output from systems and data provided by their suppliers and the Client’s own systems to determine whether the suppliers were meeting the Service Level Agreements and Key Performance Indicators of the business. Determining this performance requires the correlation of data from numerous sources with abstract algorithms in order to calculate over forty specific SLAs. Some examples of key data sources are:
| Service management metrics | Application performance metrics |
| Service level agreements | Incident, Problem, and Change tickets |
| Key performance metrics | Service request ticketing |
| CMDB & Inventory | Backup and Replication data |
| Vendor support contracts | Asset location and Line of Business information |
Solution
VSO’s FogLifter service is designed to reduce the noise, making business sense of all this data-creating one clear and concise view of environmental performance, in a manner that facilitates real action. VSO embarked on a significant customization effort required to integrate several Client systems, allowing the creation of an accurate, timely dashboard reporting with ServiceNow as the dashboard. The integration effort involved correlation of datasets not previously connected, and with full API integration to enable constant, real-time ongoing reporting availability.
Customization required integration and data integrity auditing of various large, existing data sources such as Arcadia, Atlas, Tableau, and ServiceNow itself, as well as underlying vendor infrastructure management tools. All of these data sets are correlated to underlying technologies, supplier-generated reports, and maintained via dashboards in ServiceNow.
Once deployed, FogLifter is still operating as a monthly service that not only maintains the developed dashboards and metrics reporting, but also audited calculations of infrastructure element counts and SLA calculations that are informed with monthly Incident, Problem, and Change exceptions which are negotiated monthly with suppliers as part of ongoing operations.
VSO has also been asked by the Client to provide DevOps Services with Agile teams. VSO runs a team within the Client that performs internal software development for the Client-owned IT support systems. VSO provides these Agile teams through our “Velocity as a Service” offering which allows VSO to deliver specific development objectives at fixed costs with committed timeframes. This is achieved by setting a fixed cost per Story Point within the Agile framework. The Client then pays a predictable monthly cost for a total number of Story Points-which is defined as the “velocity” of the team within Agile.
Project Outcome & Success Metrics
VSO's FogLifter offering mined data from all relevant IT systems to create an interactive and real time dashboard which was deployed on a scalable Azure infrastructure, connected to over 20 different IT reporting systems and covering 40+ SLAs and key performance indicators, consolidated into a real-time ServiceNow dashboard.
VSO’s “Velocity as a Service” DevOps service allows the Client to meet specific development objectives at fixed costs with committed timeframes
Hash Tags
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