In this digital era, business organizations offer IT services to customers to help them achieve the desired outcome. An IT service is anything that helps customers achieve an outcome without them worrying about the working and risks. For example, suppose an automobile firm offers an appointment management system for customers. Customers can get appointments with automobile engineers via management systems. The appointment management system is an example of an IT service where customers don’t have to worry about the management, complexity, and scaling of the system. They simply achieve the outcome of setting an appointment with the management system.

Businesses must bear the pain when it comes to the management of IT services. Since the complexity of IT services has increased, business organizations must manage them effectively to boost service availability. Most ITSM teams are coupling monitoring tools with their management tasks to boost service reliability and availability. Read on to know why monitoring should be integrated with ITSM.

Understanding ITSM

ITSM (IT Service Management) focuses on the demands of the customers regarding the IT services of any organization. Based on the customer demands, ITSM teams shape their IT services to provide the best customer experience. ITSM teams focus on the continual improvement of IT services to build better customer relationships. They make sure that the IT services are up and running all the time by improving service reliability and availability. ITSM should not be confused with traditional IT support provided by business organizations. ITSM is more detailed than any other type of IT support service and covers all the IT services provided by any organization.

When we talk about ITSM, we talk about the tools and processes involved in making IT services better. ITSM teams align the IT services according to the business objectives. If the business objective is to provide information to customers, ITSM will make the IT services more informative. With the high service availability of IT services, ITSM teams provide value to the customers.

Challenges in integrating monitoring with ITSM

For ensuring high service availability of IT services, business organizations rely on many software systems and network devices. Monitoring the performance of software systems responsible for the regulation of IT services is of utmost importance. If crucial software systems fail in your organization, IT services might come to a halt, disrupting the customer experience and service availability. Traditional monitoring tools are of no use to the ITSM teams as they cannot handle the complexity of modern-day IT services. It is why business organizations are looking for better application performance management solutions. Some of the challenges faced by ITSM teams for ensuring better monitoring of IT services are as follows:

• Whenever an IT issue occurs, ITSM teams must get on it quickly. However, for big organizations, a high number of issues with IT services occur every day. ITSM teams find it hard to deal with the large volume of IT alerts and solve them in real-time.
• Due to the lack of real-time user monitoring tools, ITSM teams can identify a disruption in IT services too late. What is the point of identifying an IT service issue when it has destroyed the organization’s reliability and service availability?
• When IT services are disrupted, ITSM teams must inform the customer about it. For example, consider a business application that is experiencing downtime. You need to send personal messages or in-app messages to customers that the business application is experiencing downtime. Along with informing customers about a service issue, ITSM teams also must tell them about the expected MTTR (Mean Time to Resolve).
• Along with determining MTTR, determining the root cause of a service issue is also challenging for ITSM teams. Due to poor observability, ITSM teams cannot know about the intricacies of their IT services.
• There are many software systems responsible for maintaining the service availability of IT services. It is important to monitor the performance and health of software systems that lend several IT services to customers. Application performance monitoring with age-old monitoring systems is not helping ITSM teams.
• ITSM teams also must monitor the performance of configuration items that extend support to IT services. Application discovery and dependency mapping are other tasks that are a headache for ITSM teams.

As you can see, these challenges prevent ITSM teams from monitoring IT services rigorously. To steer through the challenges, ITSM teams are moving towards real-time user monitoring tools.

What’s the solution for integrating monitoring with ITSM?

Many organizations have discovered that AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations) can help ITSM teams monitor IT services. Several AIOps products and tools are making waves in the market due to their rigorous monitoring methods. ITSM teams can monitor the IT services as well as automate mundane tasks with AIOps. By integrating monitoring with ITSM, you will get to know about service issues before the customer. Before a service issue disrupts the organization’s service availability, you can fix it with AIOps. An AIOps based analytics platform for monitoring IT services will be active round-the-clock without manual support.

With the best AIOps products and tools for monitoring, you can also determine the expected MTTR. Not to forget, AIOps based analytics platforms will help in determining the root cause of any service issue within minutes. When ITSM teams can determine the root cause of a service issue, they will acknowledge the issues and resolve it quickly.

With AIOps-enabled monitoring solutions, you can monitor the end-user experience. AIOps-led monitoring solutions can identify a service issue that even the customer isn’t aware of. By integrating AIOps-enabled monitoring with ITSM processes, you can make sure the IT services are up and running all the time. AIOps also ensures the software systems involved in the regulation of IT services perform effectively to boost service availability.

Conclusion

Many business organizations increase the size of their ITSM teams to handle the complexity of IT services. With AIOps, you don’t need to hire many ITSM experts, and it can help to slash overhead costs. Start integrating ITSM practices with AIOps-led monitoring!