IT Infrastructure Management – Through a Single Pane of Glass

As an information management executive, you (and by extension, your team) need broad and deep insights into the performance and security of your data management infrastructure. This is the case whether your business applications reside on five servers, fifty, or five hundred.

You need to know:

• 1 – How your servers (both physical and virtual Hyper-V) applications and databases have been performing over time under the “weight” of ongoing internal and/or external user traffic.
• 2 – What maintenance activities have been completed to ensure the stability and scalability of your infrastructure to respond to growing demand.
• 3 – What security patches have been applied to your web servers and databases to ensure your organization prevents data loss and meets regulatory compliance mandates.
• 4 – Whether your infrastructure is configured properly to receive patches through Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager.
• 5 – That patches and updates were applied successfully, and your systems rebooted and emerged from maintenance mode without any performance degradation. – Even in high-availability environments.

The Evolution of IT Maintenance Oversight

This is quite a lot to know at any given time, especially if you are running a densely populated ecosystem of apps from the Microsoft stack (like Exchange, Skype for Business, SharePoint, SQL Server), non-Microsoft applications (such as RightFax, SAP, and custom applications and services which complement them).

Feeling exhausted already from the idea of setting everything up to harvest these data sets? You might even find it daunting to delegate these responsibilities to your direct reports, and monitor that they are completed on an ongoing basis.

To Err is Human, to Automate, Divine

When you were “growing up” in your IT career, can you recall the endless buzz of the servers in your data center, and how quiet things seemed when you left it in the wee hours of the morning before the employees arrived to work? Mistakes are made late at night, when eyelids are heavy, and brains are fatigued.

Remember, before Microsoft SCCM, when you had to manage the full cycle of system patching manually. Good times at 2 in the morning, right? Or….not. Trying to sleep after wrestling with problematic patches all night was futile at best, wasn’t it? When SCCM did arrive on the scene, it was great how it could facilitate many post-Patch Tuesday updates.

Except for pre-patch testing, to make sure systems were prepped for patching. Or post patch testing, to verify servers and applications came back online successfully. You still ended up baby-sitting late night patching processes, or you had to run back to the office if something failed. It still didn’t do much for your personal life, did it?

Observe Your Automated Infrastructure Patching Over Time

Have you ever been to a farmer’s market, or an apiary, and saw, through a pane of glass, hundreds of bees working away at converting pollen or nectar into honey? Such a lot of activity in such a confined space. Just like your data center or your Azure environment during an upgrade cycle.

Capturing all of the maintenance activities associated with the “care and feeding” of your corporate data infrastructure can be seen from behind that infamous “single pane of glass”.

We were really inspired by that server buzzing sound. It was a lot like a hive of busy bees, crawling around on a honeycomb, making that sweet honey. Designing an automated process for patching was the foundation of our beekeeper solution. Then we capture and store all of the activities over time, viewable through an intuitive dashboard, which shows which patching tasks succeeded, which ones failed, and the money saved through patch automation.

Reading about beekeeper doesn’t quite do it justice. We urge you take it for a 30 day test drive, and speak with a hivesoftware specialist.