Email Infra Visibility

Why is Email still the #1 Infrastructure visibility and notification tool?!

Email VS

For the 20 plus years, the primary infrastructure visibility tool has been electronic mail. For 70% of global enterprises, email is the first notification for a network or IT infrastructure issue. From there, it’s follow the email trail: what’s the issue, where is the issue, what is impacted, who is impacted, who is working on it, what’s the bride details. Then we finally get to the fun part of troubleshooting the actual issue!

As a network engineer for the past 20 years, I have noticed many blind spots that no one is addressing. In today’s fast-paced, digital-first ecosystem, complete visibility is vital in maintaining control of your network operations and eliminating (or at least minimizing) blind spots and system downtime. Here is a list of a few things that I felt there was a great solution for:

Notifications & Communications – Email based notifications that require to follow email trials to get details around the: who, what, when, where, why for an issue, outage, task, or deliverable.

Device History – When was a device put in service? who was the last person to log into it? What maintenances were implemented on this device?

Change History – What’s the last commands executed on device and when? Who has been logging into this device?

Incident History – What is the incident history for device? Who worked on those incidents? What was the resolution of those incidents?

TAC Case/History – What TAC cases have been opened for this device? Who opened those TAC cases? What was the outcome of those TAC cases. Were there any RMAs issued? Is there an easier way to communicate with TAC engineers besides email and phone?

Carrier Case/History – What carrier cases have been opened for this device? Who opened those carrier cases? What was the outcome of those carrier cases? Was an engineer dispatched from carrier? What were past carrier maintenances that impacted your service? What are future carrier maintenances what will impact your service? Is there an easier way to communicate with carrier NOC engineers besides email and phone?

Infrastructure Timeline – What is currently going on in your infrastructure from outages to incidents to changes to task. Who is working on these events? When did the events occur?

Ticket Systems – Between hardware vendors, carriers, internal ticketing systems, and departmental documentation, why does an engineer need to document the same info in two to three different systems?

Updates – When it comes to incidents, outages and tasks. Email is still the primary communication method followed by ticketing systems. Is there an easier way to communicate updates without have engineer log into multiple systems, especially while still in the middle of incident or outage?

Diagram – Infrastructure is always changing but documentation is not always updated. How can we make documentation adaptive while maintaining history?

There are plenty of communication, collaboration, and documentation portals/systems and ticketing systems that can help with the tasks and challengess above. They typically require engineers to write thesis which leads to the documentation not being done right or done at all. 90% of the data mentioned above is already documented somewhere in your infrastructure or one of the ticketing systems you use. What if you had a tool that could consolidate all this data into one UI for you. A tool that could not only document your infrastructure but your network operations.

From a documentation perspective, sometimes simple paragraph update is all that’s required, similar to a social network.

Social Network for your network

Before you close out this webpage, here us out.

We know, this sounds crazy! We designed and built this tool and it still sounds crazy to us. When you consider all the expensive documentation/collaboration tools that have been purchased in the past decade alone and quality of documentation/collaboration hasn’t improved much and how much we still leverage email for IT infrastructure and network operations, it’s time to think outside of the box.

MobileNOC’s Management Infrastructure Timeline gives you 100% visibility into everything that’s going on in your infrastructure. From changes, incidents, outages, TAC tickets, Carrier Tickets, ticket details, notes, updates, and RFOs from one location. Reach out to your account executive to find out how MobileNOC can make your life easier.