On our summer vacation this year with our Volkswagen Van (“Bulli”) the engine warning light came on, on the way. Unfortunately, it was still over 700 km to our destination in the south of France. Everyone has experienced something like this, and everyone has the same questions: What does this mean now? Do we have to stop? Where can we find a Volkswagen garage in France, or might we even make it to our destination? Or do we even have to stop immediately?
What does an engine warning light have to do with IT and monitoring?
But why am I writing this here? Actually, we have such situations in IT as well: Usually, a warning light goes on somewhere. This information is immediately sent to the responsible IT staff and their similar questions arise as on our vacation trip – What does this mean? Has something completely failed? What effect does this error message now have for the company, our employees and customers?
As with a car, troubleshooting now begins. In modern vehicles, fault diagnosis can almost only be done by the manufacturer or an authorized partner. What is always the same, is that a specialist must now evaluate this error message, request further information/data and then diagnose it using either his expertise or a knowledge base. If the diagnosis is not possible, further specialists or the manufacturer must analyze the problem. Once the diagnosis is ensured, work will be done to resolve the problem.
How can the diagnosis time be reduced?
Especially when an IT failure has an impact on the productivity of employees or even on customers, the diagnosis must be made as quickly as possible so that a solution can also be implemented as quickly as possible. This is called “Reduce MTTR (Mean-Time-To-Repair)”. But how can this be achieved? The most difficult challenge in the entire process is usually to make a quick and correct diagnosis. This requires expertise, knowledge of one’s own environment, a structured approach and a lot of experience. Only experienced and specialized employees can use targeted questions to gather all the information needed for a rapid search for the cause. And this is where Alluvio IQ comes into play.
As explained in the last “News from Field CTO“, Alluvio IQ automatically analyzes problems before IT staff receive a report. In this process, the “expertise” of the staff is transferred into Alluvio IQ via a low-code UI. The result is a dashboard/report that contains all the necessary information about a problem, so IT engineers can diagnose it faster, without having to do extensive research work.
Get results faster with fewer clicks
Alluvio IQ enables IT departments to work in the same way as authorized garages: car manufacturers have also transferred their expertise to the diagnostic systems so that the engineers receives a pre-analyzed evaluation of a fault to quickly start repairing the vehicle. In some cases, car manufacturers also refer directly to a “knowledge base article” on how to resolve the problem.
Alluvio IQ isn’t there yet, but Riverbed is already working on the next stage, for example, to resolve problems automatically. Until then, Alluvio IQ has one goal: to keep IT staff from “digging” through many dashboards and data. To save time and start solving the problem faster, problems are pre-analyzed, much like garages do.
Want to learn more about Alluvio? Just take a look at our website. Do you like what you see and want to try it out for yourself? Download your free trial here and experience it firsthand, or talk to us if you have any questions.
