We’re back with part three of our four-part series on cutting down IT costs during the asset life cycle. In the last blog, we discussed ways to save in the asset deployment stage. In this part, we’ll look at maintenance and support, and examine ways to save during this stage of the asset life cycle.
When it comes to IT technicians, time is money. On any given day, an organization can have thousands of assets in play. New assets are constantly being added, and old or redundant assets are getting replaced by state-of-the-art machines. And the responsibility of maintaining all these assets falls directly on the IT team.
Outdated or poor quality assets require a lot of maintenance and often fail, leading to crashes and downtime. As a result, these assets end up adding to the existing workload of your technicians, decreasing their productivity, and making it difficult for them to focus on high-priority service and incident tickets.
Looking at the assets with a history of incidents could help identify assets that might be repeatedly failing and adding to the technician’s workload. One important aspect to consider while looking for problematic assets is the frequency of failure to the volume of incidents a particular asset generates. An asset with five failures in a span of 10 days is far more detrimental than an asset with 10 failures in a span of two years.
The frequency of failure can be visualized using the metric MTBF (mean time between failures). A combination of the incident volume along with MTBF can help highlight the assets that might need an immediate replacement.
Another way to ensure technicians use their time efficiently is to notify them of potential points of failure. A good example is servers running out of disk space. When a server runs out of disk space, it leads to a crash, taking down all the applications with it.
IT teams can address this by scheduling disk usage reports to be sent to their inbox periodically. However, depending on the number of servers in use, the report might be too time-consuming to skim through every day. Not to mention this report might not always include servers that need immediate attention.
The best way to notify technicians of potential points of failure is by using an alert mechanism that will send out email alerts only when configured conditions are met. For example, the following report is configured to notify technicians only when the available disk space falls below 5 percent. This mechanism can be useful to notify technicians of various other undesired activities such as installation of prohibited software on workstations or changing server configurations without proper approval.
The focus for this stage of the asset life cycle should be to reduce the burden on technicians, so they can make the most efficient use of their time to benefit your organization financially and in terms of productivity.
These reports are built using Analytics Plus, ManageEngine’s IT analytics solution that offers out-of-the-box integrations with several popular IT applications such as ServiceNow, Jira Software, Zendesk, and ManageEngine’s umbrella of IT products. If you’re looking for an IT analytics solution, start your free, 30-day trial of Analytics Plus now. If you’re already an Analytics Plus user, please upgrade to the latest version to enable new features and updates. If you have any questions, please feel free to post them in the comments section below.
