Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) scrutinizes hospital readmission rates across the U.S. each year, and it levies financial penalties on organizations that overshoot acceptable hospital readmission rates. As healthcare systems across the country embark on a journey to introduce patient-centric models to their organizations, they must align their resources with ever-changing regulations for them to thrive.

Many ITOM or ITSM tools come with built-in features for alerting and notifications and are able to send at least an email or text notification upon incidents to operations teams. But is this enough reliability to respond to and handle major and critical incidents? Recently, we have been surprised to see more and more monitoring tools listed as alerting tools on review platforms like G2.

How many servers can be managed by one system administrator? This question is not an easy one since it definitely depends on the tasks that need to be operated. However, it´s quite clear that the amount of servers one engineer can manage has increased enormously over time, and is still growing. Yet, public and private clouds, combined with automation tools, enable us to automate many daily tasks. In a modern IT infrastructure almost everything can, and should, be automated.

It’s 2 AM and you’re paged when you’re still awake – how well can you find what you need to fix the latest mistake? When the incident begins it might only be impacting a single service, but as time progresses, your brain boots, the coffee is poured, the docs are read, and all the while as the incident is escalating to other services and teams that you might not see the alerts for if they’re not in your scope of ownership.

This blog post is the first in a series highlighting actual questions asked to eG Enterprise during customer support calls and our answers to those. At first, it appeared that this customer had a simple active/passive web server set-up to provide failover resilience. However, it transpired that they were using Citrix ADC’s (was NetScaler) GSLB (Global Server Load Balancing) features.