Managed services cover all services designed to ensure the performance, integrity and optimal operation of your information system (IS).
This management of operational IS activity can be entrusted in whole or in part to your service provider, who becomes a true partner of the company, given the stakes involved in this function.
Commitments and responsibilities are clearly set out in a dedicated service contract and support contract (SLA). These define not only the scope of intervention and the nature of the services provided, but also the criticality of incidents, guarantees of intervention time, recovery through the implementation of a workaround if necessary (GTI/GTR), definitive correction and any other parameter enabling the company to combine control and peace of mind.
Managed services thus include monitoring, maintenance, incident management and resolution, application of updates and security management applied to the entire information system (including network equipment, servers, storage solutions, backup and associated equipment). They cover a whole range of services agreed with the IT Department (Direction du Système d’Information – DSI) in order to gain in agility, serenity and durability, and to support the company’s strategy in its digital transformation.
For all these operations, LMSYS has chosen to train its entire team in ITIL practices aimed at delivering quality service. In particular, this involves the use of CMDBs (configuration management databases), which identify each IS component as a “configuration item”. Within this framework, a recurring steering committee has been set up. This committee monitors the indicators defined as part of the support contract (e.g. number of tickets processed, average resolution time, etc.), and the operational management of the infrastructure (indicators such as server utilization rate, storage capacity occupancy rate, etc.), enabling us to measure the quality of service provided and make future decisions for the infrastructure.
Monitoring : Supervision and metrology
Supervision corresponds to the processing of instantaneous information, i.e. everything relating to occurrences that may affect the IS. LMSYS has chosen the open source iCinga 2 system to provide supervision services.
Its agents, deployed in the IS, can be used to manage service control, identify and record events, send alarm notifications… everything that feeds the event history.
System or application logs are also used for monitoring, centralized in a “log sink” and processed by a tool such as Graylog.
Metrology completes monitoring, by aiming to obtain data on several IS monitoring indicators (CPU and RAM consumption, number of requests processed, input/output (IO), etc.). We use the Telegraf agent associated with the Victoria Metrics / Grafana solution.
All the information generated by monitoring is used to track the IS in order to identify potential problems and induce the appropriate maintenance strategy, and to draw up a diagnosis.
Capacity planning
Capacity planning (also known as capacity management) aims to allocate the IT resources required for the proper execution of the company’s various activities, while maintaining the same level of technical performance.
This involves adapting resources (CPU, RAM, storage, etc.) as the services deployed increase, to ensure infrastructure scalability. Inadequate anticipation of capacity requirements can lead to performance degradation, or even the interruption of certain services, but conversely, oversizing an IT environment on principle will generate a waste of resources (a strategy incompatible with the Digital Responsibility approach) and a financial loss.
The challenge of capacity planning is therefore to anticipate changing needs and optimize resource allocation to guarantee IT performance and availability. In some cases, these capacity management actions can be automated.
Maintenance (MCO)
Maintenance refers to all operations aimed at maintaining the IS in operational condition. It therefore integrates CMBD, monitoring, incidentology and capacity planning data to define a 2-level strategy: preventive and corrective maintenance.
Preventive maintenance is defined by the actions taken to avoid an incident, and involves change management (OS and application security updates in particular) or the detection of known security flaws declared via the CMDB.
Corrective maintenance refers to the notion of intervention in the event of an incident.
LMSYS relies on ticketing tools (such as GLPI) to trace and trigger the appropriate treatment.
Operational management of a services contract
BT Services provides consulting, integration, support and maintenance services for network and IT infrastructures. As part of a service contract with a major French industrial group headquartered in the Nouvelle Aquitaine region, BT Services is to implement a service to operate the LAN, WAN, security equipment and VoIP at the group’s 360 international sites.
As LMSYS already assumed the role of Service Delivery Manager with a dedicated team hosted at the client’s site, we had to ensure the transition to the new operations team spread over two sites in France.
To this end, SDM managed the training of the new teams so that they could appropriate the technical environments and their specificities:
Our knowledge of customer processes, contacts and business constraints allowed:
Following this handover, customer satisfaction has lasted for more than 3 years after the signature of the contract thanks to a structured daily operational management close to the customer.