Support Stories Part 2: Remove the burden of administrative IT tasks

Interruptions in service and performance issues put a significant amount of stress on IT teams. Whether it’s your internal users who face these roadblocks, or your end users/customers, problems with your services can lead to brand damage and loss of customers. Not only that, but resolving problems with your service can often take a huge amount of time and resources away from other projects.

That’s where JDS support comes in. Our team of local, Australia-based support consultants provide IT management, monitoring, and support services to customers all around the country, ensuring their environments function properly and their systems perform as needed. This allows your team to focus on business services and innovative projects by removing the burden of administrative IT tasks.

We have provided both temporary and ongoing support solutions for companies in a broad variety of industries, over a range of timeframes. In Part 1 of our Support Stories, we discussed the services we provided on an automation project and a service manager project. In Part 2, we have two more case studies featuring a large mining company and a respected Australian university.

Mining Company Case Study

A large mining company (LMC) handed over their Health Check System to Support to ensure the LMC’s applications were up and running. A request came in as a priority 2 where BSM was needed to analyse performance issues on their Sharepoint application, for which the script wasn't maintained and was failing consistently. This presented challenges as our consultants had to upskill quickly in Vugen (required to rework the script), and get a good grasp of the LMC’s environment, which was being slow and unstable (application crashing).

To start with, we had to re-work a script that was known to be problematic. Once that was fixed, the LMC would be able to use BSM to troubleshoot performance issues tied to the application.

We treated this issue as a high priority and focused on finding a solution from the day the work was raised and approved from the LMC’s end. As part of this process, our team tapped into multiple knowledge sources to ensure that had all the information required to deliver a successful outcome for the LMC. To ensure proper expectations were set and met, we were in constant communication and providing updates to our stakeholders.

Ultimately, we raised the issue with our support team lead, who assisted in setting up a meeting internally to discuss the best way to go forward (whether it was best to get a consultant to go on-site or continue working on the issue, what needed to be done, who to contact or get involved, etc.) We made use of all the resources available, such as logging high priority tickets with the vendor and checking the broad range of JDS staff resources to see who was able to assist.

As the project took longer than expected due to circumstances beyond the client’s control, we agreed on a reduced fee for the number of hours worked. In the end, we were able to fix the script after two weeks, and the client was pleased with the result and continues to engage JDS Support for its ongoing monitoring and performance checking needs.

University Case Study

A respected Australian university (RAU) had ingested some data sources into Splunk and the performance was degrading, which meant that data was not coming into the system. Because of this problem, they were not able to use Splunk to its full capacity.

Initially, the JDS support team disabled the inputs in Splunk to stop the degradation of the performance. However, that in of itself, did not solve the original issue and there was still the task of integrating new data sources into Splunk remaining.

Our remote support engineer engaged Splunk Support on behalf of the RAU. A JDS consultant and the support engineer also went on-site to the RAU to work directly with the client and collected logs and performance metrics for the support case—this was a special case, where the needs of the customer warranted an on-site visit that wouldn’t normally be included in their support plan.

Splunk Support suggested some solutions and we tested it in our own environment before going back to the RAU to implement the solution.

In the end, we were able to ingest all the data sources that the RAU needed and also improve performance on the servers.

Length of Time at JDS

Since February 2017

Skills

Mainly HP BSM, and I’m about to start upskilling in AppDynamics.

Workplace Solutions

Any client queries related to HP BSM (Technical queries, Technical issues, licensing, etc).
Assisting internal stakeholders at JDS with their business IT needs or issues.
Helping to maintain the different applications that make up the whole system at JDS.
General IT Support, ensuring client applications are running smoothly and that their technical issues are addressed in a timely manner