I will help you with all aspects of Enterprise Management project design and planning.  Spending time on project design is imperative when you are planning a large monitoring project, but even if your project is small some design work is critical to ensure you have covered the agreed scope and can publish, discuss and agree against a formal document. I can help you with high-level design documents, detailed design documentation, and provide project plans to help visualise how your project will proceed.

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I can help with your architecture design to ensure we cover what you have now, along with what you are planning to purchase, install, configure and deploy.  The resulting architecture for the monitoring framework should then be functional, complete, resilient, and ultimately reflect a best of breed monitoring solution.  Using the detailed design documentation I can also ensure that key stakeholders are involved in the planning and delivery phases of your project to ensure the new architecture is delivered in as smooth a manner as possible.

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I can help you with all forms of project management to ensure your Enterprise Management programme proceeds as you expect, with planning sessions, regular updates, meetings, progress reports, deadline visibility, milestone definitions, deliverables reviews, coupled with effective team management if required. This can also be of use if your business is using outside/vendor consultancy services and you would like this to be managed effectively to ensure they deliver as promised, to agreed timescales, and fulfil their contractual obligations.

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Project management is one thing, project delivery is another matter.  Having someone working within your Enterprise Management & Monitoring programme who is intent on delivering a workable, beneficial and supportable solution is paramount to effective project delivery.  The delivered system must satisfy the project requirements, it should be documented, communicated to all stakeholders, and ultimately should deliver on all of the promises that would have been discussed during the project initiation and management phases.  I am highly experienced in delivering complete monitoring solutions that are best of breed and exceed expectations, providing immediate benefits to your business, saving you time, effort and money.

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I can help you with all forms of installation and configuration of various software products, supported by extensive, thorough build documentation to ensure you have a complete record of what was done, and the steps involved to get the software working as expected.  Examples of software products I install regularly include:

For more information, or to discuss something not listed here, please contact me.

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I offer extensive consultancy services in the area of HP Operations Manager message management, message refinement and message reduction.  All too often clients have HP OpenView systems in place and the alarm message volumes are unmanageable, making it hard for the datacentre/bridge operators to correctly identify real problems in the environment due to this message "noise".  In turn this impacts the effectiveness of your entire monitoring solution, swamping teams with alerts and trouble-tickets, whilst sometimes missing or masking critical faults.  I can help reduce the number of alarm messages generated within your HP OpenView tools, reducing the noise to ensure correct (meaningful) alarm messages are generated, and enforcing alarm message standards to increase readability, understanding and ultimately your effectiveness to provide a pro-active best of breed monitoring solution for your business.

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I can help with all forms of HP OpenView Operations Manager template/policy configuration, whether you are having issues with particular monitoring conditions, or whether you require more advanced mechanisms to monitor your IT environment in a more effective manner.  Some questions you might ask yourself include:

For more information on templates/policies that might help you take a look at my downloads page and register for updates.  Alternatively, contact me with your requirements - if there's something you would like to see let me know as I might already have done the hard work before… why re-invent the wheel when I have done all of the hard work for you!

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I offer a comprehensive health check service (in the UK I liken this to a car MOT test) for your HP OpenView Operations Manager environments.  Here I will review your entire environment, including hardware, architecture, software, patches, configuration, support, training, documentation, people and processes.  I can focus on all or some of these areas as you decide, and deliver a report on what is good or bad, which areas require work, and resulting in a list of recommendations you should address in order of priority.  I can then help you to resolve these issues, or leave them for you to work through in your own time.  I recommend you go through this process before you begin any major piece of work, and then on a yearly basis thereafter to ensure you are constantly reviewing & improving your monitoring environment.

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An essential part of any IT monitoring solution is the provisioning for DR (disaster recovery) situations.  If the system is unavailable for whatever reason, or is unable to provide a satisfactory monitoring function, then there must be a clear procedure which should be followed to assess the situation and determine if the monitoring services should failover to the DR standby server.  I am experienced in configuring DR monitoring solutions using HP OpenView Operations Manager and can provide documented procedures and scripts to ensure that failover and failback is handled as smoothly as possible.  Another useful task is to perform routine, periodic role-swaps between your primary and DR monitoring tools - this ensures the processes of failover and failback are fully understood and are executed consistently.  It also provides everyone with confidence in the entire Enterprise Management & Monitoring service you provide to your business.

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Most organisations have a datacentre or operations bridge where a team of people view various IT systems and displays, providing a central nerve centre for alarm management within the organisation.  This is where HP Operations Manager would be displayed, ideally on a large screen to maximise the visibility of alerts.  I can help to define the roles and responsibilities within a datacentre operations bridge to ensure that the monitoring tools are used in an effective, consistent manner to ensure that faults are reported accurately and efficiently.  If you would like me to help you review and improve the processes within your datacentre operations bridge please contact me.

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