Today more and more enterprise customers are deploying Lync or Skype for Business as a mission critical platform for unified communications and collaboration. As part of the feature set associated with deploying such a solution, an enterprise customer gains the benefit of improved communications experience within and outside the enterprise, by using a wide range of modalities and capabilities that were not available previously using dedicated legacy systems. With such solutions, end users are freed from their previously static forms of communication, and business processes are unlocked for faster and more efficient decision making. However, with this solution there are some potential pitfalls if not carefully planned, designed and monitored.
Example:
The power of a consultant to communicate with any enterprise user, in a timely and efficient manner while at a customer’s premises is a major benefit of the solution. The benefit from the solution is lost, if the communication from the consultant is either blocked or of poor quality.
Issues can arise from a wide range of possibilities, which when they occur are potentially costly and could cause setbacks to significant investments already made including tangible investments, customer satisfaction and goodwill. Potential issues that could arise, could impact critical business functions owing to Lync or Skype for Business solution’s behaviors include but are not limited to:
- Software failures
- Hardware failures
- Poor configuration in the solution itself, or within dependent components including firewalls, load balancers and gateways
- Poor performance on the network causing poor communications.
Detection, diagnosis and resolution of an issue greatly reduces the impact of that issue. A continuous, dynamic monitoring service can add significant value to an organization. The PowerSuite Monitoring Solution service can provide the following on behalf of the organization:
- Automatic verification of the system working satisfactory, that occurs regularly throughout the day.
- Alerting of the correct individuals, when an issue has been identified by the service.
- Provide detailed information on the issue, including details of the experience an end user would see.
- Provide a mechanism to automatically retry and verify that the issue is resolved.
- Continuing to monitor the rest of the environment, while the fault is being fixed, ensuring that further breakdowns do not occur during the vulnerable period.
Providing a service which removes the variability around an issue ensures that an organization can save a significant portion of productivity loss and the associated costs. Monitoring Solution provides alerts and reports to inform the organization of the issues. Reports provide weekly and monthly summaries of service levels and statistics. Alerts are sent when the validation has failed or is no longer failing. Monitoring Solution’s real time alerts incorporate practical Unify Square expertise and real-life operational experience in large enterprise environments. Monitoring Solution alerts include failure analysis to assist the organization’s IT staff with rapidly identifying the root cause of the failure. PowerSuite Monitoring Solution sends reports weekly and monthly, these reports are a valuable mechanism to provide insights into the:
- Overall service availability.
- Associated trends over time.
- Ability to identify larger problem areas that continue to have large impacts.
- Benchmarking to compare to other Lync or Skype for Business environments.
It should be noted that the costs and problems associated with detecting issues are not something uniquely identified by Monitoring Solution. Lync or Skype for Business does provide customers with mechanisms to detect issues via techniques such as SCOM alerts, and with the ability to install Synthetic Transactions. Although, an enterprise should not ignore the advantage of the Lync or Skype for Business monitoring capabilities, there are still gaps in the overall monitoring solution, and hence it is necessary for a mechanism to be added allowing the enterprise to validate the complete deployment. PowerSuite Monitoring Solution is that solution.