Proactive

IT Management
How to Do More with the Resources You Have
 Most IT helpdesks are built to handle incidents reactively, using
a process that looks something like this:

If you wait for -

-
Incident is identified via a ticket from a technician or end user
Incident is investigated and a resolution is identified
customers to -
-
Remediation is implemented
Resolution is verified and submitter is notified
tell you that This reactive IT management model:
you need to do - Forces the IT team to rely on a negative outcome before a
something, user takes action and notifies the team for a solution
- Negatively impacts end-user productivity and satisfaction
you’re too late. - Increases cost and delays strategically-important projects

Movement towards a proactive model doesn’t happen

— Stuart Rose overnight and requires the right set of tools, but it can have
a dramatically positive impact.
The cost of reactivity Cost of server downtime
Who really cares if your team isn’t proactive? Well, the
business leaders in your organization certainly do.
44 $549k (SMBs)
The chart on the right details the cost of server 99.5%
downtime for SMBs (in light blue) and larger hours $9.3M (Global Average)
organizations (in darker blue). This is the average cost
of a single server going down based on uptime
percentages. Even at 99.95% uptime, the average $109k
annual cost of server outages is $55,000. What 99.9% 9
happens if we take that number and apply it across all hours $1.9M
the servers you manage?

A reactive IT management process also adds costs in

the form of: 4 $55k
• Employee productivity losses from spending time
99.95%
hours $930k
on fixing IT issues
• Lost opportunities due to delayed or abandoned IT-
enabled projects from lack of IT bandwidth
• Fines or ransomware payments due to lax security $11k
• Higher direct IT labor costs as IT staffs up 99.99% 0.5
hours $185K
Bottom Line: Reactive IT management can have an
outstanding cost to your business.
https://venturebeat.com/2012/11/14/the-high-cost-of-server-downtime-infographic/
 Helpdesk
 Fewer tickets
The benefits of proactivity  Fewer user-generated tickets
 Faster ricket response times
Shouldn't your job be about more than just putting
 Faster ticket resolution times
out fires?

1. A proactive approach to IT management focuses on:

 Avoiding potential issues through maintenance
 Resolving issues that do arise before they impact Users
users or the business  Less time spent solving IT related issues
 Higher satisfaction
2. Proactive monitoring allows IT teams to identify leading
 Greater productivity
indicators of failure on a network, server, or endpoint.
 Higher trust in IT processes
E.g. Monitoring for a predictive RAID failure to
proactively failover to a secondary server and fix the
issue.
Infrastructure
3. Proactive maintenance can increase the longevity of IT
assets and increase the reliability and stability of your  Greater network uptime
infrastructure.  Greater server reliability
 Improved security
4. Because a proactive approach solves issues before they
impact end-users and resolves issues faster, this
approach can significantly impact key metrics your team
is measured against.
 STEP 1

Monitor Everything
If you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it.
monitor
— Peter Drucker
 Monitoring examples
Monitor everything  Hardware inventory, including
processors, memory, disk volumes,
 Device state
 Network utilization
and more
 Software inventory  Key process and service state
Without real-time insights into your managed IT
assets, being proactive is incredibly difficult and time  Health and performance metrics like  Drive health
consuming. CPU utilization, drive space, and more  And more
The single most important step any IT team can make
toward becoming proactive is to implement a
centralized remote device monitoring and alerting
solution across your entire IT portfolio that gives you
360-degree visibility into your endpoint health and
performance.

Remote monitoring
 Gives IT teams a robust self-updating inventory of all
managed IT assets to help you make decisions and
remediate faster
 Enables IT teams to keep a pulse on the health and
performance of your servers, networks, and end-user
endpoints
 Makes incident identification faster
 Gives technicians the context they need to assess
and remediate incidents
 Provides a mechanism for targeted endpoint state or
event identification to kick off proactive workflows
 Notification trigger examples
Use notifications effectively  Server offline  Unexpected high network
utilization
 Failed or missing patches
Remote monitoring gives you data, but notifications and  Unauthorized software installation
alerts make you proactive. By monitoring live endpoint  Multiple consecutive failed
authentication attempts  Full disks
telemetry data and creating threshold-based condition
triggers, you can automatically create notifications,  Critical server process status (DNS,  Degraded batteries
alerts, and tickets based on endpoint behavior. DHCP, Exchange, SQL, etc)
 And more

Notification benefits for technicians

 Where signs of predictive failure can be identified and
monitored (SMART status or RAID errors for example),
technicians can perform proactive maintenance and avoid
failure
 Signs of future degradation (almost-full disk, regular high
CPU utilization, low network bandwidth) can also trigger
notifications and help IT teams proactively address future
potential issues
 When failure is detected, IT teams are the first to know, so
they can resolve the issue before end-users feel the
impact of failure
 Notifications and alerts are incredibly context-rich and
make incident identification and remediation faster and
easier

Remote monitoring with proactive alerting can instantly

make your team more proactive.
 STEP 2

Automate Practically Anything

With automation, there will come abundance.

— Elon Musk
 How to identify automation targets

Automate everything 1. Look for high volume ticket,

particularly those with
3. Look to less standardized
processes that are time
standard remediations consuming and break the
process down into chunks that
Problem 2. Look at highly standardized can be automated
(or standardizable) processes
 IT operations and support tasks are often resource- that you already run 4. Finally, look to any remaining
intensive, often responsible for a high proportion of IT staff repetitive tasks or tickets and
FTEs start automating those
 These tasks are critical for the continuing operations of the
business and so cannot be ignored
 This imposes resource constraints that have a high
opportunity cost on the business in terms of delayed or
abandoned IT-enabled projects

Solution

 Automate high-volume, repetitive tasks like

 Endpoint and server maintenance tasks
 New endpoint setup or redeployment
 Software installations
 Patching
 Highly standardized 1-2 step tasks

 Build out a library of incident remediation scripts that can be

deployed with one click to
 Free up significant workload from your technicians
 Shift more remediations to Tier 1 and Tier 2 technicians

Remote monitoring with proactive alerting can instantly make

your team more proactive.
 Reactive, manual workflow vs. automation

Automation examples No Automation: With Automation:

The printer server spooler system goes down: The printer server spooler system
goes down:
1. An employee is having trouble printing and
A few common real-world examples submits an “I can’t print” ticket 1. Ninja detects that the service has
partners have shared with us about how 2. Technician receives ticket and begins gone down and triggers an alert
they use automation include: investigation on endpoint 2. Ninja automatically deploys a script to
3. Another employee has the same issue and restart the print server spooler service
 Identifying a stopped service and submits a ticket; issue is escalated to a problem 3. Employees’ ability to print is
automating the service restart (e.g., 4. Technician pivots and investigates print server, interrupted for only a few minutes at a
identifies that the print spooler is down and maximum and no ticket is ever
OneDrive, TeamViewer, Active restarts it opened
Directory, Print Spooler) 5. Employees are notified and they can start printing
 Setting device configurations,
deploying software, joining the
domain, and personalizing the
workspace for a new employee’s
device
 Setting patch scanning, approval and
deployment schedules to minimize
vulnerability and end-user impact
 Triggering an automatic reboot
whenever an employee laptop has not
been restarted in 30 days
 Automating deployment of weekly
and monthly maintenance and
cleanup activities on servers and
workstations
Remediation workflows
Traditional remediation w orkflow

End-user Feels End-User Ticket Resolution

Ticket Review
Pain Submits Ticket Remediation verified and user
and Follow Up
notified

Back and forth

with user
W ith monitoring and automation
End-User
Feels Pain

Ticket Resolution
Failure Predicted / High Context
Remediation verified and user
Detected Ticket Created
notified

Automated Resolution
About NinjaOne
We simplify IT operations

NinjaOne is committed to building high-performance,

scalable, secure, and easy-to-use IT management
products that monitor, remediate, and enable MSPs and
IT professionals to deliver business continuity and drive
profitability. Our user experience was designed from the
ground up to lower the costs of onboarding new users
and maximize automation to deliver a modern IT
management experience.

Talk with us
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