Root Cause Analysis provides Instant Troubleshooting

The Need: Answering the question "Who touched this server?"

Oddly enough, the simple question "Who last accessed the server and what did (s)he do?" remains one of the toughest questions to answer in IT today. This is despite the variety of system management tools that monitor your network environment. Management tools are improving our ability to handle system error. But human error, the #1 cause for server downtime, remains elusive.

• Know who worked on which servers
• Record all actions that are taken
• Track, report and alert on any user activity

ObserveIT takes you straight to the root cause of error

With ObserveIT on your network, you can review every action that takes place on your server network. No more fingerpointing, no more hunting for cause of changes, and no more wondering what they do on your servers once you give them access.

ObserveIT Benefits for Troubleshooting

• Knowing 'Who did what?' – Answer the question that will really lead you to problem resolution
• Immediate root cause determination – Bypass the slow-moving log review, and go straight to the problem origin
• Alerts inside your Network Monitoring platform – Streamline your IT monitoring process, with all user action alerts routed via your existing monitor infrastructure
• Real-time playback – Keep a close eye on mission-critical servers
• Defeat the 'Oops' Factor – Users will stick to the task at hand, with no funny business
• Just-in-Time policy messaging – Inform users about critical usage policies exactly at the time that they start using that particular resource

Knowing "who did what" on your network servers and workstations

When troubleshooting a server outage, a thorough user audit allows you to answer the straightforward-yet-elusive question: "Who was using this server, and what did they do?"

ObserveIT allows you to focus in on user activity: you can drill-down or search according to server, user, applications launced or resources used in each session. And once you find the relevant sessions, you can play back the entire user activity, or jump directly to a specific chapter that looks suspicious, based on the metadata collected.

If a database server has a dropped table, just open the diary of user accesses for that server, read the list of apps launched in each session, and the reason will be clear. Or if a distributed application is not performing properly, you can search across the entire network for sessions that modified registry entries or system resources associated with the application. In either case, troubleshooting becomes a breeze with user audit clarity.

Enhance your Network Management platform with user action alerts and session replay

ObserveIT integrates easily into any network management platform, including SCOM, Unicenter, Tivoli and OpenView.

Business-specific policy rules will trigger alerts that can be handled by your IT support team directly within the primary monitoring environment! Each alert includes detailed information about the user session, and allows for video replay of the entire activity, for fast determination of necessary action.

Real-time playback: Keep an eye on what's happening right now

For more sensitive network resources, you'll want to know immediately about any activity. ObserveIT allows you to monitor and replay a user session while it is still going on! Youre ability to identify potintial problems and stop outages even before they start increases your server reliability, and decreases the need for after-the-fact troubleshooting.

Defeat the 'Oops' factor: Eliminate unnecessary activity on your servers

User awareness of auditing and recording has a deterrent effect that dramatically decreases problem initiatition in the first place.

It's a fact of human nature: When no one is watching, people are more likely to be careless, or even malicious. Once it is known that all user sessions are being recorded, the anonymous smoke screen of 'administrator' login disappears. Users – whether they are local network users, remote corporate employees or 3rd party outsource vendors – will be sure to do exactly what they need to do, and nothing more.

Deliver policy messages at just the right time

Nothing is more frustrating to IT administrators than having a problem repeat itself. ObserveIT helps you prevent human error repetition by delivering important information to users that is specific to each server or application, precisely when they login to these resources.

You've searched to discover the cause of a problem – Perhaps it was caused by a user starting a database trace on the production server – and you have fixed the problem. You even took the initiative to send an email to all administrators letting them know that they shouldn't run a trace on this server. But in reality, this has little preventitive impact. Instead, ObserveIT will deliver the message "Do not run a trace!", and require confirmation, to each user that starts a session on the database server. The email reminder is long forgotten, but ObserveIT continues to deliver the message.