What is Operational Support?
Operational support is the management, monitoring and proactive resolution of system, server and technical environment issues. It looks after the underlying environment upon which your applications sit, and helps ensure that you receive high levels of availability. Applications that are vital to business are only as dependable and reliable and able to perform as the machines that they are placed on.
SFW offers Operational Support that manages and maintains these physical machines, optimising their performance and uses the following key tools to ensure that your business-critical systems are ‘always on’:
- SCOM – Systems Centre Operations Manager
- Patchlink
- WebMon
SCOM - Systems Centre Operations Manager
SCOM is a complete, automated management system for all environments, systems and applications. It includes features which enable SFW engineers proactively manage the environments they support - resolving issues before they become user problems. For more information about SCOM and its vast array of customisable management tools, click here
Lumension Patchlink
This is the automated maintenance tool that SFW uses to apply critical updates and patches to all supported environments including the operating systems and applications running on them. Using a scheduled, and pre-agreed, monthly maintenance window to maximise user convenience, it applies all relevant updates. Occasionally, when it is necessary to deploy urgent security updates and patches outside these scheduled windows, SFW engineers will liaise with the client to agree a suitable time for deployment. Each patch is tested against 300 configuration items at centralised Patchlink servers to ensure conflicts are bypassed.
WebMon
This is an automated tool, custom-built by SFW that is used specifically for monitoring website availability, and website response times. WebMon polls all supported websites every 5 minutes, searching for a specific piece of text, such as ‘Welcome to our website’ which ensures that client websites truly functioning aren’t just displaying a 404 error page. It also allows SFW to give clients more granular detail on website performance issues, delivering detail on when downtime occurred, what the issue was (e.g. ftp issue, client site power outage) and, most importantly, how the issue was resolved.
SFW – Premium, Dedicated Service
SFW delivers all of its automated and human services via a stringent SLA which is customised to meet the exacting requirements of individual clients. It offers a premium and personal service, which includes end-to end engineer ownership of issues, from the moment your users speak to them on the helpdesk all the way through to issue resolution – giving you consistency and continuity of service from knowledgeable engineers. Moreover, through proactive management SFW engineers are there to solve your issue before it becomes a problem to your users.