Collaboration tools help flatten the obstacles to communicate, enabling organizations to access talent and distribute work teams across the country, the region and the world with less need for co-location.
Find out how GSX Monitor & Analyzer and System Center Operations Manager are complimentary.
7. Managing your Environment
Single management pane of glass
Real‐time view of end-user experience
Easy to use and fully automated
Transparent and easy to upgrade
Proactive analytics
9. Conclusions
System and application management vendors are attempting to create
simpler network and app management solutions by increasing the
breadth of hardware and apps they can manage.
In doing so they increase complexity, and the effort required to maintain
optimal messaging and collaboration capabilities.
Large Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint shops (typically with 10,000
users and upwards) are by default using Microsoft’s Operation Monitoring
tool SCOM.
However, optimized management requires fully integrated third party
value accelerators on top of SCOM that focus on automating routines, as
well as handling configuration and planning issues.
The Environments:
Microsoft:
Exchange & SharePoint
Blackberry
BES
IBM
Quickr, Traveler, Sametime and Domino
Google
Apps for Business
The managers:
SCOM
HP OV
Others?
Adam
OK Thank you, and welcome to our Audience today, we are glad you could join us
A quick introduction about GSX…We have been in business for over 17 years with our headquarters in Geneva Switzerland.
We have 2 offices in the USA (in Buffalo, NY and one in Boston MA where I am located). Also have offices in the UK, France, Switzerland and in China.
We have longstanding partnerships with Microsoft IBM and BES, along with partnerships that extend across more than 40 countries
Adam
A quick look at our customer base will show that we work with over 30% of the fortune 500 currently, we have over 600 customers worldwide and some of the most common verticals that we work with included Banking and finance, manufactureing, consulting/MSP’s and Hosting companies and Healthcare…
Adam
Some of the recent awards we have received are for the Best of TechEd in 2012 for our SharePoint Product and the Best of TechEd in 2013 for our Exchange produce. We also have won the gold award from Msexchange.org.
Adam
To speak about some of our customers, we provide monitoring for companies like HSBC, Michelin and Louis Vuitton. However the size of the company does not matter, what matters is how critical the messaging or SharePoint environment is.
[Olivier]
We have a lot of feedback from people using SCOM and here is a quick recap of the top 5 challenges:
Using multiple APM Tools increases the troubleshooting time and complexity
SCOM doesn’t provide much insight over the real time stats
Hard to diagnose issues
Reporting can be very time-consuming or even impossible without specific a specific skill set of SCOM and SQL
Very time consuming to fine tune alerting
[Adam]
If we take a look at the current GSX customer base, we see that SCOM is deployed along with GSX about 90% of the time. So what makes companies with SCOM want GSX as well?
One of the key differentiators of GSX is that we are designed specifically to monitor and Report on Exchange & SharePoint. We are a tool that is very easy to deploy and configure and we really take a deep dive into what the end-user experience looks like…
Which is why we focus on business line satisfaction by actually simulating an everyday user in the environment and proactively alerting you to any performance issues.
One of the key features of GSX is the ability to provide out of the box automated reports on availability, performance and usage. Our customers utilize this feature to compliment SCOM is several different ways, and of course GSX Analyzer is a very straight forward, easy to use tool.
Our tool will help you leverage your SCOM investment and get the statics, alerts and reports that are most important to you.
What we see, especially in larger organizations is that the SCOM team and the Messaging/collaboration teams works separately. GSX Monitor/Analyzer gives the Messaging and collaboration teams a tool that is targeted for them that gives them only the information relevant to them.
Because GSX is so simple to Deploy and maintain, we reduce the costs associated with monitoring, along with the ability to centralize all of your alerts in the SCOM dashboard.
Adam
So the focus of the webinar today will be on how GSX interfaces with SCOM environments but that is not the only platform that we can help you manage…
We have the functionality to monitor IBM Notes, IBM Traveler, IBM Sametime, IBM QuickR, BlackBerry Enterprise Server and of course Microsoft Exchange On-Premise, Hybrid and Exchange Online.
[Olivier]
(for exchange)
This map gives you an idea of what a multi-tenant deployment of GSX looks like.
GSX is usually installed on a VM, but for trial purposes it can be installed on a laptop.
From there GSX is going out and performing tests on each of your servers. Not only do we monitor at the server level, we monitor at the CAS array and DAG level and also at the organization level to give a complete view of the status of your environment. You can also monitor the routing of emails both internally and externally and all the way to a mobile device. As I mentioned before, all the alerts can be pushed to 3rd party tools like SCOM.
(same goes for SharePoint).
[Olivier]
GSX provides out-of the box End-user scenarios reproducing actions performed in Outlook.
You can configure these scenarios from multiple locations
Allowing you to identify any performance issue and detect what part is causing the issue: internal network, internet provider or Office365
Mail Routing is also a powerful end-user test that GSX Provides: it allows to send an email from one location to another and track the routing time. Can be alerted on Availability and latency.
All these alerts can be centralized into the SCOM Dashboard.
[Olivier]
GSX Analyzer is a web-based reporting tool that allows reporting on the data collected by multiple GSX Monitor station
You can then easily compare the end-user performance from multiple locations
You can create users and profiles to provide access to different user with different priviledges. They can then create their own reports
All the reports can be sent out automatically every day/week/month as a pdf or csv file
You can easily create trend reports with forecasting in order to plan for future resources. You can compare the resources along the growth of the number of mailboxes/users.
[Olivier]
In order for you to see the GSX Alerts in SCOM we provide a Management pack.
GSX Management pack works for both SCOM 2007 & 2012
Can see all the GSX Alerts from the SCOM Dashboard as GSX sends all the alerts as SNMP Traps to SCOM with all the details
Can categorized GSX Alerts by severity (Critical, Warning, Information).
Can receive the GSX reports at the user level directly by email or uploaded on an FTP Site or network share.
[ADAM]
Ok so to wrap up on what we saw today, a few of the benefits provided by GSX include…
Of course GSX is providing you a deep dive into the quality of service that is delivered to your end users but actually using the applications to monitor and measure the end user experience.
GSX can proactively identify the different network and internet issues that impact the service delivered to your users at multiple locations.
Our tool is key in situations that require troubleshooting and will save you time by pinpointing the source of any issues.
GSX it utilized by several of our partners before, during and after a migration to ensure that there are not any interruptions in the service provided to the business line at any location
And finally GSX will help you cut down your support costs by proactively monitoring and quickly helping your team identify issues and fix them.