I’ve written about ITIL and Tripwire Enterprise, offering a secure approach to managing your Change Management processes, but ITIL’s guidelines offer more than just recommendations around ensuring changes happen as expected.

Problem management is another key area where Tripwire Enterprise can help you on your ITIL journey. ITIL sensibly focuses on root-cause analysis for problem management. Once a problem (or, indeed, a potential problem) has been identified, root cause analysis can begin.

At the heart of this process are two key objectives: developing a detailed understanding of the original problem and its causes and identifying the relevant actions that will either resolve or prevent an issue from happening.

For many organizations, root cause analysis is often skipped in the problem management process due to its time-consuming nature. Understanding the circumstances under which a problem arises can be challenging, especially when your team is busy working to implement a fix. But understanding the root cause is key to preventing repeat occurrences and extended outages. Therefore, it should not be dismissed.

Whether it’s a security risk, a configuration error or a hardware fault that causes it, problem management will likely be a good test of your toolset. When you look across your estate, understanding what’s going on necessitates the ability to spot patterns that may only show up under the magnifying glass of someone working their way through a problem management case. All too often IT teams are caught out by the recurring minor incidents that actually reflect a bigger, underlying fault.

Fortunately, the toolsets for IT problem management are getting better all the time, and, perhaps more importantly, the important data they often gather is no longer hidden in individual log files.

The last few years have seen a rise in tools aimed at helping organizations not just capture data (Read more...)