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NetEx help desk generally provides support for users and
applications within an organization. This support will include
first level support for direct user questions and application
issues, as well as in-depth support for new or difficult issues.
Both types of support are critical with high availability
applications, particularly as in-house operations staff numbers
decrease. Best practices for help desk organizations will
include multiple levels of support and a well-documented
escalation procedure for exercising each level of support within
the organization.
NetEx help desk personnel are to provide first level support for
issues that arise in the data center. In each case, help desk
personnel are responsible for gathering specific sets of
information regarding a problem, assessing whether this problem
is previously known, and then planning a resolution to the
problem. Help desk also explicitly specifies the minimum set of
information that will be gathered for each instance. To help
assess whether a problem is previously known, the help desk also
maintains a list of previously seen application-specific error
codes. In each case, help desk personnel are also responsible
for initiating an escalation for any unknown or critical errors.
NetEx has a unique infrastructure for handling escalation which
maintains the concept of multi-level support for issue
resolution.
Our practices in help desk operations include ensuring the help
desk responds promptly to requests and gives reasonable and
accurate estimates of time needed to resolve problems. Keeping
the user informed along the way (including any changes to
original time estimates) goes a long way toward improving
perceptions of the quality of service provided by the help desk.
Problem Resolution
Our help desk can perform several key functions during problem
resolutions. The functions include supporting users and system
infrastructure components, and identifying, diagnosing and
resolving problems when they occur.
Our help desk operations are generally categorized by specific
levels of support and escalation procedures. This level of
support and escalation allow the help desk to provide the most
appropriate assistance during problem assessment and resolution.
Our help desk procedures determine whether operations personnel
reporting the problem can resolve the problem, or needs
assistance. This usually occurs with level 1 support. The
majority of help desk support is handled in this manner.
Once the correct personnel are involved with an issue, the next
key concept is to maximize the amount of time that those
personnel have available to work on the system without affecting
the rest of the enterprise. NetEx accomplishes this task by
providing warm standby equipment, and isolating this equipment
in a separate physical location (NetEx Network Operation
Center), to allow for more catastrophic failures. If clients
implemented a
disaster recovery
plan, they chose to design windows of recovery
directly into its business processes, so that personnel have
defined windows of time to work on a system before a failure in
that system affects other systems within the enterprise.
Level 2 support usually enlists engineers and technicians that
specialize in parts of the system such as network
administration, database administration or particular
application skills. Level 2 technicians usually work with either
remote diagnostics tools, or dispatch service technicians to the
location of problem.
NetEx help desk addresses problem assessment through extensive
use of remote debugging capabilities. This extends from online
debugging of application performance, to analysis of machine
crash information. NetEx help desk also, addresses this issue
using standard
remote control software, to
allow help-desk personnel to directly interact with servers that
may be experiencing error conditions.
Level 3 support usually involves the group responsible for
either developing or architecting the system that has a problem.
If a problem is escalated to this level, a crisis resolution
team will take responsibility for restoring service.
Crisis Resolution Teams
Our crisis resolution team is formed by highly qualified
technicians who not only have good relationship with the client
IT staff but also carry good knowledge of their system. These
teams are responsible for critical applications and systems in a
high availability environment. We have individuals pre-assigned
to these teams that greatly enhance resolution response to the
most critical issues. The team has both the responsibility and
the authority to react to and resolve critical failures in a
high availability system.
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