Johan Swart has worked as a Light Current Electrical Engineer for 10 years at SuperGroup in South Africa. His focus for the past 2.5 years has been IT Service Management, including implementing good practices with Cherwell and CBAT. He presented on SuperGroup's exception management solution that funnels alerts into Cherwell to provide visibility and prioritize critical events, directing them to the correct people through email or SMS. The solution processes and maps events to configuration items and services, and automatically closes resolved issues. It provides a consolidated exceptions homepage and supports business processes.

1. Johan Swart
SuperGroup, South Africa
I am a Light Current Electrical Engineer. My main
subjects were Computer Science, Electronics,
Industrial Electronics, Digital Systems, Electrical
Engineering, Radio and Telecommunications. My
real interest started in the electronics world when
Television was introduced in South Africa in the late
70’s. I ordered via a small group my “BBC” computer,
existing of a CPU, RAM and an on-board keyboard. In
those days you connected to a TV screen and your
data import was from a tape recorder. I’ve been
working for Super Group for the past 10 years. My
specific focus for the last 2.5 years has been IT
Service Management, including the implementation
of good practices. Cherwell and CBAT made all this
possible. We’re only now starting to explore the real
exciting stuff! The limitation of Cherwell is only
governed by what’s in your mind.
“Exception Management to support Services IT provided
to Business”

2. Speaker – Johan Swart
Session Title:
Exception Management to support Services IT
provides to Business
Date & Time: 25 September 2014 2:50pm
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3. Agenda
• The Businesses we support
• IT Strategy & Infrastructure in brief
• Event problems & solution concepts
• The implemented Events solution
• Imported items to provide solutions
• Other solutions we implemented
• Why we succeeded
• Q&A
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4. The Business we support
• Supply Chain
• The division operates across the entire
supply chain and focuses on providing true
end-to-end solutions.
• Fleet Solutions
• Fleet management solutions meet vehicle
management needs and represented in SA, UK,
New Zealand and Australia.
• Dealerships
• 37 Franchised dealerships based in Gauteng
and North West Provinces in South Africa
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5. Our IT Strategy in brief
• Support Business operations and processes.
• Proactive in the strategic decision making, to ensure
that SGIT provides a competitive service to all our
customers.
• Provide required technology (Fit for purpose and not
best of breed only) enabling Divisions to conduct their
daily operations in a fast and efficient manner.
• Provide continued “cost effective” technology whilst
offering latest technology.
• Most importantly striving to provide the best Customer
Service experience.
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6. Our Infrastructure in brief
• Summary of Components
• 500+ Servers (Microsoft, SUN, Linux etc)
• 1000+ Databases (SQL, Oracle, UniVerse etc)
• 170+ Managed Switches (Nortel, Cisco & other)
• 100+ Firewall devices (SonicWall, Mikrotik, CheckPoint)
• 2500+ Workstations
• 2 Primary Hosting Facilities
• Services provided
• 30 Business Application Services
• 8 Core Services
• 11 Technical Services
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7. Event’s starting out
• The questions were:
• How do we make sense of the monitored alerts as a
valuable asset so that we could become more pro-
active?
• Can monitored alerts really help us in a new way to
ensure that our Services remained in an operational
state more of the time?
• How do we make use of what we already have in
place without re-inventing the wheel?
• How do we keep the solution as simple as possible
for the people that is targeted for?
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8. The Problem
• Let’s Email these alerts to a distribution list, a group
of people or worse a single individual.
• Facts.
• Electronic dis-organization is worse than the manual
kind.
• Communicating everything to everyone produces a zero
result.
• 99% of this stuff should have never crossed your desk in
the 1st place as you’ll simply miss the 1% that is really
important.
• Knowing about something serious as an individual and
not visible helps no-one.
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9. The Solution in Concept
• A structured approach was needed:
• Tunnel events into a single controlled system
• Record everything required, but alert/focus ONLY on
the critical events
• Direct the critical events to the correct people
• Maintain a 100% visibility of everything going on
• Focus on the basic priority items first and then later
expand the system gradually as you go.
• This will assist resources to focus on the right things
instead of just a busy frenzy.
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10. The Solution in Concept …
• To bring about structured and organized
approach in dealing with 1000’s of daily events
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11. The Implemented Solution
• Incoming Events
• Processing Events
• Mapping Events
• Visibility of Events
• Alerting on Events
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12. Incoming Events
• Our sources of events/alerts are:
• Solarwinds, Telco & Internet Service Providers,
Backup systems, AV systems, Firewall systems,
Microsoft OpsMgr and Foglight.
• Homegrown queries in the Microsoft
environment using tools like PowerShell.
• Homegrown queries in the Linux environment
using tools like Bash.
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13. Incoming Email Events
• A Dedicated Email listener for Events/Alerts
• Internal controlled Emails comes in in a
standard format
• Subject: HV-NEO Drive C: Status
• Body 1st line “HV-NEO C: 10.484GB of 99.998GB, leaving 10% free.”
• Status:Recorded%
• Level:Warning%
• Event Type:Disk%
• Hostname:HV-NEO%
• Service:Storage Service%
• UpDown Only:Down.%
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14. Processing of Events
• Business Process 1
• Set the relevant Event Fields on creation
• Create the SMS output file
• Business Process 2
• Update the CI if required (Example on backups)
• Business Process 3
• Auto close all “Down” events if an Up event was
received for the exact item
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15. Business Process 1 Result
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16. Business Process 1 creates SMS
• Creation of the appropriate SMS output file
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17. Business Process 2 updates CI’s
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18. Business Process 3 close Event
• Will automatically close all Down Events when a
corresponding Up Event was received.
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19. Mapping Events - Independency
• Maps to CI’s
• Maps to Services
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20. Visibility of Events
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21. Visibility of Events
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22. Visibility of Events
• Results consolidating upwards examples
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23. Alerting of Events
• Email versus SMS?
• Ability to switch off parts of the SMS system
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24. Key guidelines on Events
• To keep Email & BPE processing fast and
affective
• Keep the incoming Event component small
• Keep the incoming Event structured as indicated
• Processed Email Events move to Deleted Items
• Keep the Event as independent as possible
• Keep high volume events during non peak hours
• Use Cherwell as the wake-up mechanism and use
the source systems to go and find the in-depth detail
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25. Some results are Imported Daily
• In some case it makes sense to import daily
results, such as those from:
• Anti-Virus Systems
• Workstation Backup Systems
• Access to critical Business applications such as
those from:
• Warehouse Management Systems
• ERP Systems and
• Fleet Management Systems
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26. Application Access Control
• Access can be internally audited and verified
against the different controls already in place in
Cherwell
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27. Dedicated Exceptions Homepage
• This brings all your exceptions
together in one single place that is
simply a click away.
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28. Business Process Support
• Example of an outgoing warning to business
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29. Other Implemented Solutions
• JML (Joiner, Mover Leaver) Portal Forms
• Staff Availability
• Asset Management
• Contract Management
• Project Management
• Expense Tracking System
• Supplier Approval System
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30. Why we succeeded?
• Having a “Business Orientated” CIO
• Dedicated position was created for ITSM responsibilities
• Product selection criteria set (Cost/Dev/Upgrade/Sup)
• Select the right partner
• Start with the basics but keep on evolving even if
implemented solution is not perfect.
• Ability to “Make things happen” without reliance always
on development teams
• Making it easy for PEOPLE to do their work and even
bringing in some “Wow” factors for your IT staff
members as the system evolves.
• PEOPLE, PROCESS, TECHNOLOGY done.
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31. Questions and Answers?
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32. Final Slide
• Thank you for attending this session.
• Please fill out an evaluation form.
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