Part of the content of this article comes from Dr. Bu----Senior Product Expert of Qingchuang Technology
IT technology has become ubiquitous, and all walks of life cannot do without it. Whether it is a bank, a brokerage, a family, a school or an individual, IT technology is inseparable. For example:
We use software for socializing between people, such as WeChat, QQ, Momo, Facebook, etc.
Banks use IT technology to realize financial account management, wealth management management, and calculation of wealth management income for us.
Brokers provide us with real-time stock market information and stock trading systems.
Industrial manufacturing companies use IT technology to implement ERP systems, financial management systems, etc.
Schools use IT technology to manage student status and books.
In life, we purchase food and order services through platforms such as Meituan.
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These invisible and intangible "services" guarantee our food, food, housing, transportation and other aspects. Once abnormal events occur in these systems (such as network outages, system inaccessibility, transaction failures), it will seriously affect our lives.
Service interruptions to IT systems are inevitable. Therefore, when an event occurs, we must manage, analyze, and dispose of the event in a way that consumers can tolerate.
A unified event management system is an indispensable infrastructure for any enterprise. Its main mission: to integrate with the tool system of the entire operation and maintenance system of the data center, use machine learning to analyze problems, and automatically take actions to solve problems at the first time. It can effectively improve team productivity and guarantee a great digital experience for end users.
This article explores best practices for unified incident management, including:
1. What is an event?
2. What is event management?
1. What is an event?
In the TIL 4 version, an incident is defined as an unexpected interruption of service or degradation of service quality.
To ensure customer satisfaction, businesses must adopt appropriate handling strategies to deal with different events. The following are typical events in which service interruptions or exceptions occur in some systems:
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User cannot log in
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Every time you use your transit card, the card inexplicably won't open
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Transactions are slower than usual when making transactions
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The URL cannot be accessed...
2. What is event management?
Wikipedia explains it like this: Event Management is the application of project management in the innovation and development of large-scale events, such as festivals, conferences, celebrations, weddings, parties, concerts, gatherings, etc. This includes brand research , target audience identification, event concept design, and technical coordination before the event actually takes place.
We project this concept to the IT field, which is a series of processes that link transaction status change information with personnel responses in order to achieve a specific business requirement. Its goal is to detect and record these changes in transaction status in order to gain full visibility into business risks and opportunities, and to minimize the negative impact of incidents when problems occur.
For example: user login, transfer failure, business system version upgrade, data backup, server maintenance completion, these are changes that the team needs to track. While these changes do not directly reflect a reduction in service quality, they may indicate potential risks affecting user experience. Therefore, it becomes very critical to comprehensively collect event information, determine the response priority, and take corresponding measures.
As the complexity of business models and IT support environments has increased, the size of incidents that teams need to manage has grown exponentially, yet too often the number of people managing incidents has not increased. Now, many teams deal with tens of thousands or even millions of events every day. Limited by resource investment, it is almost impossible to effectively separate high-value information and noise from massive events to gain insight into risks and opportunities.
And that's where the core competency of an incident management solution lies. The event management platform docks and aggregates events through integration capabilities, filters noise, identifies risks, and notifies relevant personnel to perform corresponding operations.
With the acceleration of enterprise digital transformation and the increase of IT delivery risks, it is more important than ever to improve the processing efficiency between events and related actions through an integrated event management platform.
3. Why event management is so important
Although many companies have prepared very detailed business continuity guarantee plans and contingency plans, with the increasing complexity of the business environment and the further intensification of industry competition, higher requirements have been placed on the efficiency of responding to business risks and business opportunities .
It is crucial to collect more comprehensive information and use intelligent means to help the team evaluate risks and benefits in real time and improve the speed and accuracy of response. The event management platform uses event stream processing and artificial intelligence technology to automate this process, fully mines the core high-value information in massive events, associates risks and opportunities with personnel, and uses modern communication and collaboration tools to provide more convenient, Comprehensive and accurate incident assessment and response.
The value of incident management also includes:
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More proactive risk prevention
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Faster business recovery
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More efficient teamwork
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More agile real-time response
Fourth, the characteristics of event management
An incident is an objective description of the state of affairs. An effective incident management plan and strategy is a cross-scenario, end-to-end processing process that can reduce or eliminate the impact of risks, explore and expand new business opportunities, and improve the response speed of the team , and optimize the output results.
The characteristics of event management are mainly reflected in the following three aspects:
1. Integration
Collecting and obtaining more comprehensive event data is the prerequisite for more accurate risk assessment and business opportunity mining. Establish a wide range of connections with the enterprise digital ecosystem to achieve real-time event reception and message push to ensure the rapid flow of events between systems and personnel.
2. Intelligent
Combining rich contextual data, actively classify, screen, and detect risks and opportunities, and associate this information with assets and personnel, predict losses before losses are actually caused, help team members accurately grasp business status and threats, and avoid mistakes Leakage, better decision-making.
3. Process
Automated processes help teams work autonomously before risks and opportunities are identified, without extensive human involvement. During the problem handling process, events are automatically circulated among team members according to the established dispatch strategy and notification method, further improving response efficiency and ensuring the effectiveness of actions.
5. Typical incident management process
The first step in incident management is to log the incident. Events can be obtained through some monitoring tools or customer phone calls, and notifications can be obtained through some automated means. At the same time, relevant information about the event can be obtained, including description, time of occurrence, and source of the alarm , What happened to the event (such as a host, a business). The recorded event information will subsequently become the basis for analysis, decision-making, and disposal of management events. include:
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Communication: In the process of analyzing and handling incidents, it is necessary to coordinate communication and collaboration between personnel in different professional fields to analyze problems effectively.
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Resolution: After the analysis is complete, the incident manager or emergency team will make a decision on incident handling and perform a quick repair of the incident.
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Escalation: If during the process of analysis and handling, it is found that the incident has exceeded the capabilities of the incident response personnel, the incident needs to be escalated in a timely manner. At this time, the incident can be transferred to a professional in a certain field for handling.
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Handover to other processes: After the incident is resolved, if the incident requires a corresponding work order to be cured, it is necessary to create a corresponding problem work order to investigate the root cause of the problem and completely solve the problem.
Successful incident management relies on clearly defining the duration and handling of any incident a customer tolerates. These are usually defined in a service level agreement (SLA) or contract, the most important part of which is defining the timeline for responding to and resolving incidents.
6. Main Responsibilities of Event Management Execution
As a service provider, how to structure the corresponding organization and handle different types of incidents is the main responsibility performed by incident management.
1. For known event scenarios
This event happens repeatedly. In such cases, known event models can be defined and used for automated processing and resolution. The known event model is an important solution when managing the recurrence of a specific event. It helps to reduce the time and learning curve for new employees to solve incidents, and helps to implement scattered knowledge into the tool system.
2. It is not easy to find a solution for some incidents
Workarounds can be employed to try to reduce the impact or likelihood of recurrence. In this case, the decision-making authority for disposition will be confirmed manually. For the current event, solutions such as restart or offload can be used to recover quickly.
Well, this is the end of the sharing about events and event management in this issue. In the next issue, I will use examples and practical examples to further help you understand and how to use event management in daily life. Interested friends can pay attention to it in advance~
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