Overview
At Network Dynamics we believe in developing and fostering 'partnership' relationships. Being a partner means understanding the mission and objectives of our customers and ensuring their technology infrastructure, strategy and support services align. Network Dynamics's vision is to provide industry leading technology services to small and medium sized businesses by leveraging a diverse, multi-disciplinary workforce capable of delivering and supporting end-to-end solutions that effectively enhance an organization's performance. Network Dynamics's unique blend of large enterprise experience and multi-disciplinary workforce offers customers enterprise class service and support at affordable prices.
The following document outlines a detailed description for Network Dynamics Managed Services. This solutions include complete IT management and 24x7 Support for converged computing environments and to provide support for the infrastructure that supports those UC Systems
The objective is to minimize the risk of downtime, by stabilizing your environment, monitoring your infrastructure and network and performing routine and preventative maintenance.
Service Description
Network Dynamics provides an array of essential IT services, including Network Management, Unified Communication, Server Management, and Application Management, on a fixed-fee subscription basis to small and medium sized businesses. We understand technology, so we take on your risk and minimize your pain, frustration, and uncertainty associated with managing IT and not knowing how much downtime is going to cost.
Whether you already have some technical expertise on staff or not, we provide whatever expertise you need but don't have. If you encounter a software or hardware problem, just call, email or login to our service center portal and we will engage a qualified engineer based on severity.
Our onsite monitoring equipment is tuned to effectively identify, isolate and notify support personnel proactively which reduces downtime and improves resolution times.
We view ourselves as an extension of your business. Our goals are to reduce your IT costs, increase your total technology up time and reduce your technology-induced stress level.
Service Desk
The Service Desk provides access to the Service Portal, which includes web, telephone and remote desktop support. The list below outlines the specific features and benefits of the Service Portal:
· The service desk is staffed 24x7x365
· Network Dynamics provides the same Service Levels regardless of when an incident is reported.
· Network Dynamics accepts support tickets over the phone, on the Internet, and via email.
· The Ticket Management system provides user, department and organizational views of current and historic support tickets.
· The service center provides verbal and/or email based acknowledgment of tickets. Ticket resolution is confirmed with the end user and ticket closure is confirmed either via email or verbally (based on user preference).
· All trouble tickets are managed by the certified service center staff. The service center staff is responsible for managing and ensuring all communications related to support tickets. These resources are responsible for ensuring that engineers provide regular updates on long running support incidents.
· Users can log into the performance portal and view real time fault and performance information for all managed network and unified communication devices.
Client Communications
Network Dynamics provides several levels of communications including quarterly service and technology reviews, support incident updates, service request web access, backup management reports, and real-time network and unified communications monitoring.
Service Assurance
1. Customizable Dashboard
a. Allow you to create (via application configuration) a real?time dashboard and display graphs, tables and charts for any metric. This dashboard is updated in real?time, and multiple dashboards can be created to view the performance of services and infrastructure.
2. Intelligent Data Gathering
a. Collects, analyzes, and stores performance data locally from networks, devices, systems, servers, and applications. Collects alarms, events, and polls from the various infrastructure elements such as servers, routers, and applications. Each DGE has its own distributed relational database. Data is collected according to the definitions configured in the Object Store. These definitions include which devices are monitor, polling intervals, and notification profiles. This information is then progressively summarized over time (5 minutes to 1 hour to 1 day to 1 week, etc.) as well as analyzed relative to thresholds, key events, alarms for taking appropriate actions.
3. Dashboard to Fill Drill Down
a. Supports integration with network flow and packet level data collection tools to provide seamless drill?down from system and device level monitoring to troubleshooting and analysis using flow and packet data. This capability allows easy drill down from a high level service container view to the specific host that is consuming the bandwidth or resources. This seamless integration enables quick identification of impacted IT Services (what is affected), trouble areas (where to look) and problem sources (what to analyze further).
4. Correlation & Smart Notification Engine
a. Provides advanced root cause analysis (RCA) features that extend beyond traditional network level analysis. The root cause analysis engine is based on a Service Object Model designed for analyzing end?to?end business impact instead of just stopping at the network layer. Real?time alarms are triggered based on approaching maximum capacity, traps, log messages, user defined maintenance, etc., taking into account the complex relationships between IT elements for delivering distributed applications. Smart Notification Engines (SME) automatically suppresses transient flaps, and prevents alarm floods based on topology and service dependencies. The multi?stage alarm engine provides a comprehensive escalation process to send notifications based on how long a device has been in warning or critical conditions and on time of day and status on repeated polling. The smart suppression engine uses complex heuristics to avoid false suppression of alarms in redundant networks.
Service Level Management
1. SLA for End-to-End Services
a. In addition to specifying and monitoring SLAs for individual metrics (such as link uptime or database response time), users can create SLAs for end?to?end IT services using unique Business Service Definitions. Along with the composite metrics feature users can monitor SLAs for all aspects of the business.
2. SLA Schedules – Time of Day
a. The SLA metrics calculations can be defined such that the SLA is only calculated for specific time?periods, such as 9?5 Mon – Fri, and ignored for all other times. The calculation windows/schedules are customizable and the user can specify the time of day and day of week in calculating the SLA metrics.
3. Real-Time Dashboard
a. The SLA dashboard displays the amount of time that a metric is within the SLA threshold, and also displays how close the metric is to violating the defined SLA. This information is updated in real time, and users can drill down to see details instantly.
4. SLA Reporting
a. In addition to the real?time SLA dashboard we offer a variety of SLA reports that can be generated on?demand or automatically using our dynamic reporting engine:
• Business Impact Report: Displays services impacted by events and general event information.
• Device Unavailability (Packet Loss) Report: The Unavailability Report is based on device availability as measured by the ICMP packet loss test. The report shows how many times and for how long Packet Loss tests were in the Critical or Unreachable states. The SLA threshold for the Packet Loss test is used to determine when the test was in Critical state. This report shows the Top 30 devices by amount of "unavailability", displaying total time unavailable and the "unavailable" percentage.
• Device Instability Report: The Device Instability report displays the top 10 services affected by number of events. The report consists of the frequency distribution of the events during each hour of the day, each day of the week/month and duration of events.
• Container Instability Report: The Container Instability report displays the top 10 services affected by number of events. The report consists of the frequency distribution of the events during each hour of the day, each day of the week/month and duration of events.
Health Checks
Network Dynamics shall review the performance of the Managed Devices every three months of each calendar year of the contract term, via on-site or remote review means (at Network Dynamics discretion). Network Dynamics review includes, but is not limited to 1) systems and logs, software configuration, and versions 2) network and device performance and 3) CPU and memory loading.
Network Dynamics shall compare reviews with generally accepted best practices, specifically documented Customer requirements or policies, and vendor guidelines.
Contract Management
Hardware vendors offer a variety of warranty services to ensure timely replacement of failed equipment. Network Dynamics's service offering does not replace vendors warranty services or otherwise fundamentally alter any offering provided by the hardware vendor, but is built upon the mutual observation that timely and consistent support can only be obtained when accurate data is maintained by both the Customer and the hardware vendor.
Network Dynamics shall provide ongoing monitoring and status reporting associated with the monitored devices supported via hardware warranty contracts in order to assist in managing, maintaining, obtaining, and auditing support through the hardware vendors warranty program. The warranty contracts being monitored shall be specifically identified in the Customer Runbook.
Network Dynamics shall review this information with Customer on a mutually agreed upon schedule.
Network Dynamics shall enumerate discrepancies between hardware vendor information and information either gathered by independent monitoring or otherwise provided by the Customer. Upon Customer request, Network Dynamics shall provide identification of any discrepancies to the hardware vendor and/or specifically request and manage the update of hardware vendor maintained warranty contract information (this support is dependent on a Customer supplied Letter of Authorization). Customer understands and accepts that Network Dynamics is augmenting Customer's relationship with hardware vendors and Network Dynamics is relying on both Customer and the hardware vendor for certain data. Any requested change is subject to the hardware vendor's acceptance and timely completion of certain actions over which Network Dynamics has no control.
Please contact Joseph Schafer for more information.
Network Dynamics, Inc.
Joseph Schafer
jschafer@ndiwebsite.com
813-864-8040 DID
727-637-2145 Cell
