Who are OpsRamp?

OpsRamp is an IT operations management software company whose SaaS platform is used by leading enterprise and service provider IT teams to monitor and manage their hybrid cloud and on-premise resources. The OpsRamp platform leverages AIOps and machine learning to deliver auto-discovery and monitoring of infrastructure, event and incident management, and automation and remediation. 

With OpsRamp, customers can achieve a single pane of glass through out-of-the-box integrations to popular third-party tools. OpsRamp investors include Sapphire Ventures, Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).

When was OpsRamp established?

OpsRamp was established in 2014.

How did OpsRamp and Kedron come together?

Kedron needed to respond to its customer growing requirement to connect IT operation data from hybrid enterprise environments to present in a meaningful way. Quickly. Kedron had tested 17 different vendors in their lab and performed a detailed score analysis against requirements driven by request from their customer base. OpsRamp was the resounding winner.

What gap is Kedron filling for OpsRamp?

As a trusted advisor of IT operations and monitoring tools for enterprises and service providers, Kedron can help expose customers to the operational efficiency, cost savings, and IT governance benefits that the OpsRamp platform can deliver, and in turn help drive market share in the UK market and abroad.

What can OpsRamp bring to Kedron?

The OpsRamp platform bolsters the Kedron portfolio of solutions by bringing full end-to-end visibility into infrastructure wherever it lives.  This makes the life of an IT operations or DevOps professional much simpler, with data at their fingertips to maintain great-performing websites, apps and processes. OpsRamp also powers the intelligent automation of incident management processes so teams are always tackling high-priority issues first.

OpsRamp solves common customer challenges such as tool overload, silos of monitoring data, slow time to resolution, high manual effort, exorbitant IT operations software costs, and inability to support new digital products and services for end customers. The end goal of OpsRamp is to give customers easy-to-use tools for delivering highly resilient and flexible infrastructure necessary for supporting business and organizational growth.

“We are aggressively moving to support the AIOps needs of European enterprises where IT leaders want to deliver targeted value to their business counterparts through intelligent, automated IT operations. Kedron is a superb partner in that their team thoroughly appreciates the IT challenges of local businesses and have formed relationships with many of the region’s IT leaders.” – George Bonser, VP of Sales, EMEA at OpsRamp

“We are excited about our strategic partnership with OpsRamp. It is the missing piece in our already very successful portfolio and allows us to respond to the challenges we are seeing in the market, which are too much data, too few people and complex hybrid infrastructures. The team at OpsRamp have been exceptional in enabling our team and we are already working on a number of successful projects. We look forward to working closely with them in the coming months and years.” – Roland Stigwood, Managing Director at KedronUK

Call us today on 01782 752 369
KedronUK, Kern House, Stone Business Park, Stone, Staffordshire ST15 0TL

We’ve shared a lot about business continuity over the last 6 months, but what does it all mean in practice when you’re running the operational IT for large, complex, hybrid enterprise networks?

If you are certified to ISO9001 or ISO27001, you might remember that the question relating to business continuity planning asks, in so many words: ‘Do you have a plan?’ As long as a protocol of some form existed, the box could be ticked. But that ‘plan’ is something that a lot of large enterprises have had to rely on this year.

Complacency contributed to some issues. Budgeting priorities will have played a part, too, as always. But for many organisations, the pandemic has reordered priorities and identified tools and processes IT teams didn’t know they needed. Now we’re under more pressure than ever to monitor the business impact of COVID-19.

As the situation develops and new challenges arise, business continuity needs to leave the back page of your operations manual and come to the fore. You’re sure to have some form of business continuity plan filed away. There’s never been a more fitting time to get it off the shelf and quantify it into actual metrics. What do you need to understand to make it work?

A robust business continuity strategy will be based on how you keep providing a product or service to your customers, as well as maintaining the supply chains, systems and functions that mean you’re able to deliver those products or services. Everything should be made ready and operational just in case.

Once the plan is in operation, how will you measure performance and success? Your plan should have concrete objectives – queries resolved, applications processed, units delivered… While the plan’s in action, you can continuously measure how you are performing against these objectives.

There’s no template that fits every business, which is why a gap analysis will help at this point. When you’ve assessed the contributing factors, the gap analysis finds ways to extract all of the metrics you need and plug them into an appropriate dashboarding solution. Often this will involve too many SLAs to display them all together coherently.

Single pane of glass dashboarding – able to visualise at a glance, at a high level, information from multiple different tools – has proven very difficult to achieve. There are a number of tools on the market now that have started to gain some ground, but each has its own limitations. You’re welcome to talk to us about the different solutions that are out there and how to select the best one for your needs.

Continuity in a disaster is always going to be a challenge, whatever your industry or sector. But all enterprises need to be able to strategise and prepare for a worst-case scenario. If the current pandemic is anything to go by, future worst-case scenarios may be much worse than we’ve imagined. It’s impossible to remove all risk, but are you doing what you can to mitigate the risks that remain?

Call us today on 01782 752 369
KedronUK, Kern House, Stone Business Park, Stone, Staffordshire ST15 0TL

A common thread that’s emerged in our conversations with potential clients is that Enterprises need better visibility in order to deal with newly hybrid workforces, IT transformation and decentralisation.

The questions we’ve been asking as we construct our Business Continuity Dashboards are connecting IT with business outcomes in a way that makes sense – particularly under current circumstances – but that doesn’t seem to have been done before.

These are questions like: If productivity is down, is it because end users are experiencing network issues? If you’re not delivering goods on time, which part of your system is slowing you down? How does it impact your bottom line when absentee rates surge? Are you still able to do what you do as a business at pre-pandemic efficiency levels? Where are the tools and indicators to help you see all of this information?

The answer, very often, lies in data that you’re already collecting in one form or another. After all, it’s information that’s crucial to your top-level decision making. But in most organisations reporting covers discrete areas, with no cohesive view of how each area is performing in relation to any other. The data is not live, it’s tricky to access and it’s potentially hard to interpret.

We set ourselves the challenge of taking the data that you care about from spreadsheets and isolated role-specific applications and visualising it in live dashboards. We can enrich these with data that you’re not yet collecting if there are gaps in visibility, with the end goal of making business continuity measurable.

IT
We are all used to the traditional performance and availability monitoring of the critical services that users need to perform their jobs.

However, for a more complete picture of how well the business is performing… we can also monitor (for example) the network and user interactions of e-mail and telephony systems and score all of these along with business performance metrics like enquiries, deliveries and invoicing etc… We will bring all of this information together to confirm that the business is achieving its performance and productivity goals and then measure how consistently this is being upheld with SLA scoring and dashboarding.

Productivity
What you choose to measure here will be specific to your Enterprise, but the aim is to measure how well your people and processes are performing. Indicators and metrics, you might want to monitor range from:

• IP telephony – Are sales staff making as many phone calls as they would if they were in the office? How many customer service agents are logged in?
• HR applications – How many employees are off sick or on annual leave?
• Supply chain logistics – How long can your hospital function without delivery of PPE?
• Manufacturing – Are IT failures in quality control slowing down production?

Finances
Financial dashboards would be available only via secure, role-based access to select stakeholders, but it makes sense to gather and visualise this data in one place. It means you can easily see how well your business is performing financially and what factors could be having an impact. For example, vastly longer lead time visible in the productivity metrics may be affecting your stock price.

Your top-level business continuity score – indicating the overall health of your Enterprise – is informed by a combination of data from all three areas. We’re here to give senior leadership teams confidence in their ability to track business continuity through live data feeds and an easy-to-understand dashboard interface.

Download your copy of the business continuity brochure here and book a free demo of the dashboards.

Call us today on 01782 752 369
KedronUK, Kern House, Stone Business Park, Stone, Staffordshire ST15 0TL

You’ve barricaded the front door against Covid-19, but do you know what’s happening out back?

While the global pandemic may have advanced the business case for digital transformation by leaps and bounds, some concerning survey results have emerged over the last couple of months that suggest monitoring strategy is, as ever, an afterthought.

At least some of the change we’ve seen since March will be permanent, with more than four-fifths of companies saying that they will allow employees to continue working remotely, according to Gartner research. While almost half of those surveyed said they will let employees work remotely full-time, flexi-time will be adopted by many others.

The goals are clear: to build more a resilient operational model, and to meet shifting employee expectations. However, alongside the emergence of this complex, hybrid workforce, 29% of business leaders admitted they were not taking any measures to track productivity remotely.

At the same time, more Gartner findings suggest that CIOs are shifting spend to cloud-based desktop offerings without necessarily factoring in the implications for monitoring end-user experience. We’re also seeing massive growth in the adoption of SD-WAN, but Viavi’s ‘State of the network’ report indicates that better visibility of end-user experiences will be needed to make this work, particularly when it comes to remote users.

There will also, inevitably, be those looking to take advantage of gaps in your visibility in what Viavi have labelled the ‘age of dynamic disruption’. As enterprises have increased connectivity, networks have become even more exposed to vulnerabilities. 73% of business leaders who responded to their survey said security professionals need full visibility into network infrastructure if they are to enhance cyber security efforts and speed remediation.

And while 54% had already deployed internet of things (IoT) devices and a further 24% said they plan to do so in the next 12 months, only 57% of them had a mechanism in place to monitor those devices. After making rapid technological changes, many organisations are leaving themselves at worst dangerously exposed, or at least in the dark.

There’s always the threat of another crisis just around the corner. It could be a second wave of coronavirus, or it could be a climate change related phenomenon. Business continuity planning is intended to safeguard against threats like these. Many business leaders will now be asking themselves how their business continuity strategy can be reconfigured to ensure they don’t get caught out (again).

You can start by checking how your business continuity strategy is performing in real-time. We’ve developed dashboards which are able to connect data from multiple sources on the outcomes that matter to your enterprise, whether they’re related to IT service performance or availability, employee or supply chain productivity, or financial input and output.

By giving your team and yourself that visibility, you avoid the risk of assuming all is well when it’s not. You avoid the risk of your competitors stealing a march while you scramble to find out why your numbers are down. You avoid becoming a victim of your own eagerness to adapt.

Book a live demo here if you would like to see the dashboards in action and find out how they could work for your business.

If you would like to discuss a specific issue with your critical data monitoring, call us on 01782 752 369.

Call us today on 01782 752 369
KedronUK, Kern House, Stone Business Park, Stone, Staffordshire ST15 0TL

We don’t have a magic wand to make everything better. We don’t have medical training or a vaccine in development. We don’t even have a sewing machine to whip up scrubs like some of the heroes out there.

What we do have is a very particular set of skills. 

Over recent weeks, our technical team have been putting their expertise to use to help IT departments across the UK who are battling hard to maintain vital networks and services while working from home themselves. Many have needed to make rapid changes to their infrastructure, a process that we have been able to make quicker and safer. 

With ongoing projects as well as new challenges arising from the global pandemic, we’ve continued to support clients including large NHS trusts, critical national infrastructure, and organisations in the financial services sector. 

One NHS trust was already aware of issues with their patient-facing IT services, which are obviously more important than ever at the moment. Part of our role was gathering and analysing critical data to get to the root cause of an issue involving multiple service providers.

We’ve deployed a security analytics solution for another large NHS trust in a project that was underway before the crisis hit. At a time when rapid changes are being made to infrastructure, it’s essential that those changes can be made safely and our health service protected from opportunistic criminals. The solution we’ve put in place applies AI and machine learning to all data traversing their network to keep security threats at bay.

One organisation we work with was experiencing a problem where, after a massive increase in the number of staff working remotely, many of these staff were unable to connect to the network. Our technical team was able to troubleshoot the issue using software the client already had in place to find and address the root cause. 

Another financial services sector client, to whom we’ve provided security solutions in the past, identified a performance issue. They were lacking critical visibility of the infrastructure being used by their home workers. We arranged a free extended trial of the software they needed, which we were also able to remotely install and configure on their behalf. 

We’re not saying all of this to blow our own trumpets or make a fast buck. Like many companies, we’ve found ourselves in the slightly awkward – but also positive – position where our expertise and the solutions we offer can actually help with real problems you’re facing right now. 

As a vendor-independent consultants, we know which software will give you the visibility you need in various complex environments, including Citrix and SAP. We know how to recommend tools that will integrate best with your existing set-up. We can offer support with remote configuration and installation, and even supply technical staff on-site if necessary. We are more than happy to apply our knowledge to help you get the most from the software you already have. 

Download our guide to getting visibility fast to find out more about some of the solutions we provide.

If you would like to discuss a specific issue with your critical data monitoring, call us on 01782 752 369.

Call us today on 01782 752 369
KedronUK, Kern House, Stone Business Park, Stone, Staffordshire ST15 0TL