MSP startup InterOps Management Solutions Inc. on Monday rolled out the second major release of its Internet operations management platform.
The management service provider, targeted at providing remote operations management services focused on the Internet sites of larger companies in the financial services sector, created a next generation version of its Reflex services delivery platform.
Reflex 2.0 includes a graphical a portal that incorporates several views and functions, allowing users with different roles to access different reports and conduct administrative activities. The Reflex Portal includes an enhanced Client View that facilitates online collaboration between customer clients and InterOps personnel.
“We give business views of alarm flows, and real-time issue management information. They can iterate tickets on the fly and view alarms at the business level, because we understand dependencies between applications and business infrastructure,” said Chris McLellan, founder and chief technology officer for InterOps, in Medford, Mass.
The portal also adds a new configuration change management methodology that can step customers through an installation plan. “It gives them a structure for change management,” described McLellan. The methodology also adds a cloning process, where a configuration for one server can be applied, with modifications, to other servers.
The real-time configuration change management capability allows operators to automate, collaborate on, and track “recipes” that dictate the steps that must be taken when a network or system component is reconfigured. It can help to prevent outages due to incorrect or partial configuration changes, and it allows InterOps operators to find out in advance when and what changes are being made to IT resources that InterOps is managing for a client. The client view portal also allows end customers to manipulate reports by modifying charts, graphs and colors used in reports.
InterOps also enhanced the underlying technology in Reflex with a correlation engine that guides operators through a scripted set of processes to quickly solve production problems. The correlation engine automates the introduction of dynamic data associated with problem alerts into a business rules engine so that new problems can be associated with ones already experienced. The aim is to reduce the time it takes to diagnose and solve problems.
Reflex 2.0s underlying technology also adds a new Tri-Panel View that gives engineers working to solve specific problems multiple screens of information related to the problem being solved. Such screens could include online topology maps, status of the current problem ticket, a certain cell in an escalation matrix that describes actions to be taken, a knowledge base of related problem tickets and a change management log for details on the infrastructure. It is intended to help expedite problem resolution.
Reflex 2.0 is due out in early May for the subscription service.
