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Top Dependencies for WatchMyDC® Enterprise Implementation

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Bywatchmydc

IT Automation Dependencies Overview

Successful WatchMyDC® IT automation implementations have a few common customer traits:

  • Qualified and trained WatchMyDC® admins (“power users”)
  • Understanding of internal requirements
  • Existing tool knowledge
  • The anticipation of internal Change Management lead times
  • Awareness of dependencies that affect the speed of implementation

This document describes the top dependencies for the WatchMyDC® enterprise solution.

IT automation

Know Your Dependencies for Your IT Automation Project

Be prepared to review the following dependencies and take the appropriate steps to accelerate your WatchMyDC® implementation.

Compile IT Operations Challenges

You will need to find out and compile challenges in your IT operations. There are a few places to look into:

  • Dumps of all ITSM support tickets of the last 3 to 6 months time. Find out the most problematic and repetitive ones
  • Similarly, dumps of your NMS incident logs where your team has put efforts to fix those
  • Sit with your team to find out the multi-step tasks which are very common
  • Have a conversation with different business units to find out the most time-consuming tasks
  • Finally, find out the root cause of your SLA under pressure

Compile an Endpoint Inventory Including Credentials

Networks, systems, and applications are called endpoints to WatchMyDC®. Prepare a list of inventory for the below endpoints along with their access credentials:

  • Network Endpoints. Such as network switches, routers, firewalls, etc with SSH credentials.
  • System Endpoints. Such as physical and virtual servers, virtualization hypervisors, etc with SSH or WinRM credentials.
  • Application Endpoints. Such as APIs.

WatchMyDC® also supports native integration with AWS. Keep ready one of below access mechanisms:

Prepare a Deployment Model for IT Automation

Since WatchMyDC® supports various deployment models as described in the WatchMyDC® Design Guide, customers need to decide on a deployment model first. WatchMyDC® Professional Services team can help to assess the right deployment model for you.

Configure the Firewall for Inbound/Outbound Access

The WatchMyDC Collector needs inbound and outbound secure HTTP (TCP port 443) to our data centers. However, be sure your security team is aware of and processes a change to allow our public DNS or IP addresses access to the Collector (and of course end users) inside your network. And be sure to configure WatchMyDC® Collector to communicate through an HTTP proxy, if necessary.

WatchMyDC® Collector Access to Your Endpoints

You may have firewalls on your network between the Collector and the target devices you plan to automate. If you have an internal network firewall, good chances are you will need to consult your security team. This is to make changes to the infrastructure to allow the Collector to monitor devices on appropriate TCP/UDP ports. Something as simple as ICMP should not be blocked between the Collector and devices. Partially or fully blocking these ports will result in extra time spent resolving dead devices in WatchMyDC®. And also troubleshooting missing data with the Collector Debug Facility. Be sure to plan this step well in advance to make appropriate security justifications and schedule lead times.

Endpoints Configurations for Sending Event and Activity Logs

WatchMyDC® expects to receive every meaningful event and activity log from the target endpoints. So you may need to access those endpoints and configure the log destinations towards the WatchMyDC® Collectors. The current version supports Webhook with basic authentication and Syslog

Consult the WatchMyDC® Technical Team

Anticipating your IT Ops organization’s dependencies and lead times is critical to a successful WatchMyDC® implementation. If you are pursuing a rapid migration to WatchMyDC®, be sure to review this list and bring any questions to WatchMyDC® representatives.

Follow the WatchMyDC® Questionnaire Documentation

WatchMyDC® has published a data collection questionnaire document. The document is readily available to download from this link. Customers can follow the questions to understand the dependencies while planning to implement the WatchMyDC® IT automation solution.