#030: Can your ITOM do this?

Continuous IT/OT Operations Management (cITOM): Boosting IT/OT Resilience with Smarter Alerts

AuthorAuthorAuthor

Nagesh Nama, Kashyap Joshi & Chaitanya Vaidya
October 02, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 25 minutes

Credits: Stability.ai

Table of Contents

1.0 Alarm & Incident Management for the AI Era

1.1 Status Quo

My business trips have taken me to manufacturing facilities in 5 continents for three decades. One critical aspect of running an automated manufacturing facility is Alarms or Incident Management. This domain has various implications to the business: Production Efficiency, Product Quality, Regulatory Impact, to name a few.

Then why there is absolutely no innovation in alarms management and is rarely optimized and mined to understand the problems lurking beneath?

These are the common scenarios I have noticed in almost every GxP facility:

  1. Press the Acknowledge Button and then move on? You know an alarm is akin to nuisance.

  2. When you need only 20 alarms, the developers add another 80 to make it 100. The critical alarms that need attention are often neglected. Call this Alarm Overload!

  3. No one looks at the historical alarms to do some basic data mining to see what is really going on in the last 3 months, 6 months or a year. Either the historical database is non-existent or it is backed up never to be seen again.

  4. If there are 5 identical manufacturing lines, I have not come accross a facility where alarms are compared over a time horizon across identical lines. There is a wealth of information is such a comparison.

  5. When an alarm is triggered, can the operator query the database to see what was done in the past to quickly take care of the issue? Or Can the operator add to the knowledgebase to make it easy for operations in the future.

  6. These a just some of my observations. I am pretty confident you can add a few more based on your experiences.

1.2 What does a GxP Manufacturing facility need for efficient alarm or incident management?

2.0 Continuous IT/OT Operations Management (cITOM): Boosting IT/OT Resilience with Smarter Alerts

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Industry 4.0 and the concept of "smart factories" are revolutionizing the manufacturing sector. In the realm of drug and device production, companies are embracing digital transformation and the convergence of IT/OT, thereby broadening their attack surface and heightening the risks associated with vulnerability exploitation, production interference, intellectual property breaches, and other security concerns. Given these inherent vulnerabilities, GxP firms find it challenging to adhere to the FDA’s Data Integrity regulations.

cITOM stands out as a robust incident management tool crafted to empower teams in swiftly and efficiently addressing critical alerts. By centralizing notifications from diverse monitoring systems, cITOM ensures that pertinent individuals receive timely updates.

Equipped with features such as on-call scheduling, escalation protocols, and incident monitoring, cITOM empowers organizations to uphold operational continuity and reduce downtimes. Its seamless compatibility with popular collaboration and monitoring platforms renders it indispensable for teams seeking to bolster their incident response capabilities.

3.0 Benefits of cITOM

3.1 Enhanced Incident Response

In cITOM, the system guarantees the swift delivery of alerts to designated team members. This process facilitates prompt detection and resolution of incidents.

3.2 On-Call Management

The platform provides comprehensive on-call scheduling features, enabling teams to efficiently handle shifts and guarantee continuous availability for prompt alert responses.

3.3 Customizable Notifications

Users have the flexibility to personalize alert notifications according to their preferences. This ensures that they stay informed with timely updates delivered through email, SMS, phone calls, or mobile push notifications.

3.4 Escalation Policies

Within cITOM, teams can establish escalation policies to ensure that if an issue persists beyond a specified timeframe, it will automatically escalate to higher-level personnel.

3.5 Seamless Integration with Various Tools

cITOM seamlessly integrates with a diverse array of monitoring, collaboration, and ticketing tools. This integration enhances current workflows and establishes a centralized alert management system.

3.6 Incident Tracking and Reporting:

The platform offers comprehensive insights into incident history, enabling teams to analyze response times, identify trends, and enhance future performance.

3.7 Collaboration Features

cITOM enhances communication among team members during incidents, enabling real-time collaboration and decision-making.

3.8 Mobile Accessibility

Through a user-friendly mobile app, cITOM enables team members to receive alerts and promptly respond to incidents while on the move, ensuring uninterrupted coverage.

3.9 Data Security and Compliance

cITOM prioritizes adherence to industry standards for data security, offering reassurance to regulated GxP organizations.

3.10 Flexible Alerting Rules

Users have the ability to establish personalized alerting rules according to specific conditions, guaranteeing that alerts are pertinent and actionable.

4.0 Key features of cITOM

4.1 Actionable and Reliable Alerting

cITOM guarantees you stay on top of critical alerts by integrating seamlessly with monitoring, ticketing, and chat tools. By grouping alerts, eliminating unnecessary noise, and delivering notifications through various channels, cITOM equips your team with essential details to kickstart issue resolution promptly.

Moreover, cITOM directs alerts to the appropriate personnel based on predefined rules, escalation paths, and on-call schedules, streamlining the process and ensuring every notification receives attention. In cases of unacknowledged alerts, cITOM automatically escalates them to the next level, preventing incidents from being overlooked and ensuring swift resolution of critical issues.

4.2 Multiple Alerting Channels

Monitoring tools commonly rely on email notifications, but this method falls short when dealing with time-sensitive alerts that demand quick responses. cITOM employs a variety of communication channels such as email, SMS, mobile push notifications, and voice calls to guarantee timely notifications for recipients.

4.3 Alert Enrichment

Short text messages often lack the depth needed for users to make well-informed decisions. cITOM alerts go beyond mere characters! Enhance your alerts by including additional fields and attaching charts, logs, runbooks, and more to enrich them, offer context, and empower recipients to take appropriate actions. These alerts can leverage data from integrated monitoring tools such as Datadog, New Relic, or AWS to provide valuable insights into root causes, performance metrics, and system health. Furthermore, alerts can adapt in real-time by incorporating new information as the situation progresses, ensuring that responders stay up-to-date.

4.4 Custom Alert Actions

Respond to alerts within the cITOM Application by taking necessary actions directly. Besides the standard alert responses like "Add Note" and "Close", you have the option to perform investigative and corrective actions. This includes tasks such as pinging or restarting a server, or generating a service ticket instantly with a simple click.

4.5 Automated Actions

Establish action policies that can execute diagnostic or remediation tasks automatically upon receiving alerts. By integrating with AWS Systems Manager or other third-party automation platforms, cITOM will activate your response playbooks when an alert aligns with your specified conditions. This enables the system to implement necessary actions without the need for on-call engineers, thereby mitigating alert fatigue and minimizing Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR).

4.6 Heartbeats

Opsgenie Heartbeats guarantee the functionality of your monitoring systems and alert generation. It verifies the active status and connectivity of monitoring tools, as well as the timely completion of custom tasks. In case of signal absence within a set timeframe, cITOM promptly notifies you about the issue.

4.7 On-call Management and Escalations

cITOM simplifies on-call management by providing a user-friendly interface to create and adjust schedules and set up escalation protocols. This ensures clear accountability during incidents, with team members always aware of who is on-call. You can be rest assured that crucial alerts will never go unnoticed. You can generate on-call schedules effortlessly with options for daily, weekly, and customized rotations. Also take advantage of various scheduling rules to apply different rotations as needed, enabling complex scenarios like after-hours support, weekday/weekend coverage, and support for geographically dispersed teams.

4.8 Routing Rules and Escalations

cITOM plays a crucial role in ensuring that no critical alerts go unnoticed. By leveraging cITOM's adaptable routing rules, notifications are directed to the appropriate teams based on factors like source, priority, and timing of the issue. Moreover, escalations guarantee that alerts receive prompt attention if they are not acknowledged within a specified timeframe. For instance, in the scenario where the designated person fails to respond to a high-priority alert within 5 minutes, an alternative individual or team can be automatically notified.

4.9 On-call Overrides

When a user encounters scheduling conflicts, others can effortlessly swap shifts and transfer responsibilities without requiring administrative assistance. This feature allows you to specify the precise start and end times for the override, offering flexibility for both short-term and long-term adjustments. cITOM enables the support of multiple concurrent overrides, guaranteeing uninterrupted coverage in cases where several team members require replacements. Once the override period concludes, the schedule automatically reverts to its original rotation, ensuring a seamless transition back to normal coverage without the need for manual intervention.

4.10 On-call Reminder Notifications

cITOM plays a crucial role in keeping your team informed about their responsibilities. By automatically alerting users about the start and end of their shifts, cITOM ensures timely notifications. These reminders can be customized to align with your team's preferences, whether it's an hour, day, or week before the shift commences. This feature aids in upholding team visibility regarding on-call schedules, thus minimizing confusion and enhancing the efficiency of shift transitions. Reminders are versatile, as they can be dispatched through various channels such as email, SMS, mobile push notifications, or chat platforms, guaranteeing that team members receive alerts through their preferred means of communication.

4.11 Incident Management and Response

cITOM comprehends the significance of issues on business services and proactively communicates outages to all stakeholders. By planning in advance for service disruptions, cITOM can promptly send messages, establish status pages, and set up conference bridges when incidents arise. This approach minimizes distractions, enabling teams to maintain focus on resolving issues efficiently.

4.12 Team-based service management

cITOM allows you to link alerts to the corresponding business services, providing a clear insight into the responsible teams and individuals who should be informed about the resolution progress. This approach ensures that all relevant teams are notified at once and equipped with the necessary tools for effective collaboration throughout the resolution process.

4.13 Post incident analysis

Discover how teams managed major incidents through cITOM's comprehensive Post-Incident Analysis report. This report delves into the specific actions carried out by each team, their involvement in the resolution process, and the methods used to communicate status updates to stakeholders. It enables you to promptly pinpoint successful areas and areas that can be enhanced.

4.14 Incident Timeline

The Incident Timeline serves as the primary reference point during an incident's lifecycle, documenting essential information such as the incident status, related alerts, activities at the Incident Command Center (ICC), and additional details. This chronological data is seamlessly integrated into the incident postmortem, enabling teams to access a comprehensive log of all occurrences from the beginning to the resolution of the incident.

4.15 Communication and Collaboration

Efficient communication and collaboration play a vital role in achieving quick response times. cITOM offers extensive integrations with leading chat platforms, enabling seamless action-taking and collaboration. By leveraging cITOM, you have the ability to establish virtual war rooms for coordinating responses across various teams and ensuring stakeholders are promptly informed through its mass notification features.

4.16 ChatOps

Create and manage alerts and schedules directly within your ChatOps tool. In the event of an incident, promptly establish a dedicated Slack or Teams Channel for immediate response.

All team members swiftly gather in one centralized location, enhancing efficiency to resolve issues promptly. Enjoy smooth integrations with leading ChatOps platforms such as Slack and Microsoft Teams.

For example, let’s delve into the integration with Slack.

4.17 Web Conference Bridge

cITOM simplifies communication with important individuals by allowing you to connect through your chosen web conferencing provider, be it Zoom or Twilio. The conference bridge information is included in the incident details and is automatically shared with your team.

For example, initiate a Zoom call for incident #616.

4.18 Incoming Call Routing

Phone calls are a prevalent means for customers to report problems and seek help. Leveraging cITOM's incoming call routing features allows you to utilize familiar tools for handling critical incidents, guaranteeing no crucial phone calls go unanswered. This approach provides valuable insights into the reasons behind the calls and helps enhance overall customer satisfaction.

4.19 Call Routing

Never again will you overlook a customer support call. Utilize cITOM on-call schedules to direct phone calls to the appropriate individual. In instances where no one is accessible, cITOM will record a message, create an alert, and inform the designated person through their preferred notification method. The notification includes call specifics, allowing recipients to listen to the message promptly.

4.20 Advanced Reporting and Analytics

Gain valuable insights into areas of success and opportunities for improvement within your operations. The cITOM system diligently monitors all aspects concerning alerts and incidents. Leverage robust reporting and analytics tools to uncover the root causes of the majority of alerts, evaluate your team's efficiency in acknowledging and resolving issues, and gain clarity on the distribution of on-call workloads.

4.21 Operational Efficiency Analytics

Effortlessly grasp the number of alerts managed by your organization within a specific timeframe, along with the average time taken to acknowledge and resolve them. Visualize the trends of these metrics over time and swiftly delve deeper into problematic areas with just a click. Identify alerts that demanded extra time and focus for resolution.

4.22 Monthly Overview Analytics

cITOM’s standard dashboard is designed to analyze the monthly alert distribution and response trends. This allows you to effortlessly compare them with the previous month and delve deeper into any areas of interest.

4.23 Incident Investigation

The Incident Investigation View allows you to directly investigate deployment-related incidents within cITOM.

The dashboard presents a timeline showcasing both successful and unsuccessful code deployments originating from Bitbucket, GitLab, or Bamboo. It also includes records of past and current incidents. Consolidating all this data in a single location enables users to establish connections between incidents and code deployments, identifying the latter as potential triggers for incidents.

5.0 ContinuouscITOM - Delivered as a Managed Service

In each of our services, we ensure continuous qualification of the software application and ongoing validation of the customer's instance. With each iteration, we conduct a thorough 100% regression testing.

6.0 Conclusion

cITOM is your Alarms and Incident Dashboard to your entire manufacturing facility. It provides the “best of breed” and “best in class” continuously validated app that has all the advanced and useful features. It can streamline incident management and response, alert channels, automated actions, on-call management, advanced analytics and much more.

cITOM can ensure alarms and incident management are never the same. It provides a sophisticated platform which is very simple to use. Can systematically handle routine low level warnings to critical alarms in a streamlined fashion that can increase your production efficiencies, reduce down time while meeting all your regulatory obligations.

7.0 ContinuousTV Audio Podcasts

8.0 Latest AI News

9.0 FAQs

Question

Answer

1. What is the current state of alarm management in manufacturing facilities?

Many manufacturing facilities, particularly those adhering to GxP regulations, face challenges with outdated alarm management systems. Common issues include:

1️⃣ Acknowledgement Without Action: Operators often acknowledge alarms without addressing the root cause, leading to recurring problems.

2️⃣ Alarm Overload: An excessive number of alarms, many of which are non-critical, can overwhelm operators and result in important alerts being overlooked.

3️⃣ Lack of Data Analysis: Historical alarm data is often disregarded, missing opportunities to identify recurring issues and improve processes.

4️⃣ Limited Knowledge Sharing: Systems often lack integrated knowledge bases, preventing operators from accessing historical solutions or contributing their own insights.

2. What is Continuous IT/OT Operations Management (cITOM)?

cITOM is an advanced incident management solution designed to address the shortcomings of traditional alarm management systems.

It enhances IT/OT resilience by centralizing alerts from various monitoring systems and ensuring timely notifications to the appropriate personnel. cITOM empowers teams to:

1️⃣ Respond to incidents swiftly and effectively.

2️⃣ Maintain operational continuity and minimize downtime.

3️⃣ Improve collaboration and communication during critical events.

3. How does cITOM improve incident response times?

cITOM employs several mechanisms to expedite incident response:

1️⃣ Centralized Alerting: Aggregates alerts from various monitoring tools for a unified view.

2️⃣ Multiple Notification Channels: Delivers alerts through email, SMS, mobile push, and voice calls, ensuring timely receipt.

3️⃣ On-Call Scheduling and Escalation: Routes alerts based on predefined schedules and escalates unacknowledged alerts automatically.

4️⃣ Alert Enrichment: Provides context to alerts by including charts, logs, runbooks, and other relevant data.

4. Can cITOM automate incident response actions?

Yes, cITOM enables the automation of diagnostic and remediation tasks.

By integrating with platforms like AWS Systems Manager, cITOM can trigger pre-defined response playbooks based on specific alert conditions.

This reduces the reliance on on-call engineers, minimizing alert fatigue and MTTR (Mean Time to Resolution).

5. How does cITOM enhance team collaboration during incidents?

cITOM fosters team collaboration through:

1️⃣ Shared Incident Timeline: Provides a centralized log of all incident-related activities, ensuring transparency and accountability.

2️⃣ ChatOps Integration: Enables the creation of dedicated chat channels (e.g., Slack, Microsoft Teams) directly within cITOM for streamlined communication.

3️⃣ Web Conference Bridge: Facilitates immediate communication with key stakeholders via integrated web conferencing tools like Zoom or Twilio.

6. What reporting and analytics features does cITOM offer?

cITOM provides advanced reporting and analytics capabilities to gain operational insights:

1️⃣ Operational Efficiency Analytics: Tracks metrics like the number of alerts, acknowledgement times, and resolution times, allowing for trend analysis and identification of bottlenecks.

2️⃣ Monthly Overview Analytics: Delivers a comprehensive view of alert distribution and response trends, enabling month-over-month comparisons and insights.

3️⃣ Incident Investigation: Correlates incidents with code deployments from tools like Bitbucket and GitLab to pinpoint potential causes.

7. Is cITOM suitable for regulated industries like pharmaceuticals and medical devices?

Yes, cITOM prioritizes data security and compliance with industry standards, making it suitable for GxP-regulated organizations.

Its robust features help these companies adhere to stringent data integrity regulations.

8. How is cITOM delivered?

cITOM is offered as a managed service, ensuring continuous qualification of the software application, ongoing validation of the customer's instance, and thorough regression testing with each iteration.

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