Maintenance Support: Network Management

Today’s technological advances enable most systems to run smoothly and relatively hassle-free, but few organizations can get by without doing any maintenance. Maintenance includes technical and associated administrative actions that are planned – as well as reactive responses to alerts, faults, and configuration and performance statuses that are issued automatically by a network management tool. In either case, maintenance keeps your systems running at optimum levels of performance, ensures quality of service, and provides around-the-clock availability of system features and functionality.

TWD provides skilled maintenance support for our clients’ business-critical system environments utilizing a variety of network management system tools, such as Orion Solar Winds, to monitor, manage, and analyze your systems to keep them available and functional, with limited interruptions.

Maintaining Your Systems at the Speed of Business

TWD utilizes network management tools to monitor the health and status of your systems proactively, identify problems and their sources, and analyze and alert to system conditions that may impact your system performance. In addition to scheduled system maintenance, our network management tools help us determine which of three types of maintenance support is needed:

Routine Maintenance

Routine Maintenance consists of the tasks that are performed on your systems daily, weekly, or monthly. Performing regular maintenance is cost-effective because it greatly reduces your chances of system problems, enhances survivability, and limits service interruptions. But remembering what to do – and when – requires the establishment of a maintenance schedule, which must be followed and updated diligently.

TWD schedules these tasks as part of your routine system usage in order to keep your systems running efficiently. Tasks include:

Updates – Software updates include revised or new code to fix bugs and security holes and to help the software run better. Most software programs allow you to set automatic updates for certain days or times (such as overnight, when the system isn’t being used), which ensures regular and convenient maintenance. This is recommended particularly for antivirus software.
Backups – While not strictly a maintenance function, backing up your systems should be on your maintenance checklist. The use of removable media, off-site storage, and off-site backups often are part of an organization’s important disaster recovery strategy.

Preventive Maintenance

Preventive Maintenance prevents system failures before they happen, and ensures that system quality of service and integrity are maintained.

Typical preventive maintenance activities that TWD performs include periodic inspections of components, monitoring, and analysis of system performance criteria – and, when necessary, replacement of suspected- or known-impaired critical components. In order to accomplish this, blocks of time are incorporated into the operations schedule, often after-hours, so that the impact to productivity is minimized.

Preventive maintenance that is implemented carefully on IT equipment and systems within a network benefit from documented, detailed fault isolation and troubleshooting processes. Through the use of automated network management tools, TWD develops and further refines these fault isolation and troubleshooting processes each time a preventive maintenance routine is accomplished. The more complex your network, the more important these fault isolation processes become in establishing plans-of-action to deal with IT equipment failures or system degradation, and in limiting their impact on your daily business operations. Preventive maintenance:

Reduces system failures, system interruptions, unplanned downtime, and degraded service
Increases system reliability
Helps you avoid the unexpected
Increases Quality of Service (QoS)
Reduces the need for demand (break-fix) maintenance

Demand Maintenance

Demand Maintenance is sometimes referred to as “break-fix,” and involves all unscheduled actions performed as a result of system failure or degradation. Demand maintenance is an attempt to restore the system to its full optimal condition. TWD’s use of network management tools automatically monitor your system for health and status, and alert to conditions that may impact your system’s performance. The alerts prompt demand maintenance support, which include a range of activities including:

Failure identification
Fault isolation
Resolution
System verification

Keeping Your Technology – and Your Business – Running

TWD incorporates the use of industry-leading network management tools in its maintenance support to keep your technology running at the speed of your business. We field and deploy maintenance support teams who are savvy in the benefits of proper and proactive maintenance and the importance of strict adherence to industry and manufacturer standard maintenance procedures. Our full-service, cost-effective maintenance support programs provide:

Routine maintenance – a primary focus on maintaining overall system health, integrity, and survivability
Preventive maintenance (daily, weekly, monthly) – scheduled maintenance includes server reboots and system backups, software and firmware updates that follow product change notifications and other manufacturer maintenance requirements, and maintenance that ensures compliance with physical and system security
Demand maintenance – includes alarm monitoring, alarm response, escalation as appropriate until resolved
24/7 help desk support – on-site (7am – 5pm, Monday through Friday) and on-call after hours roster receives trouble reports, conducts troubleshooting and resolution; and tracks tickets via Remedy system
Moves/Adds/Changes (MACs) – programming and software/hardware changes to add/remove users and complete other end-user requests
Daily security incidents and status reports – weekly activity reports, monthly reports (e.g., hardware inventory, capacity, stations, network infrastructure), and quarterly hardware (e.g., spare circuit packs) manager reports
System performance monitoring – traffic analysis and studies, trunk group reports, and load balancing
Alarm monitoring and resolution – TWD utilizes Alarmtraq to monitor all alarm events for all major or minor system issues, dispatches technicians to respond and resolve alarm conditions (including environmental)

TWD is committed to high standards for our network management operations as well as our routine, preventive, and demand maintenance support services. We provide you with the following maintenance support distinctions:

Methods/Techniques

TWD maintenance routines follow documented standard fault isolation procedures and escalation procedures. All preventive maintenance is scheduled, tracked, documented, and assigned with accountability down to the technician level. TWD utilizes Microsoft Office for maintenance scheduling.

After Hours Coverage

Out-of-hours, on-call functions are implemented to track the healthy functioning of systems and to respond to issues. When alarm conditions occur, immediate notification is sent to the TWD team who can diagnose, and in many cases, resolve the problems remotely or dispatch our on-call technicians for rapid repair and restoration services. When necessary, issues are escalated to Tier 3 and tracked to resolution.

SLAs

We meet stringent service level agreements (SLAs) that require work completion/trouble resolution, regardless of type of work request, alarm, or project.

Operational Support

TWD maintenance support addresses business management processes; daily operations for voice, video and data communications; design and deployment of an intricate enterprise network; and overall standardization of operating procedures for voice, video, and data communications. TWD provides cross-functional project management, engineering, implementation, and O&M support.

Expertise

TWD fields experienced and cohesive teams of project managers, technicians, and software engineers to provide your maintenance support. Our teams manage service requests and trouble reports effectively on a routine basis. The teams are cross-trained, and achieve results during periods of increased requirements, juggling workloads and schedules to meet your requests. They maintain a stringent schedule of preventive maintenance routines, and ensure that system product change notifications and software/firmware upgrades are completed within manufacturer- and customer-prescribed procedures. With a tight, rotating schedule, the teams use an on-call roster to provide support after regular business hours. Each team member is trained to use customer-mandated ticketing systems, which allows supervisors, team members, and authorized government personnel to see the status of tickets real-time, and to monitor the progress from ticket assignment through completion and closing.

Experience

TWD has been providing network management tools and maintenance support services to our Department of Defense (DoD) and Federal Civilian agency clients since the early 1990s with exceptional results. Since 2003, TWD has ensured 100 percent system availability for our network management and maintenance support customers.We currently support key government civilian agencies in the operations and maintenance of more than 35 Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) enabled systems and more than 100,000 ports using Avaya site administration for software applications on Avaya platforms. Our clients include the DoN’s NAVSEA Command Information Office, the Department of Homeland Security (multiple components), the National Institute of Health, and other executive-level national security agencies.