Xangati’s New Visual Trouble Ticket Automates, Improves Help Desk Function with Environment Recordings

By extending the company’s Application Management 2.0 framework, program improves collaboration, data collection when troubleshooting problems, even in cloud-computing environments.

• By James E. Powell
• 04/20/2009

Xangati has released the Visual Trouble Ticket (VTT) portal that extends the company’s Application Management 2.0 framework so that IT help/service desks and employees can visually collaborate in real-time. The new product enables help desks to collect real-time information about end-user problems quickly and easily, making problem determination and resolution easier and quicker.

With Xangati’s VTT portal, end users use a front-end reporting system to initiate and submit a DVR-style recording of their environment; the immediate capture of networked application activity helps IT professionals better diagnose problems by viewing conditions at the time of the trouble-ticket report. A 15-minute recording, which can be viewed using flexible graphical tools issue, tracks relevant information about network and application activity.

David Messina, vice president of marketing at Xangati, told Enterprise Systems, “In essence, we’re adding automation to incident management. We’re making a visual ‘note’ or recording of what’s going on in the user’s environment and adding that to the enterprise’s existing trouble-ticket system such as Remedy.

“This recording is especially important when you’re working with cloud applications,” Messina points out. “When a user calls the help desk and report a problem with an in-the-cloud application, it’s up to the help desk to figure out where the problem lies -- is it an internal problem or one with the service provider. With Visual Trouble Ticket, the service desk has a much better idea of where the bottleneck truly is. Best of all, we do it without using agents or hardware probes, which wouldn’t work for cloud applications anyway.”

“With today’s difficult economic climate, enterprise IT staffs are expected to do more with less -- and managing an end-user’s application experience shouldn’t be an afterthought,” said Alan Robin, CEO of Xangati said in a prepared release. “Particularly with the rapid adoption of virtualization and cloud computing, it’s imperative that the help desk is delivered a solution that allows them to keep pace with supporting these operationally complex innovations -- that’s where Xangati’s new Visual Trouble Ticket comes in.”

Quick resolution is critical, Messina notes. “A Forrester report said that an average of six service desk calls are needed to identify the owner of a problem. The issue is that when a call comes in, it gets bounced around until, hopefully, someone -- the network or database administrator, for example -- sees that their part of the environment is the problem. Sometimes to the user this just seems like a delaying tactic -- what Yankee Group called problem resolution ping pong -- but in truth it is a problem of not having enough information to solve the problem.”

Xangati claims that organizations can “reduce the cost of operations by resolving performance issues 50 percent faster.”

More information is available at www.xangati.com.