Overview: Incident and IT Service Management
The AWS Marketplace offers a large variety of commercial and open source offerings to augment IT management and incident resolution within the AWS ecosystem. Sumo Logic's AWS Marketscape looks at the pros and cons of the most common incident management and IT service tools from the Marketplace.
DevOps methodologies and cloud computing infrastructure have transformed how software is written and deployed. It’s now quite common for enterprises to continually modify, build, and release internally created applications on a weekly—or even more frequent—basis. With such a high volume of software deliveries, the likelihood of an issue arising is far greater than before. To support these activity levels, it’s critical for DevOps teams to quickly identify problems, notify the affected teams, and then correct the flaws.
AWS IT Service Management Solutions
Via carefully designed, interwoven techniques like redundancy and fault tolerance bolstered by extensive administrative oversight, Amazon provides extremely high service levels for the underlying resources that constitute AWS. To assist IT teams in identifying and registering issues outside of Amazon’s control, AWS offers two primary building blocks:
- AWS Service Catalog. This contains an inventory—along with optional usage restrictions and version information—of all the elements that are being used in a customer’s AWS environment. These items include assets such as virtual machine images, servers, software, and databases.
- AWS Simple Notification Service (SNS). This is a web service that coordinates and manages message delivery to subscribing endpoints or clients. In this scenario, AWS SNS can transmit alerts regarding possible service disruptions.
Pricing for AWS IT Service Solutions
Amazon’s cataloging and monitoring services are reasonably priced, and thus should be incorporated into the IT organization’s administrative processes:
- AWS Service Catalog. Each portfolio, which is comprised of a grouping of products along with related configuration details, is charged at a fixed cost of $5 per month.
- AWS SNS. Outlays for this service depend on the number of published and delivered notifications, supplemental API calls, and the type of endpoint being contacted.
Limitations of AWS Incident and IT Service Management
While the cataloging and notification services supplied by AWS are essential building blocks, they’re not meant to serve as a complete incident and IT service management solution.
Instead, enterprises seeking to deploy mission-critical applications that utilize AWS-hosted assets should absorb this information into existing IT management applications, whether hosted on-premise or available as SaaS solutions. This presents a unified overview of the entire technology portfolio and can help track, prioritize, and correct issues.
Third Party Incident and IT Management Solutions
Specialized enterprise applications meant to service these distinct requirements have been around for decades. However, this ecosystem continues to flourish with new entrants constantly arriving on the scene.
These vendors offer fresh approaches, multiple deployment options, and deep linkage with other elements in the IT portfolio like software development systems and quality assurance applications. They also are capable of incorporating alerts and notifications from AWS into their workflow, either natively or via site-specific customizations.
Third Party Incident and IT Management Features
| Comprehensive issue tracking | Rich workflow spanning multiple teams | Versioning and change management |
| Multiple notification options | Cross platform support | User provisioning and management without requiring IT support |
| Tight coupling with AWS management and monitoring systems | Strong integration with the entire software development tool portfolio | Cloud or on-premise deployment alternatives |
| Automated escalation | Incident grouping | Service grouping |
| Live call routing |
Third Party Solutions
| Company Name | Summary |
| Atlassian (JIRA) | An all-inclusive software solution offering extensive planning, tracking, releasing, and reporting capabilities. |
| PagerDuty | An incident resolution platform that collects events from monitoring systems, triages what’s important, and involves the right people for fast resolution. |
| ServiceNow | ServiceNow offers a service management system that helps IT organizations offer support in an organized way: Requests come in, they’re categorized and prioritized, then assigned to available staff, and tracked in a single system. |
| VictorOps | A hub for centralizing the flow of information throughout the incident lifecycle. Driven by IT and DevOps system data, it provides a unified platform for real-time alerting, collaboration, and documentation. |
