Whether it is a server, a network, the OS, an application, or any other critical piece of your infrastructure, you need to know when it goes down, and preferably before it fails. Monitoring solutions must take into account the core needs of a company, and everything that supports that piece of infrastructure. After all, knowing that the server is up does not help if the network is down, the application has hung, or the database is out of space.

FVT Solutions knows how to analyze a companies monitoring needs and find the solution that gets the necessary information into the right peoples hands quickly, before your customers are knocking on your door. We have implemented, extended, and customized monitoring solutions from multiple vendors, including IBM's Tivoli, NetView, and BMC. With this experience, we have built up a library of custom monitors that can expand your view into your infrastructure well beyond any out of the box installation that others provide.

Event Management

Organizations with multiple monitoring solutions have lots of event data to manage. However, those events are just that, raw data. Event management looks at ways to get all the events into one location where it can be turned into information and knowledge. Multiple events are able to be correlated into root causes and all integrations with notification, ticketing, and reporting systems can now be done from a single place. This helps customers answer the all too important questions:

• What's the current status of my environment?
• How can I use my resources to prepare for and prevent future outages?
• How do I stop from spending all my time "fire fighting"?
• Who is impacted by a given outage?
• How do I make sense of this constant flood of events?
• How can I solve a problem before my customer finds it?

FVT Solutions has extensive experience with Tivoli's Enterprise Console (TEC) including its many integration points and has the ability to customize the complex backend rules to make the most frequent changes a simple one line configuration file setting. They have helped customers integrate with monitoring systems, logfile based events, SNMP traps, Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM), email and paging systems, help desk and trouble ticketing systems, and reporting tools. Their consultants are known world-wide within the Tivoli community for their ability to configure the TEC rulebase to perform the most complex tasks. They also specialize in the migration of customers TEC servers to new hardware without any downtime.

Enterprise Scheduling

A large enterprise frequently has a continuous flow of inter-dependent batch jobs for processing and moving the endless flow of data through the organization. IBM's Tivoli Workload Scheduler (TWS) is well known for its stability and scalability for this mission critical task. FVT Solutions has assisted many clients deploying this solution with special consideration towards:

• Managing TWS in a global organization with multiple time zones and no down time
• Enabling multiple groups to securly access their own jobs
• Integrating with the Tivoli Enterprise Console
• High availability configurations
• Complex dependency creation

Configuration Management

With the ever increasing number of desktops and the growing demands of end users to keep up to date with the latest software, most organizations desktop support is stretched to the limit and users have discovered the only way to get a computer with the latest software is to get a new computer. Configuration management allows companies to identify what hardware and software they have deployed, and simplify the process of deploying software, upgrades, and patches.

FVT Solutions specializes in helping clients use Tivoli's Configuration Manager tool to maintain a current status of what is deployed across their environment and identify the best method to deploy software to minimize bandwidth and maximize their success rate. We have shown customers that nearly gave up on an existing Tivoli solution how they could use Configuration Manager to perform an upgrade to Windows XP reducing their costs, performing more upgrades at once, ensuring a consistent and repeatable upgrade, and minimizing end-user downtime.