Ceeview
The True Next-Gen IT Service Management

"There is only one thing stronger than all the armies of the world; and that is an idea whose time has come.” As clichéd as this may sound, modern-day businesses live and die by the truth in this paraphrased quote by Victor Hugo. With 50 percent of jobs expected to become obsolete within the next decade, innovation is a skill that will keep an organization relevant amid aggressive competition. For the creators of the Norway-based company, Ceeview the “time came” at every turn their next-generation IT Service Management and Monitoring solution kept getting more robust and savvy. A truly innovative solution—Ceeview—is a single point of truth which offers visibility into the disparate entities of an organization’s IT infrastructure by monitoring, measuring, and analyzing all aspects of an IT Service for ensuring high service availability. Today, the biggest challenge for CIOs is not just balancing existing legacy technologies and their modern counterparts, or managing colossal masses of data, but it is the understanding of how customers perceive their IT services. By building a new approach toward IT services, from both operations as well as a service monitoring perspective, the company has introduced their Ceeview solution that is a cut above the plethora of service providers in the arena.

According to a 2017 IT Service Management Survey that was conducted among CIOs and IT leaders, “89 percent of the respondents see ITSM as a value-add to their business—mostly in support of customer experience (35 percent) and service quality (48 percent).” However, figuring out a way to perform optimal and cost-effective monitoring of hybrid implementations—while taking both IT Operations Management (ITOM) as well as IT Service Management (ITSM) tools into consideration—remains a daunting task for most enterprises. Ceeview addresses this challenge effectively by understanding the importance of monitoring and visualizing service quality and end-user experience to maintain customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Ceeview performs auto-discovery of already monitored components to build infrastructure and service models by focusing on multiple aspects of IT service performance. These models are the base for monitoring and reporting on service availability and service level agreements (SLAs). “Ceeview is making it easy to get a holistic view of complex IT environments by consolidating the data collected from different systems into one single point of truth, building transparency and offering a common status to all users,” asserts Anders Grindland, the president and CEO of Ceeview.

The Inception

Ceeview is a product portfolio developed by industry experts who have vast experience and a long track record of developing products within areas such as cloud computing, virtualization, SLAs, event monitoring, database and application management, and service management.

It has intuitive service dashboards and advanced service modeling that continuously adapts to changes in the IT infrastructure, supporting private and public clouds. Ceeview provides a complete overview of the IT deliverables by monitoring, analyzing, and identifying problems.

To achieve efficient and transparent representation of IT services, Ceeview’s flagship solution comes with two types of models. The first one is the Service Behavior Model, which provides a depiction of how the service behaves as seen from the user’s point of view, and typically includes transaction response times. The second model is the Service Infrastructure Model, which contains infrastructure components that the service depends upon, in the likes of servers, databases, and networks. With its application monitoring system for mobile and web, Ceeview offers not only end-user simulation and application instrumentation but also provides passive, composite, and indirect monitoring. “Our concept of IT service monitoring as seen from the end user's perspective, combined with the overall health of the service and dependencies in the infrastructure, differentiates us from others,” states Dag Lund, VP, sales and marketing of Ceeview.

Modeling of IT Services and the Underlying Infrastructure

When it comes to service availability and understanding users’ perception for timely execution of duties, Ceeview measures and analyzes services and relates measurements and performance data to service models. These models analyze and represent the behavior of the service and the underlying infrastructure. It can also scout the infrastructure for early detection of a possible decline in service availability. For measuring and reporting on the service to ensure that it is compliant with a defined agreement, Ceeview provides an aggregated overview of the status of all SLA agreements for the complete customer portfolio in real time and historical web-based user interfaces, as well as in PDF reports. The SLA module in Ceeview supports exclude periods, SLA history, operating periods, and PDF reports.

From service modeling to health index calculation with a comprehensive SLA module, integration with third parties—both ITOM and ITSM—or providing thorough monitoring of websites and applications for ensuring high availability of mission-critical solutions and services, Ceeview effectively and efficiently does it all. With the end-user simulation feature, Ceeview allows scripting or programming which simulates user actions, macro-recording, and application instrumentation. Hence, the application monitoring system not only provides the user with the complete feasibility of monitoring individual components that the application depends upon but also provides seamless integration of third-party data by use of gateways or APIs. Ceeview also has an incident tracking system where the deviations between a service provider and the customer are assigned to relevant personnel for timely correction.

In an effort to secure the visibility, the dashboard can be customized with role-based access control that can be modified in the system through a web-based portal. On the other hand, for maximizing availability to users and providing crucial information about multiple aspects associated with IT services and applications along with the ease-of-use of the tool, the company introduced—Ceeview On The Go—a mobile interface to Ceeview. It facilitates users to track changes such as violating SLAs, events and affected service assets. The app provides an overall overview of the services, service model, and log changes in Ceeview along with a quick-start guide for the users’ convenience.

"Our concept of IT service monitoring as seen from the end user's perspective, combined with the overall health of the service and dependencies in the infrastructure, differentiates us from others"

A Result-Oriented Initiative

“Dedicated Efforts lead to Desired Results”—dwelling upon the same ideology, Ceeview has helped numerous clients in overcoming their business hurdles and attaining desired outcomes. For instance, Infront—a leading solution provider for global real-time market data, trading, news, and analytics—was concerned about reducing outages and quickly pinpointing response time issues. With the help of the Ceeview API, the company was able to monitor elements in the advanced trading solutions for the distribution of real-time trading and market data. As a result, Infront improved its user satisfaction rate, resulting in fewer outages alongside enhanced and customized reporting for their clients and the management staff.

Another such example is Canton Aargau—the fourth largest canton in Switzerland providing IT services for more than 200 communities. The company wanted to build better transparency over its service and offer timely status to its users, consolidate the data collected from different systems into a single point of truth that would send early warnings in the event of possible bottlenecks. They desired one common platform to be put in place for all users about the status of the applications while also ensuring flexibility, ease of use, as well as complete visualization into asset and event level of operations, and services for service managers and service consumers (end-users).

With its service, Ceeview effectively nipped these challenges in the bud and provided a better investigation of problems through a visibility of the dependencies, and KPIs about availability and quality based on the available services. Ceeview not only improved the incident management capabilities for dispatching tickets into the right organization by understanding service dependencies but also solved the communication issues between the services and the components.

Building a Road toward a Sustainable Future

Today, with most products in the ITSM space focused on service desks and helpdesks, Ceeview’s clinical approach toward infrastructure monitoring, makes them a game changer. For the future, Ceeview intends to expand its business to newer territories with more partners and resellers. The company also aims to broaden and improve its functionality of Service Model Designer and Service Board Designer. “We believe that the key to success is making customers happy. With our highly experienced team and innovative product, we are making IT management easy,” asserts Carstein Seeberg, the CTO at Ceeview.