Now that BlackBerry service has become mission critical to your business, you seek to the best way to manage, monitor and support your BlackBerry users. Understanding the maze of approaches can be confusing. Most tools provide simple “up/down” visibility to the BlackBerry Enterprise Server supported by limited SNMP-based metrics or focus more on simple troubleshooting of configuration issues. Collectively they all miss the core ability to measure actual user experience, which is required to deliver full visibility, better understanding, proactive prevention and faster action.
BoxTone is already the software trusted by more Fortune 1000, law and professional services and government agencies to manage their BlackBerry platforms, with proven ROI. As you survey the vendor landscape, be sure you are asking the right questions – just like these successful organizations.
And by proactive, we don’t just mean alert on up/down or catch rare configuration problems or sit and wait for SNMP traps or 24 hour batch reports. Being proactive means a return to first principals that you can’t manage what you don’t measure.
You can only truly be proactive if you can...
- Measure and understand what normal user performance is for every user and every transaction flow (ie. baseline and benchmark normal performance) and all the BlackBerry service delivery infrastructure (ie. smartphones, carriers, BES, mail servers, MDS servers, OS, network, etc)
- Identify variances and trends away from norm
- Be WARNING alerted on trends away from norm (not just up/down)
- Receive clearing alerts as service returns to normal
- Trend and analyze correlated data to isolate root cause of chronic problems over time
The Bottom Line: You cannot truly be proactive if you don’t have real-time user-level transaction flow data correlated with infrastructure metrics that are continuously compared to baselined normal performance – the key approach at the core of the patented BoxTone SmartMP™ technology.
- Which 5% of my users are having issues right now and why?
- What is normal average delivery time for all of my users? Which users are substantially slower and why? What are the delivery times by individual hop for the last 20 emails for an individual user of my choice -- like my CEO?
- Which handful of users are causing problems for hundreds of my other users?
- Who are my high-use and low-use users? What impact are they having on my systems and the rest of my users?
- Which of my BES-Mail server pairs are the most problematic? What is the list of all exceptions/errors for all my BES servers in the last 24 hours and who was impacted?
- Can you show me a WARNING alert for trending away from norm for hung threads, pending messages, carrier performance issues, and BES-mail server performance issues?
- Can you audit/verify IT Policy push and activation/wipe success vs. fail?
- Can you track changes to the device history, such as which of my users just loaded applications or changed their devices, unknowingly causing them or others problems?
- Which of my users haven’t connected in >3 months and are causing BES performance issues?
- Do you have a step-by-step modular growth plan based on proven ITIL best-practices?
The Bottom Line: If you don’t model each BlackBerry user as an object and don’t have user transaction flow data that is baselined for norm and correlated with trending over time, you cannot answer most of these questions. See how BoxTone's patented SmartMP captures and shows you all the data you need!
- Can you provide a single view of all my users across multiple BES-SQL Domains, or can you only see one BES at a time? Are you limited to less than 5000 smartphone users? Does the single view extend across BlackBerry users, BES servers, Mail servers, carriers and the entire infrastructure?
- Are you agentless? Or do you require remote agents that must be manually installed, configured, versioned and managed? And when remote servers with agents go down, do you go blind?
- Are you safe with no risk? Or do you require draconian Active Directory [AD] administrator security rights which could open risk in my organization and fail my CSO audits?
- Are you log line and user level transaction flow based? Or do you rely on SNMP system alerting which can be chatty and delayed, does not provide guaranteed delivery, does not show actual individual and group user level performance, and does not include historical information over time?
- Do you include an integrated knowledgebase with detailed problem/resolution answers and integrated take action troubleshooting tools?
- Do you have the ability to configure WARNING trend alerts which are truly proactive or can you only configure up/down critical alerts?
- Do you have custom grouping capability so that you can monitor, manage and alert at different thresholds and SLAs based on any requirements such as VIP, west coast field sales and services, Asian operations, data center team, etc.?
- Do you have a performance database with an historical data warehouse that can show you real time data for every minute of the current day and archived data for months? To see performance data do you have to wait 24 hours?
- Do you have dedicated roles with screens, consoles, dashboards and reports purpose-built for BES admin, messaging teams, help desk (multiple levels), security/auditing teams, asset teams and procurement/telco/finance teams?
- Do you have a modular platform with core server and discrete modules for each task and role that can be cost-effectively added over time as needs change and grow?
The Bottom Line: If you don’t have a scalable, agentless centralized platform with modular approach that includes real-time correlated data collection from logs and infrastructure with embedded historical database, you cannot answer most of these questions. See how BoxTone's patented SmartMP has the right architecture for the enterprise!
More than 110 enterprises and agencies (including 40+ in the Fortune® 1000), encompassing more than 260,000 smartphone users, have deployed to BoxTone to manage, monitor and support their mission critical BlackBerry platforms, with proven results, including:
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30-40% Fewer Incidents in first 90 days |
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70-80% Faster Mean Time to Repair |
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70-80% Fewer Service Desk to IT Escalations |
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Verified Compliance Tracking for IT Policy & Activation/Deactivation/Wipe |
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Rich Asset Inventory, Lifecycle & Utilization details |
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Access to real-time performance, availability & capacity data to drive action |
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Better accommodate BlackBerry Smartphone user & application growth |
The secret is BoxTone’s plug-and-play modular platform built on the patented SmartMP™ technology core -- enabling IT operations, engineering, service desk, compliance, procurement/finance and management teams to address the most critical challenges no matter where their organization falls in the mobile maturity curve: pilot/VIP phase, departmental phase, or enterprise phase.
- “BoxTone acts like an expert system… it automatically interprets errors and provides suggested fixes.” -- BT British Telecom
- “We determined that BoxTone was the leader in the space & their product was most mature… We are now more confident than ever that we have a rock solid platform built for user & application growth.” -- Chesapeake Energy
Want to learn more about how the BoxTone solution compares to the new BlackBerry Monitoring Service software from RIM? Email BoxTone for the detailed white paper.
Ready to go? Then pick up the phone and call the BoxTone sales hotline at +1 410-910-3344, or email BoxTone—the expert in mobile user management—right now for a personal demonstration and price quotation.