The 9th of August 2019 was the day after Interchange Unplugged in Melbourne and I dragged myself down to the breakfast with the rest of the Ivanti team. The date was also significant as it marked my 20th year with Ivanti. I was in desperate need of coffee after a night of celebrations.

The question I constantly get asked is, why the same company for twenty years? The answer is simple – we have great products, a strong and growing organisation the great people I work with, and I enjoy what I do, which is helping customers with their business needs. I can honestly say, Ivanti customers are some of the most passionate people that I have ever come across. So Ivanti’s customer event, Interchange Unplugged, is something I look forward to every year.

Interchange Unplugged 

We ran Interchange Unplugged in Sydney and Melbourne a few weeks ago and I got to meet with a lot of customers and prospects. There were a lot of familiar faces in the crowd, some that have been with us for around 20 years. That really says a lot about the trust they have in Ivanti, our products and our direction.

One thing I really enjoy about my role is learning how customers have used the Ivanti Service Manager (ISM) platform to help them with their business. I have honestly seen some amazing things over the years and some not so amazing. I remember a customer many years ago that had configured their forms with a fluorescent green background. I’m quite certain it got changed after their administrator left.

Reporting Challenge

In the Sydney session, we heard how Xtraction helped a customer with their reporting challenge. I know every organisation depends on reports to analyse their performance, identify trends and bottlenecks. This particular customer used to spend days crunching data, exporting data or copying and pasting between ISM and excel spreadsheets to generate management and service desk performance reports. When I spoke to them a few months ago about this issue and understood that they wanted to combine information from multiple objects, my immediate thought was Xtraction. To compound the issue, most of the reports had to be replicated for each support group, product line and customer.

For those that haven’t heard about Xtraction, it is the Business Intelligence dashboard reporting solution that is bundled as a value add with all Ivanti solutions, including Ivanti Service Manager. As an Ivanti Customer, you are entitled to two users of this powerful and easy to use reporting tool. For ISM Cloud customers, you will need to access the ISM database through a “BI Server”, which is a replicated database as accessing the production database directly is a security risk.

This customer can now generate Service Level Agreement (SLA) trending reports and even drill down into the months where they didn't meet their SLA targets and subsequently open up the Incidents that caused the breach. Best of all, the customer is now building reports themselves and have expanded the use to other parts of the organization.

Gamification to Drive Service Level Improvement

In the Melbourne conference, I met another passionate ISM customer and once again, it was Xtraction that was the hero. Their aim was to improve the SLA performance and by having Xtraction dashboards on monitors across the IT department, the IT teams could easily see the current status and whether they were about to breach their team's SLA. Yes, it is gamification and it works. It appeals to the competitive nature in us and we don't want to be the team with red dashboards.

The question I commonly get is how is Xtraction different from the reporting tools within the ISM platform? In terms of dashboard reporting functions, there are the Service Manager Dashboards and the Analytic Metrics. The Service Manager Dashboards and Analytic Metrics are also easy to use and can help you quickly generate dashboard reports. The main difference is that Xtraction can consolidate data from multiple business objects into a single dashboard. And the most common business objects that customers want to consolidate are Incidents and Service Requests to display the total volume of tickets logged with the service desk.

For those of you that use Ivanti Voice, the call management solution, you can also use Xtraction to report on your Ivanti Voice statistics. One of the most common challenge at the service desk is validating that all calls are logged and responded to. Xtraction allows you to consolidate data from both Ivanti Voice and Service Manager to ensure the number of inbound calls matches the number of Incidents or Requests logged.

Let Us Know

If you have similar stories to share or finding it a challenge to report off any of the Ivanti solutions, please reach out to us. We would love to hear from you and help you with your service management journey toward Unified IT.

Download It

If you are an Ivanti customer, please take advantage of this great solution as it is your entitlement for partnering with Ivanti. Xtraction has more than 50 predefined connectors for Ivanti products as well as non-Ivanti products, such as Microsoft, BMC, ServiceNow and more. You can download it from the Ivanti Community site or reach out to us for further information.