 |
|
How are your devices performing? How are customers using them? Can your staff
solve problems before they become crises? Are your customers locked in or open
to other vendors? Do these questions make you nervous? They should if you don’t have
good answers.
In an era of ever-increasing competition, a device manufacturer’s service organization
can be the key differentiator that drives customer loyalty and profits. The challenge, of
course, is to deliver high-value, margin-rich services to an increasing percentage of
your customer base while keeping tight control of service operations costs. But you
can’t do either unless you can connect to your deployed devices and develop a reliable,
actionable source of performance data.
Questra SmartMonitor™ helps solve these problems by monitoring, generating alerts,
and executing diagnostics on devices deployed at customer sites via a secure Internet
connection. Ideally suited to geographically dispersed devices running critical business
processes, Questra SmartMonitor gives your service personnel a host of customizable
capabilities: monitoring, diagnostics, usage tracking, business rules to drive alerts and
actions, and device performance views. With a system of record for device performance
and actionable information, your organization now has the means to optimize service
operations, proactively address customer problems, and develop new product features
and service offerings that capture your customer’s loyalties.
Questra SmartMonitor can be deployed as a standalone solution or in conjunction with
Questra TotalAccess™ and Questra SoftwareDirector™. Questra SmartMonitor can also
connect to your enterprise applications, creating an end-to-end solution that maximizes
the potential of existing software investments.
Questra IDM Application Suite™
Monitoring. Questra SmartMonitor is designed to interface
with existing device performance data stored in log files and
databases or elsewhere. When combined with business rules
and scheduling, support exists for:
- Configurable polling intervals for specific device
performance data
- Alerts based on thresholds or data values
- Defined alarm conditions and alert procedures
- Configurable actions for each type of alert
Diagnostics. Questra SmartMonitor executes commands to
run diagnostics remotely and return results to the server,
thus leveraging existing investments in on-board diagnostics
for troubleshooting and problem resolution.
Usage tracking. Questra SmartMonitor can be customized
to report on device performance data or conditions that
measure equipment usage, such as hours of operation and
number of tests or cycles completed. Your organization can
then use this data to develop new revenue models, such as
usage-based rentals, usage-based warranties, or automated
consumables tracking and reordering.
Business rules. With Questra SmartMonitor, service organizations
can configure business rules for easier manageability
of real-time device data.
- Filter data based on criteria (e.g., equipment performance
thresholds, attributes, values, data source, location)
before generating alerts
- Reduce network traffic and amount of data to be stored
by allowing only meaningful data through
Device management by group or component. Questra
SmartMonitor consolidates views of customer devices to
simplify administration.
- Dynamically sort devices by device type, location,
customer site, or customized criteria; devices can belong
to more than one group
- Perform commands or run reports against devices, a
group of devices, or multiple groups of devices.
Manage each group by applying optimal monitoring,
usage, and fault rules for devices in the group
- Represent and manage a single device, or as a collection
of components (each defined and managed separately)
Security that meets industry standards. Questra
SmartMonitor sets up a SecureLink™ connection between
devices on a customer’s network and the IDM server on
your network using strong, industry-standard Internet
security technology. It requires no modification of network
security policies and causes no security breach on your
customer’s network.
- Communication initiated from behind customer firewall
- Connections made to manufacturer IP address only
- Communication encrypted using SSL with bi-directional
certificate authentication
- VPNs and dial-up connections not required
Rich Internet Application (RIA) user interface. Questra
SmartMonitor leverages RIA technologies to offer a user
interface that combines the ease-of-use of a desktop application
with the manageability and deployment convenience of
a web-based application. RIA ensures smooth navigation
between support tasks—from responding to alerts to remote
troubleshooting—for greater service operations productivity.
Scalable, high-performance architecture. Questra’s IDM
solution architecture is designed for scalability, reliability,
and ease of deployment to support large device populations.
Optimized, high-performance features ensure best use of
hardware and network resources.
- Support for server clustering eliminates single points of
failure and increases reliability
- Support for hardware-based load balancing enhances
performance
Integration with Questra IDM Application Suite. Questra
SmartMonitor is integrated with the Questra IDM Application
Suite, and thus shares all relevant features available to the
entire suite.
OPERATING SYSTEM
Questra SmartMonitor Server: Windows and Unix
Questra Service Agent: Supports common versions of Windows, Solaris,
and Linux; has been ported to platforms like VxWorks and HP-UX VMS
WEB SERVER: Microsoft IIS, Sun ONE Web Server, Apache
DATABASE: Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server
|
|
 |
 |
|
Intelligent Device
Management (IDM) is the
proactive management of
remote devices in real time
over the Internet. With IDM,
device manufacturers can
transform their service
operations from reactive to
proactive, reducing costs
and delivering high-value
remote services that drive
customer loyalty, increase
profitability, and change
customer relationships. |
|
|
|
|
|
