The GBS Group is a Systems Integrator for wireless communications, equipment health monitoring, vehicle tracking and on-time performance, customer information systems and IoT technologies with complete solutions for connectivity, displays, announcing systems, hardware, and application deployments. We also offer an Operational Support System (OSS) for each of these services above that provides 24/7 computer-based system monitoring and reporting, telephone support, and email support. The OSS is staffed by trained and experienced personnel that we categorize into three levels: Tier1, Tier2, and Tier3.
Tier 1
Tier 1 personnel staff the Help Desk to provide monitoring, initial troubleshooting, ticket escalation, and routine reporting. They also conduct non-service affecting routine maintenance, customer support, report updates, technician dispatch, and the execution of daily continuous watch procedures to detect any errant devices. Tier 1 personnel troubleshoot devices based on checklists and procedures, provide routine maintenance and management, answer incoming calls, and escalate issues based on SLA requirements. The checklists and procedures are found both in a printed manual at the technician’s desk and online in the document management system for access when in the field. When issues are reported to the Help Desk, a ticket is automatically created, and the technician begins to respond. The response and actions taken are based on the severity of the issue.
Tier 2
Tier 2 personnel provide supervision and direct management of Tier 1 personnel, implement all potential service impacting maintenance, analysis of incident and problem trends to drive preventative maintenance procedures, provide 3rd party software maintenance support, services, security plan management, customer liaison, adherence to the system architecture, commissioning of new software releases, routine/specialized processes/procedures and issue resolution and on demand maintenance.
As a part of Tier 2 responsibility, the Tier 2 personnel will be using custom queries, regular and custom reports, and system knowledge to continuously drive demand-based issues and experiences towards preventative maintenance plans. These plans will then be part of Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 regular, routine tasks.
Tier 3
Tier 3 personnel consist of senior level subject matter experts, developers and engineers that can resolve issues requiring expert level technical capabilities. The primary focus for Tier 3 personnel is to provide:
- Field Services (Demand and Planned/Preventive Maintenance)
- Equipment Management (including spares inventory, warranty and equipment return)
Tier 3 personnel are on call 24/7 for remote support, provide onsite field services during regular business hours, problem diagnostics, and high-level technical assistance (engineers, technicians, or developers) as required by Tier 2.
Tracking & Reporting
All activities related to monitoring and managing the health of the system are tracked and reported on by the OSS tool suite: Manage Engine Service Desk Plus and Nagios. Manage Engine Service Desk Plus has extensive pre-configured reporting and ad hoc reporting capability and is used to report on ticket activities, and asset activities including Warranty and RMA.
Processes and Procedures
The processes and procedures for providing services are documented in the OSS document repository.
- 24×7 Monitoring – defines process for monitoring all on board equipment and hosted equipment in the backend. Daily procedures include System Monitoring, Ticket Review, Hourly and Shift Change tasks
- Issue/ticket tracking and management – defines both manual and automated ticket creation, and ticket escalation
- Help Desk – a 24×7 call center for customer support and issue reporting
Network Management
GBS utilizes Nagios as our IT infrastructure monitoring and alerting solution. This solution is located within the Amazon Cloud and has an availability of 99.997%. The Nagios features include:
- Comprehensive IT Infrastructure Monitoring – provides monitoring of all mission critical infrastructure components — including applications, services, operating systems, network protocols, systems metrics, physical and network infrastructure.
- Performance – the Nagios monitoring engine provides monitoring services; high efficiency worker processes allow for scalability and monitoring effectiveness.
- Visibility – provides a central view of complete network and business processes; dashboards provide at-a-glance access to monitoring information; user defined view functionality provides users with quick access to required/useful information; a powerful GUI provides for customization of layout, design, and preferences on a per-user basis, giving customers and team members full flexibility.
- Awareness – alerts are classified and sent to OSS staff, business stakeholders, and end users email and/or mobile text messages, based upon business rules designed to assure that the messages received are relevant to the individual, providing them with operational constraints as they may occur.
- Proactive Planning – automated, integrated trending and capacity planning graphs allow users to realize process changes and to make infrastructure modifications before growth and usage cause’s unwanted surprises.