Managed IT services

Once any business-critical system is deployed and customers start using it, this system must be maintained and supported. The main focus is to ensure that the system continues to perform as per the specification. First part of the service “Support” focus on service availability with key principles of redundancy, seamless recovery from failures, minimization of time to repair and fault prediction and avoidance.

Second part of service “maintenance” is more focused on continuous updates of OS, frameworks, libraries (which is prerequisite for service availability) as well as adding additional features or triaging low priority “bugs” that don't deteriorate the software design and user experience.

Our company has expertise in providing all three support levels. Our 1^st level support is ready to provide you with a professional service desk with e-mail or on-call support. In the 2^nd level support for instance we deal with setup and management of all needed environments (dev, test, acceptance, production) and infrastructure of the client, which could be either on-premise or in third party data center. A 3rd level support takes care ofresolving any bugs or other types of issues coming from the customer or the monitoring service.

We do not implement just a monitoring, but we build proactive monitoring systems capable to warn you before your clients notice something is wrong. We also become responsible for emergency backup plans and we support the deployment of your new releases. Our SLA (service-level agreement) including reaction times is individual for each customer based on the specific needs.  All agreed KPIs (key performance indicators) are tracked by our service desk management tool and we provide you with monthly reporting.

Our company also offers infrastructure support in popular clouds Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS). On top of the implementation and maintenance of the cloud infrastructure, we can help you with the automation of processes. This could be achieved by Infrastructure as a code with Terraform or support of configuration management where we use Ansible.

Support & maintenance

Once any business-critical system is deployed and customers start using it, this system must be maintained and supported in order to stay updated and perform as per the specification. xitee provides application support and maintenance services to relieve organizations from these non-core business activities.

We have expertise in providing support on all levels:

• Professional service desk (1^st level support) with e-mail or on-call support, our team is provided with service management tools to track and report KPIs.
• 2^nd level support: environmental issues, conducting deployments, monitoring, patch management of the operating system and 3^rd party applications.
• 3^rd level support: resolving any bugs or other types of issues coming from the customer or the monitoring service. Part of the 3rd level support is also application framework & libraries upgrade.
• Enhancement of software with new software versions. We offer continuous development of new features & deployment of new software versions.
• Backup & emergency plans with regular checks.

Our service hours as well as other parts of the service-level agreement (SLA) including reaction and solution times are individual for each customer based on their specific needs.  All agreed KPIs (key performance indicators) are tracked by our service desk management tool and we provide you with monthly reporting.

Together with our partner HBSN AG, we can offer you a full cycle of support/maintenance and monitoring services based on your specific needs and preferences.

Active monitoring

The goal of active monitoring is to ensure that your system is available and performing to the level expected and required to maintain your business. It is especially beneficial for the systems which are integrated with numerous other 3rd party systems.

We do not implement just monitoring, but we build proactive capabilities to warn you before your clients notice something is wrong. The system is also capable to fix issues by itself and minimize impact to all levels of your infrastructure.

Our primary monitoring choice is Zabbix, a professional open-source monitoring system. In our service we provide you with:

• Monitoring networks, servers, applications, and services
• Inventory of all monitored components
• Escalation procedures
• Real-time dashboards
• Alerting to various channels
• Automated remote commands for problem resolution
• Trends and predictions 

Cloud infrastructure support

The cloud computing model has changed the way that many companies manage their systems and resources. They could pay to rent infrastructure from 3^rd party service providers instead of building their own data centers. The leading cloud vendors provide even more advantages than typical 3^rd party datacenter. They moved to next level of cloud computing (PaaS vs IaaS), which leads to many new advantages such as ease of short time of infrastructure setup, contracts flexibility (billing in minutes, no long term contracts are needed), automatic updates,  scalability and many others..

xitee offers services of cloud infrastructure support which basically consists of a cloud setup, configuration, monitoring, and optimization of the components of cloud infrastructure. We specialize in a migration of on-premise services to the cloud. Our expertise lies in the two most popular cloud platforms: Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure.

List of our most common activities:

• AWS & Azure account management (security, billing, access)
• Network infrastructure support (setup and configuration)
• Implementation, maintenance & monitoring of infrastructure
• Migrating Hyper-V or VMware to AWS or Azure
• SQL database servers’ migration from on-premise to AWS or Azure

Automation, configuration, orchestration

Infrastructure automation is the key to reliable and efficient processes. Automation of processes that have multiple manual steps and they are mission critical become a must in modern times. Automating of IT infrastructure helps to maximize productivity and therefore decrease our effort and development costs. Our primary solution Terraform has following main capabilities:

• Automation of almost all infrastructure is possible
• Support for AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle Cloud, VMware Cloud, Openstack, etc.
• Infrastructure versioning
• Keeping the defined status
• It is open-source and no license is needed
• Perfectly fits to our pool of DevOps tools

Configuration deals with the technical and administrative activities concerned with the creation, maintenance, controlled change and quality control of the scope of work.

The goal is to ensure that the configuration of system resources, computer systems, servers and other assets are known, good and trusted. Configuration management involves a high degree of automation to achieve these goals. Therefore we use the tool Ansible as an automation engine which has following capabilities:

• Optimization of IT staff activities through automation reduced IT staff time spent “keeping the lights on”, freeing up valuable staff resources for business-related initiatives.
• Reduction of a downtime caused by system outages, cyber-attacks, security intrusions, and change and configuration activities.
• Optimization of IT operations reduces costs in multiple areas, including infrastructure, outsourced services and management software.
• Ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time.
• Configuration versioning to keep the track of all changes for easy updates and rollbacks.

Orchestration is a way of arranging your application portfolio to service-oriented architecture (SOA) and achieving that your infrastructure is dynamic, easily scalable and cost-efficient.

We help our customers to analyze and prepare a plan for the transition from a monolithic application world to microservices. We design the infrastructure and systems for an easy development and fast deployment while keeping costs as low as possible.

To achieve these goals, most of the processes are automated as much as possible so there are minimal requirements for the operations team. We rely on the famous platform in the docker world – Kubernetes which comes with following capabilities:

• Service discovery and load balancing
• Secret and configuration management
• Storage orchestration
• Horizontal scaling
• Automated rollouts and rollbacks
• Self-healing