The eG Monitor for Micros OPERA
The hospitality sector is experiencing a major shift in the way day-to-day operations are being run. IT applications and infrastructures are being put in place to streamline operations and customer self-service mechanisms are being introduced to further reduce costs and improve efficiency. The OPERA Enterprise Solution from Micros, Inc. is one of the core components of many hotel infrastructures. This Property Managment System (PMS) offers an integrated suite of products for a hotel property’s operation including Centralized Reservations and Customer Relationship Management packages specifically designed for the hotel industry. In addition to maintaining seamless coordination with the reservations system, the PMS also monitors and collects information from other revenue generating sources of the property - including the telephone systems, point of sale information from customer charges at restaurants, lounges, gift shops, etc, broadband rental, in-room courtesy bars, movie rentals, housekeeping charges and more. The successful operation of this system is critical as this system handles inventory management, allocation of charges on the final bill to customers, and guarantees the availability of rooms reserved through the worldwide reservation systems. Ensuring the availability and optimal performance of this system is the most important task of the IT staff of any hotel chain.
The importance that hotels must place on managing their IT infrastructure services proactively is highlighted by a recent industry survey which estimates that downtime of a customer service application like Micros Opera can have a material impact of over $3000 per minute. The heterogenous, multi-vendor, multi-tier, distributed nature of hotel IT infrastructures makes real-time monitoring and triage of problems a challenge.
The eG Enterprise Suite
eG Enterprise offers a proactive, real-time monitoring, reporting, and diagnostic solution for hotels. In a typical deployment, a central monitoring system is used by all the properties of a hotel chain. Lightweight eG agents deployed on the critical servers in the different properties report to the central monitoring system. IT staff from the different locations can login and view the real-time status of the critical servers and applications in their locations, and receive proactive alerts over email, SMS, pager, etc., so as to enable them to notice and resolve problems well before they begin to impact the day-to-day business operation. The ability to amortize the monitoring cost across multiple hotel properties, and the immediate benefit/relief that it offers to IT managers of the hotel chains ensures that the eG Enterprise suite offers excellent return on investment.
Centralized monitoring and reporting of Micros OPERA and other
IT infrastructure services
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What the eG Micros Opera Monitor Provides for Hotels
- A centralized console that provides unparalleled visibility into the performance of core applications that drive the key IT infrastructure services; allows 24*7 monitoring from any where, at any time, using just a web browser;
- Integrated monitoring of the performance of Micros OPERA solution and other components of the hotel IT infrastructure, including billing and inventory management applications, network and telecommunications equipment, etc;
- Customized monitoring for the entire Micros OPERA Enterprise solution, including the embedded web server, application server, and database tiers; In-depth models for the different applications facilitate problem demarcation and enable rapid troubleshooting;
- Emulation of user access to the critical hospitality services to assess the availability and response times for these services in real-time; Correlation across each step of the user access (e.g., login, search for a specific guest, modify the reservation, logout) to identify which step(s) could be causing the slow-down/failure;
- Real-time alerts as and when problems are detected, together with in-depth diagnosis highlighting where the problem areas in the IT infrastructure are (e.g., network? terminal server? firewall? database? application?);
- Reports on service levels and trends for bottleneck analysis and capacity planning;
Topology of the Micros OPERA service with clear demarcation of the
problem area (the Oracle database)
Real-time emulation of user transactions to pin-point service
availability/slow-down problems
Questions that the eG Micros Opera Monitor Answers
- Are the critical business services (Micros Opera and others) available and performing well?
- Are the application processes running at all times? What is their resource (CPU, memory, disk) usage?
- Are the servers that host the business services adequately sized?
- Are there any network-related problems - congestion, collisions, CRC errors, etc.?
- Are the database servers properly tuned? Are there many rollbacks locking activities? deadlocks? latch waits?, etc.
- Is there any unusual activity on the network or servers?
- And many many more...
How Hotels can Benefit from the eG Micros Opera Monitor?
- Ensure business continuity through proactive monitoring and maintenance of key IT infrastructure services;
- Increase revenues by reducing downtime and mean time to repair;
- Enhance customer satisfaction through early detection and resolution of problems;
- Optimize investment in existing software and hardware through effective capacity planning and load balancing;
- Streamline IT operations for efficient performance;
- Maintain customer loyalty by avoiding reservation errors and providing prompt and correct final checkout information;
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