White PapersSeven of the solutions support ITIL best practices processes (ITIL does not address Identity Management) and can help organizations in their ITIL implementations. What’s more, all eight BSM Routes to Value are tightly integrated at the data, process, and application levels.
The BSM Routes to Value are integrated at the data level through the BMC® AtriumTM Configuration Management Database (CMDB), which provides a single source of reference across all IT disciplines. It ensures that all processes are working from consistent and accurate data, and it provides the point of integration for all BSM Routes to Value, permitting the integration of the processes they support.
SOLUTION WHITE PAPERSOLUTION WHITE PAPERBMC Service Impact and Event Management:A Major Step in ITIL ImplementationUntitled DocumentTable of Contents EXECUTIVE SUMMARY .................................................................................................................1 ITIL OVERVIEW .............................................................................................................................2 HOW BMC CAN HELP IN ITIL IMPLEMENTATION .....................................................................2 Event Management ..................................................................................................................2 Service Impact Management ...................................................................................................3 Configuration Management Database .....................................................................................4 The Power of Integration ..........................................................................................................4 DEPLOYING SERVICE IMPACT AND EVENT MANAGEMENT ....................................................5 Directing Events .......................................................................................................................5 Creating the Service Impact Model .........................................................................................5 Keeping the Model Current ......................................................................................................6 EXTENDING THE VALUE ...............................................................................................................6 Incident and Problem Management .........................................................................................6 Change and Configuration Management .................................................................................6 Service Level Management ......................................................................................................6 CONCLUSIONS ..............................................................................................................................7Untitled DocumentPAG E > 1Executive SummaryThe IT Information Library (ITIL ) first developed in the 1980s by the Office of Government Commerce (OGC), a function of the British Government has become a de-facto standard for best practice processes in IT service management (ITSM). Many organizations are adopting ITIL as their framework for establishing ITSM best practice processes.Two objectives are fundamental to ITIL:> Alignment of IT with the business> Integration of ITSM processes across IT disciplinesMeeting the first objective requires IT to take a major step up in ITSM maturity, from managing boxes to managing business services. In other words, IT must manage the IT infrastructure from a business service perspective, making decisions and setting priorities based on business impact. This approach is called Business Service Management (BSM). Meeting the second objective requires that IT operate in a more integrated manner, eliminating much of the separation that now exists across the various IT disciplines.Many organizations that have adopted, or plan to adopt ITIL, are asking how BMC Software can help. This paper addresses that question. BMC offers eight BSM Routes to ValueTM solutions:> Asset Management and Discovery> Capacity Management and Provisioning> Change and Configuration Management> Identity Management> Incident and Problem Management> Infrastructure and Application Management> Service Impact and Event Management> Service Level ManagementSeven of the solutions support ITIL best practices processes (ITIL does not address Identity Management) and can help organizations in their ITIL implementations. What s more, all eight BSM Routes to Value are tightly integrated at the data, process, and application levels.The BSM Routes to Value are integrated at the data level through the BMC AtriumTM Configuration Management Database (CMDB), which provides a single source of reference across all IT disciplines. It ensures that all processes are working from consistent and accurate data, and it provides the point of integration for all BSM Routes to Value, permitting the integration of the processes they support.This paper discusses how the BMC Service Impact and Event Management Route to Value can help organizations take a major step in ITIL implementation. The paper:> Provides a brief overview of ITIL> Describes how BMC Service Impact and Event Management can help organizations meet the two fundamental objectives of ITIL processes> Describes the steps to BMC Service Impact and Event Management deployment> Discusses how BMC Service Impact and Event Management can work in concert with other BSM Routes to Value to further automate and integrate ITIL processesUntitled DocumentPAGE > 2ITIL OverviewITIL defines a framework of best practice processes. It consists of seven sets of processes, each of which covers a different IT area:> Service Support> Service Delivery> Planning to Implement Service Management> ICT Infrastructure Management> Applications Management> The Business Perspective> Security ManagementA major thrust of ITIL is to promote the alignment of IT with the business. ITIL, in fact, defines service quality as the level of alignment between the actual services delivered and the actual needs of the business.Although ITIL covers a number of areas, its main focus is on IT service management processes. It is concerned with delivering and supporting IT services that are appropriate to the business requirements of the organization. To that end, ITIL provides a comprehensive, consistent, and coherent set of best practices for ITSM and related processes, promoting a quality approach for achieving business effectiveness and efficiency in the use of information systems.ITIL divides ITSM processes into two areas:Service Support, consisting of:> Incident management> Problem management> Change management> Configuration management> Release management> Service desk functionService Delivery, consisting of:> Service level management> Capacity management> Availability management> Financial management for IT services> IT service continuity managementImplementing ITIL is by no means a trivial task. It requires organizations to address high complexity both in the IT infrastructure and in the ITIL processes required to manage the infrastructure. It also requires training of the people to follow these processes, roles, and responsibilities.The already high complexity of IT infrastructures is growing, as organizations implement multi-tier architectures, services- oriented architectures, and virtualization technologies. The Internet has further increased complexity, adding many more users both inside and outside the walls of the enterprise including employees, customers, and business partners.What s more, ITIL requires the establishment of processes in multiple ITSM disciplines and the integration of these processes across disciplines. In this exceedingly complex environment, manual processes are not viable. Organizations need to implement systems-based ITSM automation solutions.How BMC Can Help in ITIL ImplementationThis paper deals primarily with the BMC Service Impact and Event Management Route to Value, and describes how it can help organizations with their ITIL implementations. BMC Service Impact and Event Management integrates event processing automation with service impact management to provide a comprehensive and flexible solution for consolidating, enriching, and correlating events; for determining root-cause events; for determining the impact of events on business services; and for automating corrective action based on business rules and policies.BMC Service Impact and Event Management supports three primary functions:> Event Management> Service Impact Management> Configuration Management DatabaseThese functions are all inter-related, working together to consolidate and integrate event management across the enterprise, and to permit IT to respond to events based on business priorities and impact.Event ManagementBMC Event Manager enables IT to consolidate an organization s existing event management infrastructure to create an enterprisewide view that can span multiple event consoles scattered across multiple geographies. BMC Event Manager consolidates and processes raw events from across the enterprise IT infrastructure, filtering and correlating the data to deliver meaningful and actionable information to the IT staff. Because of its scalability, BMC Event Manager can handle the high volumes of events typical of large enterprises.Untitled DocumentFigure 1. BMC Event ManagerPropagateThresholdExecuteCorrelateAbstractNew UpdateTimersEventRepositoryRegulateFilterRefineContextualDataPAG E > 3As Figure 1 shows, BMC Event Manager has comprehensive functionality that includes:> Consolidation Provides a single, normalized, and filtered view of all events, including those from other event man-agement systems and from enterprise applications, to help increase the efficiency of the IT staff in managing events> Correlation Associates one or more events with a single cause to facilitate root cause analysis> Notification and escalation Informs the appropriate people of events that require action to drive timely response> Propagation Disseminates events to other event managers, gateways, or products, as determined by business rules, to help integrate ITSM processes> Enrichment Attaches descriptive information to events to facilitate incident resolution and root cause analysisWith BMC Event Manager, IT gains an enterprisewide view of the IT infrastructure, and can automate business and operational processing based on easy-to-specify event management policies.Service Impact ManagementBMC Service Impact Manager enables IT to create and maintain a service model that depicts the relationships and dependencies among physical and logical IT assets (servers, applications, databases), and the associations of these assets with user groups, business processes, and geographic locations. The model permits real-time determination of the impact of events on business services, enabling IT to take action based on business priority mandatory for aligning IT to the business.The model can include service policies, such as granting a service higher priority during critical usage periods. For example, a policy can give an accounting application higher priority during the end-of-month accounting period.BMC Service Impact Manager delivers role-specific views of the model that enable IT personnel to visualize and quickly determine the impact of events on the business services Untitled DocumentPAG E > 4and service level agreements that are defined in the model. (See Figure 2.)Configuration Management DatabaseThe BMC Atrium CMDB, built on a federated architecture, permits the creation of a single, logical data store that can reside on multiple data sources, eliminating the need for a monolithic repository. The data store maintains a catalog of all ITIL Configuration Items (CIs) in the infrastructure. It also includes an open API and enterprise integration capabilities that expose its functionality to other business processes and tools supporting the IT environment. The CMDB provides a high level of scalability, allowing it to be used by large enterprises.The BMC Discovery Solution populates the BMC Atrium CMDB with detailed information about the assets in the IT infrastructure, including their locations and configurations, their physical and logical dependencies and relationships, and information on the users who access them. The BMC Atrium CMDB can also accept input from a variety of other discovery tools and automatically reconcile this information to ensure data accuracy. It provides data integrity verification through such mechanisms as authorization checks, name consistency, and mandatory fields.BMC Service Impact Manager uses the BMC Atrium CMDB as an asset and configuration data source to instrument the creation and maintenance of models.The Power of IntegrationBMC Event Manager works in concert with BMC Service Impact Manager to permit Event management based on business priority and impact. Used in concert with Service Impact manager, BMC Event Manager provides an integrated view of all events, as well as their relationships to the applications and business processes that rely on them. It allows to understand how events within the infrastructure impact the business as well as to find the root cause of business service outages.The BMC Service Impact and Event Management Route to Value helps integrate processes across IT disciplines. For example, the solution can integrate IT operations processes with support processes. When it receives a potential problem event, BMC Service Impact Manager automatically creates an intelligent incident ticket and forwards it to the help desk system. The Figure 2. BMC Service Impact Manager ViewUntitled DocumentPAG E > 5ticket includes rich supporting information that not only helps speed incident resolution, but also permits the help desk to respond based on business priority. This capability helps IT meet two of the fundamental objectives of ITIL: process integration and alignment of IT with the business.Deploying Service Impact and Event ManagementImplementing the BMC Service Impact and Event Management Route to Value is a relatively straightforward process that involves three tasks:> Directing events to BMC Event Manager> Creating a service impact model in BMC Service Impact Manager> Keeping the model currentDirecting EventsFirst, the IT staff must direct events to BMC Event Manager from event sources, such as infrastructure monitoring tools, event management tools, and applications. The IT staff can either direct events to BMC Event Manager from each source individually, or simply point existing event consoles to BMC Event Manager.Creating the Service Impact ModelThe BMC Discovery Solution can do much of the heavy lifting in helping the IT staff create the service impact model. It can automatically discover the assets in the IT infrastructure, as well as their physical interrelationships. It can also discover the logical topology of the assets, such as which assets support which applications. The discovery solutions populate this data as CIs in the BMC Atrium CMDB.The IT staff builds the service impact model in BMC Service Impact Manager using the Service Model editor, a graphical editor that operates on the CI information in the CMDB. The editor permits the IT staff to display and edit the CIs to create higher order process models and associate them with users. (See Figure 3.) The editor includes templates that simplify and speed model creation.Figure 3. Service Model EditorUntitled DocumentPAG E > 6Keeping the Model CurrentOnce the model is created, it is essential to keep it current throughout change to the IT infrastructure. Here s another area where the BMC Discovery Solution can help. The solution can scan the infrastructure on a periodic basis and forward the information to the BMC Atrium CMDB. Then, using its automatic reconciliation capabilities, the CMDB can compare the results of the scan with the information currently stored in the model and notify the IT staff of any differences. The IT staff can update the model accordingly. Eventually, the IT staff can establish reconciliation rules that permit the CMDB to automatically update the model when discrepancies are discovered.The IT staff can provide further assurance that the model is kept current by including in the change processes (defined in BMC Change and Configuration Management) a mandatory requirement to update the service impact model each time a change is made to the infrastructure. This would prevent the change from being cleared until the service impact model is updated.Extending the ValueBMC Service Impact and Event Management can work in concert with the other BSM Routes to Value to further support the implementation of ITIL processes in both the Service Support and Service Delivery areas. Here are a few examples.Incident and Problem ManagementThe primary goal for the incident management process, as defined in the ITIL publication Service Support, is to restore normal service operation as quickly as possible and minimize the adverse impact on business operations, thus ensuring that the best possible levels of service quality and availability are maintained. 1 The primary goal for the problem management process, as defined in the same ITIL publication, is to minimize the adverse impact of Incidents and Problems on the business that are caused by errors within the IT Infrastructure, and to prevent recurrence of Incidents related to these errors. Service Impact and Event Management can work in concert with BMC Incident and Problem Management to help IT achieve both goals. By submitting intelligent tickets that include rich supporting CI and asset information as well as business service impact, the BMC event manager enables the help desk staff to:> Address incidents and problems based on business priority rather than on problem severity alone> Speed incident resolution and head off problems before they result in outages and user disruption> Communicate proactively with affected business usersChange and Configuration ManagementThe primary goal for the change management process, as defined in the ITIL publication Service Support, is to ensure that standardized methods and procedures are used for efficient and prompt handling of all Changes, in order to minimize the impact of Change-related Incidents upon service quality, and consequently to improve the day-to-day operations of the organization. 2 BMC Service Impact and Event Management can work in concert with BMC Change and Configuration Management to help IT meet that goal.The change management staff can interrogate the service impact model maintained in the BMC Atrium CMDB to determine the business impact of planned changes. For example, in planning an update to a database server, the change management staff sees that the server supports a financial application that is used for end-of-month accounting and must be available the last three days of each month. The staff can plan to execute the change around that schedule to eliminate, or at least minimize, disruption to the business. The staff can also move proactively to notify affected business users in advance of the change.Service Level ManagementThe goal for the service level management process as defined in the ITIL publication Service Delivery is to maintain and improve IT Service quality, through a constant cycle of agreeing, monitoring and reporting upon IT Service achievements and instigation of actions to eradicate poor service in line with business or Cost justification. 3 BMC Service Impact and Event Management can work in concert with BMC Service Level Management to help IT meet that goal.The service level management team can use the service impact model to establish availability and performance levels for business services rather than merely establishing them for individual IT infrastructure components. For example, the team can establish the required service levels for an order entry transaction, rather than for the individual components (application server, database server, network switch) that, in combination, deliver the service. BMC Service Level Management can then monitor the availability and performance levels of the transaction, and automatically generate an alarm when the levels exceed preset thresholds. The capability to establish and monitor service delivery levels from the business perspective helps drive closer alignment between IT and the business.Untitled DocumentPAG E > 7ConclusionsITIL is rapidly becoming a de facto standard for best practice ITSM processes. Because of the complexity of today s IT infrastructures and of the ITIL process framework itself, implementing ITIL is by no means a simple procedure. The resulting benefits, however, are well worth the effort, and include improved service delivery, lower cost, and perhaps most important, close alignment of IT with the business.To leverage the full benefit of ITIL implementation requires systems-based IT service management solutions that not only automate and integrate ITIL processes, but also operate based on business impact and priorities. The BMC Service Impact and Event Management Route to Value meets these requirements and helps organizations take a major step in their ITIL implementation. What s more, this comprehensive solution can operate in concert with other BSM Routes to Value to integrate ITSM processes across disciplines. The result? IT can move up the ladder of ITSM maturity, transitioning from managing boxes to managing from the perspective of the business. And that elevates the role of IT to a major contributor of business value.Footnotes1 Best Practices Service Support, Office of Government Commerce (OGC), 11th impression 20052 ibid3 Best Practices Service Delivery, Office of Government Commerce (OGC), 9th impression 2005Untitled DocumentAbout BMC SoftwareBMC Software helps IT organizations drive greater business value through better management of technology. Our industry-leading Business Service Management solutions ensure that everything IT does is prioritized according to business impact, so IT can proactively address business requirements to lower costs, drive revenue, and mitigate risk. BMC solutions share BMC AtriumTM technologies to enable IT to manage across the complexity of diverse systems and processes from mainframe to distributed, databases to applications, service to security. Founded in 1980, BMC Software has offices worldwide and fiscal 2005 revenues of more than 1.46 billion. BMC Software. Activate your business with the power of IT. For more information, visit www.bmc.com.BMC Software, the BMC Software logos and all other BMC Software product or service names are registered trademarks or trademarks of BMC Software, Inc. All other registered trademarks or trademarks belong to their respective companies. 2006 BMC Software, Inc. All rights reserved. 61429*61429*
