Service management solutions White paper Integrate systems management and predictive intelligence with IBM Service Management solutions. September 2007
2 Contents 2 Overview 3 Recognize the importance of bridging the visibility gap 4 Understand the key benefits of IBM Service Management 5 Help improve prediction with integrated systems management 5 Help streamline operations with crossdomain consolidation, correlation and visualization 8 Gain deep visibility with integrated service dependency discovery and change reporting 9 Prioritize response with servicecontextual management 10 Address end-to-end coverage with a broad range of domain-specific management offerings 14 Assess, plan and deploy with IBM services 14 Summary 15 For more information 15 About IBM solutions for enabling IT governance and risk management Overview IBM Service Management solutions can help organizations achieve business objectives with comprehensive visibility, control and automation across the entire IT service life cycle. Integrated systems management is an integral part of IBM Service Management, helping organizations align business to IT, monitor critical infrastructure components, gain visibility into the health of services, reduce IT operational costs and preserve revenue from business services. IBM offers various solutions for integrated systems management that range from powerful monitoring tools to business service management to consulting and implementation services. Backed by IBM Service Management solutions for next-generation systems management, IT operations can bridge silos and streamline processes by helping improve predictive visibility into future service health and performance. This predictive visibility helps to improve service uptime and quality, reduce costs and align IT with services for more effective delivery, all according to operational and business objectives.
Highlights Recognize the importance of bridging the visibility gap Unfortunately, delivering on the goal of integrated, end-to-end systems management remains a challenge for many organizations. While many are looking to transform traditional silo-centric management to servicecentric management, environments are often highly complex, with limited integration across the broad mix of point management tools already in place. Meanwhile, service architectures are in a constant state of change brought on by the adoption of next-generation technologies and continued mergers and acquisitions, creating additional integration and management challenges for operations personnel. The lack of integrated end-to-end management results in a visibility gap which can impact an organization s ability to manage against operational and business objectives Whatever the situation, the lack of integrated end-to-end management results in a visibility gap which can impact an organization s ability to manage against operational and business objectives. Operations teams often need a common means of managing across domains while looking at information technology in the context of the business services and processes they support. Lines of business increasingly expect operations organizations to provide service level guarantees and visibility into key performance indicators (KPIs) in targeted views. Optimally, operational and business audiences have the contextual intelligence needed for effective decision making. However, achieving this state is often the next big challenge for an operations staff.
Understand the key benefits of IBM Service Management Today s organizations desire access to real-time, predictive, contextual information dispersed across a broader range of sources than ever before if they are to help deliver against service level agreements (SLAs) and other requirements across complex service infrastructures. IBM Service Management solutions are designed to address this challenge by supporting enhanced visibility, control and automation across the entire IT service life cycle. As a result, IBM Service Management can help organizations: Visualize the health of services and supporting infrastructure. Leverage best practices across the service life cycle. Avert potential application and service quality issues before deployment. Anticipate developing problems and plan for future service requirements. Rapidly diagnose and resolve unanticipated service problems.
Help improve prediction with integrated systems management To fully deliver on the benefits of IBM Service Management, IBM has developed modular, flexible solutions that help organizations with prediction the ability to gain better insight into the health of services through proactive service-impact analysis, root-cause analysis and performance trending. This ability helps organizations to isolate issues before they affect services and also to identify service trends for the prioritized investment and deployment of supporting IT resources. Prediction is supported by integrated IBM systems management capabilities that provide intelligent, contextual visualization delivered in operational, business and service views. By bringing together people, processes, technology and information, integrated systems management can help organizations: Align business to IT in a controlled, strategic manner. Better leverage investments in existing tools and service infrastructure. Gain deep visibility into service availability, performance and integrity. Reduce IT operational costs based on consolidation and improved efficiencies. Prevent loss of revenue through proactive management of service issues. Help streamline operations with cross-domain consolidation, correlation and visualization As organizations evolve from silo-centric to service-centric operations, they increasingly require a common manager of managers or single pane of glass that integrates various monitoring tools across management domains and
(IBM Tivoli) Netcool is widely used as a manager of managers because it is capable of integrating and consolidating data from a broad range of third-party management products that are already deployed. Gartner Magic Quadrant operations centers, including data centers, network operations centers (NOCs), security operations centers (SOCs) and other areas. IBM offers consolidated operations management solutions that leverage existing investments in IBM and third-party management tools for a broad variety of domains. IBM solutions offer hundreds of out-of-the-box integrations with tools such as BMC Patrol, HP OpenView, CA Unicenter and many others. Integrations are also available for help-desk systems, operational support systems (OSSs), configuration management databases (CMDBs), inventory systems, customer relationship management (CRM), event buses and many more which can provide seamless, cost-effective interoperability and improved return on those investments. IBM consolidated operations management solutions provide cross-domain integration and visibility in a single, effective interface. Operations staff can proactively manage the availability, performance and integrity of the entire service infrastructure via targeted, contextual views.
7 A customizable, Web-based interface allows organizations to integrate, visualize and report end-to-end event and performance metrics across IBM Tivoli and third-party management tools. Through the Tivoli common portal, events are automatically collected, consolidated, correlated and visualized enabling the display of real-time and historical metrics in context and speeding the resolution of service infrastructure problems. This central point of management allows IT operations to proactively monitor and optimize the availability, performance and integrity of the entire service infrastructure across transaction, application, system, network, mainframe, storage and security domains. Furthermore, an IBM manager-of-managers solution can store, analyze and visualize any event information collected through integration with third-party sources. This capability can reduce the complexity normally associated with managing across operational domains, tools and roles. Organizations can also implement a follow-the-sun management approach that includes a global management console used by staff at any location around the world, making more effective use of available resources.
Gain deep visibility with integrated service dependency discovery and change reporting For many organizations, change is often the primary cause of unexpected application and service problems. Right-click access from a single-paneof-glass view provides detailed information on what has changed in the application infrastructure helping IT operations to pinpoint whether the problem is related to a change in the environment, a newly deployed application, a new server or a configuration change to an existing resource. Integrated application discovery and dependency mapping can provide visibility into application and supporting service infrastructure complexity by automatically creating and maintaining application dependency maps. Organizations can gain a clear, holistic view of interdependencies among applications, computer systems, network devices and more. This view can be used to determine where there are gaps in monitoring, to identify recent changes in application and infrastructure configuration, as well as to help IT operations better anticipate the impact of provisioning changes prior to deployment. Your benefits with IBM business service management solutions For lines of business For operations Gain real-time visibility into business Prioritize response according to performance indicators business impact Understand the true customer experience Identify bottlenecks in business processes Ensure SLA guarantees are being met Plan investments according to business priorities Improve delivery against SLAs Pinpoint service root causes across silos Plan investments according to priority and ROI Free valuable staff to support more strategic initiatives Automate business service delivery
IBM was ranked Leader for the advanced capabilities provided by IBM business service management solutions in Forrester s 2007 Business Service Management Wave report. Service dashboards provide visibility into real-time service health and integrity, service dependencies and KPIs needed to deliver against operational objectives, including SLA tracking, impact and rootcause analysis, event views, business activity and process workflow metrics. Prioritize response with service-contextual management IBM business service management solutions further enhance cross-domain operations management with service-centric capabilities that include realtime business service dashboards. This means that executives, LOB managers, operations personnel and customers can gain real-time and predictive visibility into the status of vital services, business processes and other KPIs.
10 By leveraging IBM or third-party discovery and other sources of dependency information, IBM business service management offerings are able to map and maintain service models in real time, as environments change. Availability, performance, integrity and business activity information is processed against the model automatically to identify potential service problems before they impact the business. Root-cause analysis and service level tracking allow operations staff to quickly identify the source of the problem and also prioritize the resolution of developing problems based on service level requirements with the business. Highly customizable, these dashboards provide a richly detailed array of real-time KPIs, scorecards, graphical views, SLAs, event lists, performance metrics and more that can be tailored to meet the specific intelligence requirements of business and operational users. Address end-to-end coverage with a broad range of domain-specific management offerings To help organizations round out their next-generation systems and service management strategy, IBM offers the broadest range of domain-specific management offerings, each with its own set of highly targeted, predictive capabilities. These offerings are integrated with IBM consolidated operations management and business service management offerings to provide rapid, out-of-the-box implementation and deep management details.
11 IBM business service management in action A top-ten global investment bank must assure high availability for internal and customer-facing trading services, as well as compliance with rigorous financial regulations. During a normal business day, their massive infrastructure generates tens of millions of events. What s more, any service downtime can cost them up to $300,000 per minute. As a result of all these factors, they need to isolate service problems within one minute. With an IBM business service management solution, the bank is now able to isolate problems within 10 seconds and notify support staff on the trading floor through their BlackBerrys. The IBM solution has resulted in a massive 10,000-to-1 event reduction from tens of millions of events to mere thousands, most of which can be handled automatically. This reduction, in turn, has driven a 20 percent efficiency savings across the support teams. The teams can also prioritize response according to SLAs with the lines of business and better maintain compliance efforts. IBM monitoring solutions include: Transaction and end-user response time: IBM domain-specific solutions monitor end-user response times for Web applications and Microsoft Windows -based applications, Internet services and services enabled through service oriented architecture (SOA). Transaction monitoring visualizes the transaction s path (from the end user to the Web server to the application and to the back-end supporting database) and identifies where the transaction has a bottleneck for quick problem isolation. End-user response time monitoring proactively monitors a synthetic transaction or the experience of real end users. This capability provides IT operations with information on how a poorly performing resource is impacting customers and helps provide priority on how quickly the resource is fixed. Application and system: IBM domain-specific solutions can monitor and analyze IT infrastructure health and availability to include operating systems, databases, Web servers, application servers, messaging middleware, and packaged and custom Java EE and.net applications across distributed and host environments. Custom application monitoring also provides for drill-down to the root cause of the application problem, down to the line of code. Integration with development tools provides for speedy fixes of code-level problems.
12 Network: IBM domain-specific solutions monitor the health and availability of layer 1 through layer 3 networks, including logical and physical environments across all major hardware vendors. Advanced topology views and root-cause analysis help ensure high availability and efficient problem resolution down to the specific port on a network device. Storage: IBM domain-specific solutions monitor storage environments and offer integration with third-party storage products. Through these direct monitoring capabilities and integrations for storage environments, users can collect all relevant information on the availability, performance and integrity of storage-related configuration items (CIs). Security: IBM domain-specific solutions include a security information and event management (SIEM) offering that collects security-specific event data from over 100 different products. It also leverages the security-related data collected by Tivoli consolidated operations management solutions, providing a wealth of information via a shared collection point. Performance: IBM performance management solutions monitor and analyze performance across the domains mentioned above, offering advanced baselining, trending and alerting when abnormal trends emerge. This trending can be set to trigger on various trend strengths to provide additional predictive capabilities and prioritized response based on severity.
13 Business activity and KPIs: For keeping track of business activity, IBM provides real-time monitoring and access to events and data across an unsurpassed range of business and operational applications and systems. No matter where the relevant data is stored such as enterprise applications or middleware IBM solutions can monitor and analyze the information and then turn it into actionable intelligence for more effective decision making. This ability to track business activity and other key operational indicators is extremely valuable in predicting problems and planning for future service requirements. Change: In addition to business activity monitoring capabilities described above, IBM also has the ability to generate change events using its discovery and change tracking engine. As changes occur to configuration, change events are generated that are sent to IBM or third-party event consoles for management. The ability to detect changes to service infrastructure can be used to identify the sources of a developing problem before it affects service uptime or performance to improve delivery against SLAs.
14 Assess, plan and deploy with IBM services IBM offers a range of consulting services to enable organizations to quickly identify service management opportunities, choose the best entry point and help speed implementation of integrated systems management tools. This includes the IBM Service Management Adoption Model, a strategic roadmap to help organizations achieve incremental service management improvements and benefits. Summary IBM delivers solutions for integrated systems management that can help achieve service-centric, next-generation operations. We also offer the only single-pane-of-glass solution that can scale to any size environment, integrate and leverage existing investments in IBM and third-party tools, and help proactively identify developing service trends for prioritized response before they impact the business. In addition, we provide a broad range of domainspecific management across distributed and mainframe, security, transactions, changes and business activity.
15 With IBM, organizations can develop the solutions to: Bridge silos and streamline operations to deliver deep visibility into services and service delivery. Achieve a single pane of glass across operational silos using the ultrascalable manager-ofmanagers solution. Proactively identify and plan for changing service requirements in advance of businessimpacting problems. Help improve overall service availability, performance and integrity. Utilize best practices based on extensive real-world expertise. Develop an integrated service management strategy that can improve ROI on existing IBM and third-party management investments. For more information To learn more about IBM Service Management and system monitoring solutions, contact your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit ibm.com/itsolutions/servicemanagement About IBM solutions for enabling IT governance and risk management IBM enables IT organizations to support governance and risk management by aligning IT policies, processes and projects with business goals. Organizations can leverage IBM services, software and hardware to plan, execute and manage initiatives for IT service management, business resilience and security across the enterprise. Organizations of every size can benefit from flexible, modular IBM offerings that span business management, IT development and IT operations and draw on extensive customer experience, best practices and open standards based technology. IBM helps clients implement the right IT solutions to achieve rapid business results and become a strategic partner in business growth. For more information about IBM Governance and Risk Management, visit ibm.com/itsolutions/governance
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