Handling of the planned/unplanned maintenance of IT infrastructure is an essential event management activity, yet it seems to be an after thought in most tools. The accuracy of the information presented to users is essential. Users need to know what it truly a problem that requires immediate action and what is not.
Where IT organizations hold maintenance information varies widely from excel spreadsheets to service desk software, which is one reason why handling of maintenance in event management is often a field activity. Nonetheless, event management systems can provide the infrastructure to facilitate the implementation of planned/unplanned maintenance of IT infrastructure components. RapidOSS had inherent support for enrichment and processing of events using data from external sources, and it's always been possible to implement maintenance management. With the release of version 3.3, RapidOSS now includes a reference implementation that can be used as is or modified easily to meet specific requirements in the field.
In line with the general philosophy of RapidOSS, maintenance management functionality is implemented as operations (methods) of a class, hence fully programmable, can be automated. Using integration capabilities of RapidOSS, maintenance information can be retrieved from other systems, database, spreadsheets, etc.
In addition to the programmatic methods provided to facilitate integration and automation of the maintenance process, user interface components (that use the same underlying operations) are provided to manage maintenance state of objects interactively through the RapidOSS UI. Users can launch maintenance view from events, etc. and change maintenance status of objects or schedule maintenance periods for future.
Functionality covers most common scenarios:
- An object (a device, link, interface, application, etc.) can be put into maintenance mode or taken out of maintenance mode (programmatically or interactive via the UI)
- User can specify a fixed amount of time as the duration of the maintenance period. At the end of the specified duration, object would be taken out of maintenance model
- Maintenance period can be scheduled for future date and time
- When an object is put into maintenance mode explicitly (via the UI or by an integration script etc.), or due to a scheduled maintenance window, related events are also flagged. Similarly, when an object is taken out of maintenance mode, flag is removed from related events.
- When new events are processed, the maintenance status of the relevant object is checked, if the object is in maintenance mode, the event is also flagged.
- When a scheduled maintenance ends, maintenance flag is removed from the object and the related events.
- Users can filter our events related to objects in maintenance, use saved queries to see only maintenance events, etc.
And since RapidOSS can already process event streams from Netcool, EMC Smarts, OpenNMS, etc., maintenance functionality can be used to manage maintenance in these systems as well.
Maintenance module files are provided as part of RapidOSS include in the solutions directory. Further information can be found in the integrators' guide.
