IT Service Management (ITSM) is process focused discipline for managing technology (IT) systems, philosophically centered on the customer's perspective of IT's contribution to the business. Instead of focusing on details of how to use a particular vendor's product, or necessarily with the technical details of the systems under management, ITSM advocates providing a framework to structure IT-related activities and the interactions of IT technical personnel with business customers and users.
To enable ITSM, management tools need to be in harmony with the IT processes used to provide services to customers/users. This requirement is one of the primary drivers for systems integration projects.
In a series of posts, I'll attempt to analyze the integration requirements, challenges and potential solutions to enable IT service management. First, on this post, I'll specify some common use cases to be used in the posts that will follow. In my experience, the following scenario includes some of the most common use cases:
Scenario: A router is patched to fix a security vulnerability. The fix introduces a problem that causes the VPN connections to be dropped when router utilization is high.
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Events are generated by the various monitoring systems (application, network, etc.) and sent to the event management system (aka Manager of Managers, MoM). Depending on the root-cause analysis and correlation capabilities of the system, actual underlying problem may or may not identified, therefore there may be multiple events in the event management console as a result of the same problem.
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Depending on the operational processes of the organization and the integration between the MoM and the ticketing system, either the operator creates a ticket interactively in the ticketing system, or a ticket is opened automatically by an adapter that integrates the monitoring system with the ticketing system. The data from the event would be passed to the ticketing system.
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Ticket is assigned to a support group. Support engineer needs to see all the real-time information from the monitoring system. Although the ticket has the data from the original event, there may be (likely) other relevant events. Engineer also may need to determine what changes has been made to related infrastructure components involved. The change information may be stored in a configuration/change management system.
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Using the personalized support website, a user/customer investigates what the problem may be. The user/customer sees the status of the services s/he subscribes to and the events related each of the services. The status of the VPN service is set to critical, and there are some events associated with a router VPN service has a dependency on.
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The user also notices that a ticket is already opened for the problem and can see what the status of the ticket is, who is working on it, and when the problem is expected to be resolved.
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Historical event information, ticket history, change history for the service and the related components are available to anyone (engineer, service desk, user) who may need it.
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Another user/customer calls the Service Desk to report a problem. Naturally, the user reports the symptom that the experience and not what the problem may be. “I cannot access the finance application".
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Service Desk operator can see the events from the monitoring systems in the context of the services provided (finance application) and determines which reported event may be causing the problem user is reporting. Hence the operator is empowered with the information while talking to the customer, and can attach user's ticket with the ticket already that has already been opened, and avoids wasting resources by creating multiple tickets for the same problem.
Being able to do what's described above is not easy. It requires different management tools to work in harmony to provide the relevant information when it's needed to whom needs it. In the next couple of posts, I'll use this example to analyze integration requirements, challenges and available solutions to make the above example a reality.
