Evelyn Hubbert Senior Analyst Forrester Research

TeleconferenceChampagne Management On A Beer Budget Evelyn Hubbert

Senior Analyst

Forrester Research

March 7, 2007. Call in at 10:55 am Eastern Time

2Entire contents © 2007 Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved.

Theme

A combination of process and technology may help

overcome integration hurdles and provide cheap

but excellent infrastructure management


Agenda

• The needs of a growing enterprise

• Management choices

• Pay-later model

• Avoiding potential pitfalls of ITIL

• Unlocking the benefits of ITIL

• Defining the information needs of a typical ITIL process

• Product choices

» Monitoring

» Service desks

» Process automation

• Recommendations


The needs of a growing enterprise

• Critical point when infrastructure monitoring becomes a necessity varies:

» Critical applications have been hosted on mainframes

» The enterprise grew faster than its management capabilities

» Number of calls from end users increase

» Lack of proper tools to support an operation center


Management choices

A. Use of expensive integrated solution that frees you of future worries

» Benefit: All clothing needs are covered from head to toe

» Impact: But . . . this luxury comes at a price

B. Acquire a less expensive solution that will require replacement or integration with other solutions in the future

» Benefit: Individual pieces of clothing which fit together

» Impact: flexibility, cost savings

Pay now

Pay later


Pay later . . . but there is hope!

• ITIL, XML, and process automation to the rescue

» ITIL provides process structure and best practice recommendation

» ITIL provides an indirect guide to the information that is needed to complete a process step

» Process automation and XML provide the magic integration sauce


Avoiding potential pitfalls Of ITIL

• Trap 1:

» independent and domain-oriented groups enforce loosely coordinated processes

• Trap 2:

» Vendors are happy to oblige with products to match this divide-and-conquer


Unlocking the benefits of ITIL

• Using a top-down approach

» Supporting processes not technologies

– Example:

• Step 1: incident detection

• Step 2: incident resolution


ITIL key approach: reverse order

• Process

» Define the most critical processes to implement

» Define all the process steps

• Product

» Define what information is required by each step

» Determine if there is a product that can deliver that information

• People

» Understand the skills that could use the product and contribute to the process


Example: process information requirements

Process Information type Solution type

Incident management

Alerts and alarms from infrastructure components (hardware and software)

Ability to define alarm “fingerprints”

Component monitoring, end user experience monitoring, alarm analytics

Repository of known incidents and correction scripts

Knowledge base

Repository of service levels and service priorities

Service catalog

Correlate alarm to service Ability to perform root cause analysis

Application mapping

Document incident and pass it on to next level

Ability to follow up incident resolution

Service desk with ticketing and workflow ability


Changing organization requirements

Process phase Tasks Primary role Secondary role

Detection Detect events Operation center Service desk

Classification

and identification

Assess

Known errors

Priority

Config. details

Initial support

Operation center

Investigation Assess details

Collect data

Diagnose

Escalate

Operation center

Level 2 support

Level 2 support

Operation center

Level 2 support

Operation center

Operation center

Resolution Workaround

Change

Level 2 support

Level 2 support

Operation center

Closure User satisfaction Operation center Service desk

Product type Potential users

© 2007, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

Aligning Process And Product Requirements

December 2006, Tech Choices “Champagne Monitoring On A Beer Budget”


IT process automation

• What is it?

Ability to launch a process in context and pass information from one process to the next

• What does it do?

Helps coordinate management applications and pass information from one application to the next


Implementation recommendations

• Selling CMDB and ITIL to the organization is a pre-requisite

• The goal is to create a template for process implementation and CMDB extension

• Two choices:

» Select the most critical service and the most critical processes (but the available product set may not be able to support all management processes)

» Select the most critical process across the board and select a product set that supports it and define roles and responsibilities


Product choices

• Monitoring: monitor key performance aspects in real time and over time

• Service desk tools: management of incidents and the communication of the resolution to the existing incidents

• Process automation: function as integration between monitoring and service desk solutions.


Monitoring

ServicePilot

Run book/process automation

Service desks

Market mates


Recommendations

• Low cost and high effectiveness are no longer mutually exclusive

» Smaller and innovative startups have produced targeted solutions

» Don’t fear integration issues

» Adopt a process-driven approach

» Understand the level of integration required


Conclusion

• IT monitoring is no longer rocket science

» Infrastructure components become a commodity

» Better understanding of distributed systems

» Accepting IP as a communication protocol

• Size does matter

» Past a certain size of your infrastructure, think in economical terms: Contain IT operations in the long run


Evelyn Hubbert

[email protected]

www.forrester.com

Thank you! Dankeschoen! Merci! Gracias!

Technology

Evelyn Hubbert Senior Analyst Forrester Research