Vantage Service
Manager
Vantage Service Manager (VSM) improves the quality of IT dependent business processes. By measuring IT service levels, VSM identifies where service is below standard and subjects this to an improvement process using the Six Sigma quality management method. Real-time information about IT service is made available to IT executives and business process owners through a digital dashboard. This information can be combined with operational performance indicators to show the status of the business overall and provide a framework for improving the operational efficiency of the business.
Implementation of VSM will allow companies to:
Improve quality, speed, and effectiveness of business operations thus increasing efficiency, revenue, and profitability.
Align IT with the business, improving the return on investment (ROI) of IT.
Focus IT resources on maintaining service for critical to quality business processes.
Reduce costs through disintermediation.
Let business process owners to see the consequences of IT problems on the business and let them initiate tactical actions to mitigate any disruption to business service.
Let business process owners have access to operational metrics supporting real-time decision-making.
Support ITIL Service Delivery and integrates with ITIL Service Support
Utilize the Six Sigma approach to quality service management.
ArchitectureThe following diagram shows how VSM is connected to the IT infrastructure and collects information from it as close to real-time as possible. The information is put into its business context through the VSM server and its service model. VSM integrates with asset management products like Remedy and Peregrine for automatic synchronization between the VSM Service Model and the Asset Management database.
Vantage Service Manager is a complete solution for business service management. It retrieves data from existing systems management tools including proprietary data collectors such as PATROL, native management interfaces such as Microsoft WMI, or by using industry standards such as SNMP and TCP. Information can also be retrieved directly from leading databases and operating systems, and also from standard web and e-mail interfaces. This information is analyzed in the context of business processes to identify unacceptable cost of poor quality (COPQ). Where this is the case, defects inhibiting service are eliminated using the Six Sigma quality management method. Information about service quality is shared using the appropriate reporting mechanism—web-based dashboards, PDF reports, e-mail or pager. Service level information is reported in real-time and stored in a database to provide a historic reference point.
VSM is a pure Java application and therefore can run on various platforms. This gives you maximum flexibility when installing and running it.
The Service ModelThe core component of VSM is the service model. The service model is the ‘engine’ that transforms incoming data into relevant service level information using business rules. The service model functions as the ITIL Service Catalog and component library.
The service objects and business rules are constructed using the service navigator interface, which is a drag and drop GUI. This set of service objects and rules forms the service hierarchy, which is constructed with a top down approach in mind. The top down approach is a key part of the mapping of the IT services to the business functions that they provide, as each IT service is in turn analyzed and then modelled in VSM. Service level agreements for each of these business services are then tracked and reported using either simple availability measures or through the compliance expressions feature that allows complex service level agreements to be created and associated with business services.
The VSM Service Model is simple to create, which gives it the flexibility to model virtually any business service and represent virtually any service level agreement. The service model contains objects that represent failure points in a given system (e.g., the success or failure of a transaction or a network device) and the logical services that represent the business functions. Base level services derive their status from incoming data from adaptors using a pattern matcher. Every higher level service has a status, which is derived through a business rule from the underlying services and their respective states. This concept is repeated up through the entire service model, thereby creating a rule based state engine.
The service model allows for two different types of relationships, a component relationship and a dependency relationship. The components are those services that constitute the higher level service. The dependents are those services that are not part of the higher level service, but are required for that service to be available. For example, a database is made up of various components — such as the application processes — but it relies on the network in order for the database to be accessible to its users. Assuming there is a network outage, which makes the database server inaccessible, VSM marks the database as unreachable. This allows operators to be informed of the root cause of the outage (the network) and not to deploy resources to repair the database. For statistical purposes, the database can be regarded as available during the outage period (depending on configuration).
VSM calculates three sets of statistics for these services: the overall statistics (actual availability), the component statistics, and the dependency statistics. This concept can be extended further in an outsourced environment where services outside the control of the outsourcer can be configured as dependencies.
The VSM model also allows services to be re-used in different places in the overall hierarchy. This is important because some objects will provide multiple functions (e.g., a large host that runs many applications), or dependency relationships might exist in different parts of the hierarchy (e.g., an internet banking application might depend on a mainframe to display the account information to the user and the host is necessary for certain ATMs to function correctly). The use of the top down approach also means that technology is not being modelled for technology’s sake, but only where there is a key business service associated with that technology. This top down approach is documented as VSM Method. This process helps businesses analyze their critical services and create meaningful and working service hierarchies in VSM.
VSM Service Provider Module
VSM provides, through its Service Provider Module, a set of functionality that is designed for outsourcers or organizations with a formalized IT governance strategy.
Compliance expressions allow the creation of more complicated service level agreements (SLA) than those based upon availability or response times. Different compliance expressions can be created for the minimum or expected service levels and for differing time periods. An example of a more advanced service level agreement that can be measured using a compliance expression as follows:
Compliance expressions are tied to the statistical time periods, which by default are hour, day, week, month, and year.
The complexities of large-scale IT outsourcing engagements often require a client review of any critical service outage. Such a discussion may result in the client agreeing to a breach that is a modified version of actual events. For example, a client may agree that the service provider was not responsible for all 60 minutes of a breach and may accept accountability for half. Data reconciliation supports this process, allowing the service provider to review system outages with the customer and add, remove, or modify breaches manually. All reconciliation changes are stored separately to the original data to ensure data integrity and that unreconciled data is always available.
Additionally, two sets of statistics (system generated and negotiated) can be displayed.
An audit trail capability allows tracking of any human interaction with VSM. This includes logins, configuration changes, and data reconciliation entries. The audit trail makes VSM a controlled environment so that it is always traceable how it arrives at a certain result. This ensures the integrity of the data, which is important if it is being used to evaluate performance and track contract compliance.
VSM Adaptors
VSM uses adaptors to retrieve data from a wide variety of sources. The connection manager controls the adaptors and can run within the main VSM server or multiple Connection managers can be deployed in various places and send data back to the main VSM server. For example, an IT outsourcer could have a connection manager deployed within each of his customers’ environments and retrieve data from it. Then the data is forwarded to a central VSM server for analysis.
The various adaptors can be categorized in different groups:
Systems Management Adaptors
The adaptors connecting to systems management products typically use an API that is published by the product and uses it to retrieve information. Most adaptors provide state change (events) and performance metrics; however, limitations are sometimes created through the published APIs.
Examples for these adaptors are: Patrol, PEM, CA Unicenter, Tivoli TEC, and HP OpenView Network Node Manager.
Active Adaptors
These adaptors are able to connect to a managed system directly and extract information from them without the need of an additional monitoring product. VSM currently supports data collection from the following systems:
UNIX Platforms: The Telnet/SSH adaptor connects to remote machines by emulating the protocols, logging into the system, executing commands and returning the output. SNMP represents an alternative to this approach and the Syslog adaptor enhances the capability.
Windows: Either the Perfmon or WMI adaptor can be used to collect data from Windows.
AS400: Via the AS400 Adaptor.
Oracle: The Oracle Monitoring Adaptor monitors standard operational parameters for an Oracle database.
SAP: The SAP Adaptor allows the non-intrusive collection of performance and business metrics from SAP.
Teradata: The Teradata Adaptor extracts operational metrics from Teradata nodes.
Network Equipment: The SNMP adaptor provides a universal way of collecting data from network equipment and other SNMP enabled devices.
BEA Weblogic – The Weblogic adaptor uses the JMX standard to collect detailed metrics from the Weblogic application server, as well as information about the J2EE applications deployed within.
Infrastructure
Active Adaptors implement a communication protocol in one way or another. They simulate client access via the protocols and thereby check availability and performance of the servers providing a particular service. Supported protocols are:
HTTP/HTTPS
LDAP
DNS
SMTP, POP3, IMAP
ICMP
FTP
NNTP
Telnet/SSH
Database Adaptors
These Adaptors are designed to read data from common relational database management systems:
Oracle
MS SQLServer
DB2/UDB
Teradata
For other databases you can simply add a JDBC driver and connect to it. JDBC drivers are available for over 100 different DBMSs.
Middleware Adaptors
Middleware adaptors connect to messaging frameworks like Tibco, BEA Weblogic, MQ Series, or WebMethods via JMS. These frameworks carry mainly business activity data.
End-to-End Adaptors
End-to-End tools are products that attempt to measure the end-user experience. Adaptors for Compuware Client Vantage and Candle E-2-E are provided.
Event Management and Alert Notification
The event management and alert notification system provides real-time views of incoming events for operations teams. Event consoles are synchronized in real-time amongst all users, thereby giving every user an up-to-date view on all operational events and their status. Events can be sent to the help desk, manually or automatically, to create trouble tickets from the event console. The event console user interface is highly configurable and can easily be adjusted to specific site requirements. For example, new buttons can be created that execute specific actions — such as manually escalating an alarm — or the rules that define background colours can be changed.
Integrated with the event management system is an alert notification component that is designed to deliver notifications to the right person at the right time. The component is able to deliver notifications such as email, SMS, pager, and others based on work schedule, including the ability to define custom notifications. It has built in support for more than 50 different mobile and paging operators around the world. To ensure timely resolution of critical problems, the Alert Notification Module provides an automated escalation procedure.
Service Support Integrator Module
The Service Support Integrator Module provides integration with helpdesk, asset, and change management systems. The module represents out of the box functionality as well as a toolbox that allows the user to make extensions to the supported integrations with BMC Software Remedy and Peregrine. It also allows a user to easily create new integrations for currently unsupported systems. Integration with helpdesks supports the automatic creation of trouble tickets and their subsequent status tracking.
The asset management (also sometimes referred to as configuration management database, CMDB)) integrations offer the ability to automatically create Service objects within VSM based on new assets entered in the CMDB. VSM uses the concept of Templates to implement this feature. The templates are designed to be flexible and support the automatic creation of service objects from other sources. For example, if a new connection is added to the connection manager, services can be automatically created for it.
Reporting and alert notification
VSM has comprehensive report facilities. Many standard reports are included and it is easy to build bespoke reports. Reports can be automated or run ad-hoc as required. VSM also has a comprehensive alert notification system for escalating events via email, SMS or pager.
Business Activity Monitoring
Organizations seeking to reduce latency in their business operations and become real-time enterprises (RTE) can further utilize VSM's data collection, analysis, and presentation capability. Here, operational performance indicators are retrieved from transactional applications and presented to executives on a dashboard. Typically, these indicators appear alongside metrics about the quality of the enabling IT services, providing those accountable for business service insight into current business status. Dashboards lead to improved decision-making and allow executives to take tactical actions to deal with problems that impact the business.
