Context

Tool mentors explain how a tool can perform tasks, which are part of ITUP processes and activities. The tasks are listed as Related Elements in the Relationships section.

You can see the details of how processes and activities are supported by this tool mentor, by clicking the links next to the icons:

•   Service Execution
  •   Deliver Service

Details

IBM® Tivoli® Business Service Manager allows IT Operations staff and Lines of Business staff to monitor service execution from the service perspective. This approach contrasts sharply with the IT only view of infrastructure operations that have traditionally permeated many organizations.

IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager provides a visual representation of the critical services provided by operations. By leveraging input from across the service infrastructure, IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager can help operations teams understand the current health of their services as well as any trends toward poor health in the future. The ability to collect information from virtually any source, track and generate key performance indicators in real time, ensures that staff have all the contextual service intelligence they need to effectively manage service availability, performance, integrity and business activity in support of end to end service delivery and support processes.

Figure 1: Viewing critical systems

IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager can enable any view of the IT services that is most relevant to the particular organization. Some organizations view their services according to priority so that the operations teams can prioritize their activities according to which tasks will affect the bottom line most significantly. Other organizations view their services by geographic regions, or even customer sets in outsourcing situations. Regardless of the needs of the particular organization, IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager allows teams to provide flexible service definitions in a view most appropriate to their business.

IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager can combine both real-time status of the availability and performance of business services as well as trends and service level agreement information all in one easy to understand visual interface. By enabling the IT operations staff to understand not only the current state of the key services, but also the service trend, IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager can help IT teams to avoid potential service problems and service level agreement violations.

Additionally, IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager can be used to provide information to IT and Business Executives in addition to the IT operations team. IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager provides an easy-to-use executive dashboard that provides an overview of service health to executive team members. Each executive dashboard can be customized with the services most appropriate to the individual executive through a simple drag-and-drop interface.

Figure 2: Executive dashboard

For executives that already have customized business portals and dashboards to view the health of their business, IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager provides a custom canvas to allow service information to be combined with other information on the customized dashboard. Below is an example of one such dashboard with the information from IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager.

Figure 3: Combining TBSM with other information in a view

IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager provides business and operations staff with a flexible means to track real-time service health.  Staff can quickly identify the impact and root cause of problems on business services in support of service delivery and support processes. By automatically identifying the impact and root cause of IT problems on service health, as well as tracking key performance indicators, IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager can help operations:

• Prioritize problem resolution across operational silos
• Manage service delivery against customer SLAs and the end-user experience 
• Identifying trends early and take corrective action to avoid developing problems

For More Information

For more information about this tool, click on the link for this tool at the top of this page.