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:

•   Availability Management
  •   Monitor, Analyze and Report Availability

Details

The IBM® Tivoli® Business Service Manager database contains objects that represent attributes and relationships for all of the monitored resources within the IT infrastructure. These objects, representing both distributed and mainframe resources, are discovered and maintained through a set of discovery services that are provided with TBSM. Once discovered, objects and their relationship to other objects in the infrastructure are automatically maintained.

TBSM has the ability to define and maintain business services definitions, known as templates. These templates are the foundation models for creating and mapping service models.  

Monitoring Resources and Business Services

• Tivoli Business Service Manager collects and correlates events from virtually any source:
• Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus
• Tivoli Enterprise Console
• Tivoli OMEGAMON® XE 
• Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database
• IBM Tivoli Monitoring
• IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager
• Tivoli Network Manager
• Tivoli Service Level Advisor
• Tivoli Security Operations Manager
• Tivoli Netcool/Impact
• Hundreds of 3rd party event management and monitoring tools

Analyze and Report Availability

To help you rapidly determine the specific root cause of a service problem, Tivoli Business Service Manager automatically analyzes service health, based on an understanding of service dependencies and behaviors that fit your business model. Service health and quality can be defined according to a specific combination of conditions, including not only the status of individual devices or systems, but also:

• Transaction failures.
• Process bottlenecks.
• Performance degradations.
• Reductions in service throughput.
• Changes in the normal revenue volume.
• Business, compliance and risk indicators.

Service dependencies showing relationships allow Tivoli Business Service Manager to propagate the service impact of an event to the correct  resource. A severe event against a service  will surely impact its underlying dependencies (for example, an impacted server impacts the services that run on it). A severe event against a service dependency might not completely degrade its service, but propagation still serves to notify the TBSM user that one of its components has had its service impacted.

Business Service Model Views in Tivoli Business Service Manager contain a Logical view instance of the dependants  that comprise the service. All events are automatically forwarded to this Business Model. The Tivoli Business Service Manager user can also establish additional correlation and propagation rules within the Business Service definition.

IT organizations want to analyze and report on the end to end performance of Business Services, Resources, and collections of related dependents. Tivoli Business Service Manager includes facilities to analyze end to end performance from either a real-time or historical perspective.

Events from all the event sources described above are logged and associated automatically with a specific object type (for example server, database, CICS region) and an instance of that object type in the Tivoli Business Systems Management database. Events logged by Tivoli Business Service Manager are stored for both current (near real time) troubleshooting of affected resources and historical analysis (long term). Certain instances of these events are associated with the availability or unavailability of resources and business services.

By analyzing information drawn from virtually any operational and business data source in the context of your specific service health criteria, Tivoli Business Service Manager provides the actionable intelligence needed to manage your business services holistically.

Current Events

Current or real-time events can be seen through the Balance Scorecard or the Service model for either a Business Service or a specific resource. These windows allow the Tivoli Business Service Manager user to view the business affects all of the events that have been associated with the service or resource. This capability allows all of the various disciplines that get engaged in the end to end Management process (Service Desk, technical specialists, operations, applications support) to see a single view of all the events from multiple sources that have been associated with the service or resource. This view improves on the situation where each of these participants is using separate tools with different information.

Tivoli Business Service Manager gathers more than just traditional events — it also leverages business and operational support data from virtually any source, across distributed and mainframe environments. Using its patented data access capabilities, it can leverage these sources for both real-time and historical information when calculating KPIs. Consequently, the software enables you to track not only operational activity, but also business activity in real time — a key requirement for helping improve service quality and mitigating risk.

With Tivoli Business Service Manager, you can track — for a range of operational, business and customer audiences — quantitative, real-time business metrics, including:

• Transactional volume.
• Service revenue totals, levels and SLA penalties by customer.
• Change requests that may affect the service.
• Incident and problem records.
• Measurable process improvements, using Six Sigma or Control Objectives for Information and related Technology (COBIT®), for example.

By leveraging the business metrics in Tivoli Business Service Manager, your organization can more effectively aid service support and delivery processes.

Historical Events

For logging of historical events and data, Tivoli Business Service Manager reports can be viewed directly from the Tivoli Business Service Manager console. Events and data  can be viewed and compared with a wide variety of options.

• Tivoli Business Service Manager can capture response time data from IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager for ISM. This response time data can be stored and compared against ongoing real-time response time data for analysis.
• Tivoli Service Level Advisor (TSLA) is used to define SLAs for the Business Services that are tracked by Tivoli Business Service Manager . As events are collected and stored by Tivoli Business Service Manager , Tivoli Service Level Advisor will produce scheduled reports that specifically measure availability, which is a component of the performance of the IT department against its negotiated SLAs.

For More Information

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