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:

•   Event Management
  •   Detect and Log Event

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. This database contains both   mainframe and distributed resources, are discovered and maintained through a set of discovery services that are either provided with or integrated with Tivoli Business Service Manager. As soon as they are discovered, their relationship to other objects in the infrastructure are automatically maintained.

Detecting Events

Tivoli Business Service Manager collects events and dependency information from a wide variety of sources:

• Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus – This product is tightly integrated with Tivoli Business Service Manager and can be configured to automatically send events to the Tivoli Business Service Manager. These events might be the result of the correlation of one or more events by the Netcool / OMNIbus correlation engine. The event might also be a simple pass through of an event or exception that was generated by one of the underlying Tivoli, Netcool or 3rd party point management tools that are deployed in the enterprise.   
• Tivoli Enterprise Console - This product can be configured to automatically send events to the Tivoli Business Service Manager. These events might themselves be the result of the correlation of one or more events by the Tivoli Enterprise Console rule engine. The event might also be a simple pass through of an event or exception that was generated by one of the underlying Tivoli or 3rd party point management tools that are deployed in the enterprise.
• zSeries  Structure – Using the Tivoli z/OS Discovery Library Adapter the Tivoli Business Service Manager  can utilize z/OS feeds into the service models.
• zSeries monitors - Tivoli Business Service Manager has interfaces for the IBM OMEGAMON® monitors, for the z/OS operating system, and for critical subsystem components such as DB2, CICS, MQSeries, WebSphere® and IMS.
• 3rd Party Event and Monitoring Tools –  Events from distributed systems can easily be integrated into the service model, including those from any 3rd party monitoring or event management tool, message busses, SOA, etc.
• Tivoli Application Dependency Discovery Manager – This product is tightly integrated with Tivoli Business Service Manager and can be configured to automatically discover and send service dependencies to Tivoli Business Service Manager.
• IBM Change and Configuration Management Database - Tivoli Business Service Manager can read data from the Tivoli Change Configuration Management Database. This information can be used to populate and track real time changes to the service infrastructure and assure the accuracy of the service model.
• 3rd Party Discovery and Dependency sources – dependency information can be collected from a wide range of IBM and 3rd party sources, including but not limited to discovery tools, change and configuration management databases, inventory systems, asset management tools, databases, flat files, and many more.

Events

All of the event sources that are described above are associated automatically with a specific object type (for example server, database, CICS region) and instances of that object type in the Tivoli Business Service Manager database. The relationships are then automatically maintained and processed through the service model without the need for manual configuration.  Automated analysis capabilities include root cause analysis, impact analysis, tracking of SLAs and key performance indicators as well as balanced scorecards,  Correlation can include any mix of event sources across availability, performance, integrity or security events, as well as business activity events to provide complete visibility into service health and other critical indicators.

Operations staff responsible for managing individual domains have both the dedicated event views and the contextual service views they need to quickly and easily identify the root cause of service problems and prioritize response accordingly.  The various disciplines that are engaged in troubleshooting (Service Desk, technical specialists, operations, applications support) can go to one central view to see all the relevant events from across multiple event sources and quickly understand the severity and impact of those events on the business.  From this integrated view they also have right click access to virtually any supporting tool to view additional information if needed.

Historical Events

Tivoli Business Service Manager manages the events that are critical to the ongoing operation of business(s) services.  Automated event de-duplication and suppression keeps track of historical counts of similar events and reduces the amount of events that must be processed by the service model, as well as the number of events displayed in operator views – limiting those to a subset of service relevant events.

In addition to automatically tracking real time service levels for shorter intervals up to a few months, integration with Tivoli Service Level Advisor provides long term, historical SLA tracking,. As events are collected and stored by Tivoli Business Service Manager, Tivoli Service Level Advisor automatically produces scheduled reports on the performance of the IT organization 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.