ITIL v3 – Business Service Monitoring / Service Management

ITIL A set of Best Practice guidance for IT Service Management" is something we come across all the time. Our customers tell us Vantify is a valuable tool in the drive towards a service driven IT strategy. So how exactly does Vantify align with the main objectives of adopting V3 of ITIL? Here are definitions of some key ITIL concepts and terms and explanations of how our product Vantify fits with those concepts.

Definitions in bracketed quotes are from ITIL.

Transaction

ITIL v3 Definition: "A discrete Function performed by an IT Service. For example transferring money from one bank account to another. A single Transaction may involve numerous additions, deletions and modifications of data. Either all of these complete successfully or none of them is carried out."

Where Vantify Fits: ITIL. Business Transaction Monitoring is at the core of what we do. Building transaction and service  views from process metrics at a functional level is at the core of the value of Vantify.

If you want to talk to us, our customers or get a demonstration of Vantify or your Organisation is looking at ITIL as a model contact us.

Middleware

ITIL v3 Definition: "Software that connects two or more software Components or Applications."

Where Vantify Fits: This definition includes much of the out of the box integration functionality provided by Application servers. Middleware monitoring using Vantify makes IT operational control of your software services easier and more effective. Using Vantify allows our customers to monitor the activity of key processes at a functional level and the performance of IT services and business transactions as they pass from application to application through middleware layers. We support Sites with multiple different middlewares. Vantify includes off the shelf sensors for Middleware including .net, TIBCO, Web services, and Oracle fusion which allow our customers monitor some of their key business services without having to involve development resources.

Monitoring

ITIL v3 Definition: "Repeated observation of a Configuration Item, IT Service or Process to detect Events and to ensure that the current status is known."

Where Vantify Fits: This is part of what we do. Specifically we monitor the performance of IT Services and process as delivered by software and applications as opposed to by people. E.G. We measure how long it takes for a mobile operater to activate a top up request from a Banking partner. We don't measure how long a service engineer takes to fix a printer.(unless The start and finish points are recorded by machine)

Proactive Monitoring

ITIL v3 Definition: "Monitoring that looks for patterns of Events to predict possible future Failures"

Where Vantify Fits: We are particularly good at this.Vantify allows support to predict and prevent incidents and problems. Vantify can handle and analyse large volumes of performance data in real time and report and alert on anomalies and thresholds as well as providing a Business service level view.

“Vantify certainly presented the issue clearly and allowed the Second Level Support to react without receiving an alert from first line or from the users.”

– D. M.
Third Level Support CRM Application

Incidents

ITIL v3 Definition: "An unplanned interruption to an IT Service or a reduction in the Quality of an IT Service."

Where Vantify Fits: Failure of a Configuration Item that has not yet impacted Service is also an Incident. ITIL V3 We help prevent incidents. We help diagnose and solve them when they occur.

Problems

ITIL v3 Definition: "A cause of one or more Incidents. The cause is not usually known at the time a Problem Record is created, and the Problem Management Process is responsible for further investigation".

Where Vantify Fits: We are particulary good at identifying problems in the making. Here’s how one of our customers describes using it:

“I often take a snapshot of the minute view for data and compare it to the same time period the previous day to help identify slowness in the systems, being without it (Vantify) would make identifying performance issues much harder to spot.”

– B. F.
Second Line support

Capacity Management

ITIL v3 Definition: "The Process responsible for ensuring that the Capacity of IT Services and the IT Infrastructure is able to deliver agreed Service Level Targets in a Cost Effective and timely manner. Capacity Management considers all Resources required to deliver the IT Service, and plans for short, medium and long term Business Requirements"

Where Vantify Fits: Vantify customers tell us our reports provide vital operational information to assist in the capacity planning process. Vantify provides a historical reliable and relevant Data on the actual activity of their systems. This allows accurate forecasting of the future requirements of systems at a transactional service and functional level. Business forecasts can be compared with current functional performance to give meaningful evidence based projections on future requirements.

“ We have deployed a Vantify "Operational" dashboard which enables Support to proactively monitor our business services resulting in reduced down time and faster restoration of services. This is an automated system and reinforces our E2E Customer Service Management ability.”

- Marie
Service Relationship Manager

CMDB configuration management Database

ITIL v3 Definition: "A database used to store Configuration Records throughout their Lifecycle. The Configuration Management System maintains one or more CMDBs, and each CMDB stores Attributes of CIs, and Relationships with other CIs."

Where Vantify Fits: Vantify is not a CMDB. Customers use DATA collected and reported by Vantify to verify and populate their CMDB. Because WestGlobal monitors actual interactions between applications, software services, middleware and machines the information provided is always a Comprehensive reliable, accurate and current description of what is going on in your infrastructure.

Dashboard

ITIL v3 Definition: "A graphical representation of overall IT Service Performance and Availability."

Where Vantify Fits: Vantify has Dashboards which some customers include as a component in their Service performance dashboard. Other customers feed vantify Data and alerts to other dashboards and use Vantify dashboards and reports as part of second and third level support problem and incident resolution.

“Just this past weekend we noticed a problem with the Service. (Customer facing financial transaction) The service was taking 8-11 seconds to process and a noticeable queue of requests had built up on the customer side. Following detailed investigation it was discovered that an underlying adaptor was active but not receiving requests. This has been addressed and the dashboard is allowing us to monitor the situation.”

– D. M.
3RD level Support Dev CRM Application Team

Event

ITIL v3 Definition: "A change of state which has significance for the management of a Configuration Item or IT Service. The term Event is also used to mean an Alert or notification created by any IT Service, Configuration Item or Monitoring tool. Events typically require IT Operations personnel to take actions, and often lead to Incidents being logged."

Where Vantify Fits: Vantify is based on CEP complex event processing Technology. It makes it easier for us to monitor transactions and services from an activity and process rather than a technology level. As well as processing events, Vantify can generate events such as Alerts or automated scripts. Vantify can also be configured to prevent Event storms or cascading series of Alerts and alarms all coinciding with one underlying event.

Monitor Control Loop

ITIL v3 Definition: "Monitoring the output of a Task, Process, IT Service or Configuration Item; comparing this output to a predefined norm; and taking appropriate action based on this comparison."

Where Vantify Fits: Real time observation of Data combined with our event driven architecture allows Vantify customers to create Automated or Semi automated real time control loops based on service performance, volume, inactivity, or custom metrics. Our baselining capability allows customers to Automatically set thresholds based on the normal operation of their systems.

Customers tell us that they have used Vantify to identify redundancies and under utilisation of resources, misconfiguration of load balancing capabilities as well as deficiencies in performance of third party applications which otherwise seemed to be available and capable according to traditional infrastructure monitoring, Rum monitoring and Synthetic transaction generated metrics.