ITIL v3 - There's a Gap in Your Monitoring!

Here's a bold statement: "There's a gaping hole in the monitoring strategies of most IT organisations, and that Gap is costing many enterprises both money and customers."

This is what we call the "Service Delivery Performance" gap.

The adoption of ITIL v3 has led to the important realization of the need for an organized effort within the IT department to record and track infrastructure and software components that provide the resources used to deliver Services. The CMDB is used to record information relating to these components - yet Performance is ignored.

The problem runs deeper. It stems from the capabilities of existing performance measurement tools within IT Operations which are primarily focussed on Availability, and Capability.

In a nutshell:

Availability measures the reliability of resources. Typically measured in uptime. Capacity is sometimes seen as an extension of Availability and measures system performance of resources. Typically measured as CPU load, disk utilization, network bandwidth utilization, or transactions per second.

Capability tests and measures the Service provided by components. Typically conducted using a synthetic transaction that mimics, as closely as possible, how the Service is used by "real" Service usage.

While these are all vitally important, none are applicable to an individual Service Delivery or Customer Experience.

And while we have also seen the emergence of Customer Experience Monitoring in recent times, generally it's just a re-marketed website monitoring solution which fails to monitor any service which is not delivered via a web interface.

Within ITIL v3, IT Service Management (ITSM) is defined as “The implementation and management of Quality IT Services that meet the needs of the business”, and Business Service Management (BSM) is defined as “the ongoing practice of governing, monitoring and reporting on IT and the business service it impacts”.

In order to provide a Quality service, enterprises must monitor and manage their Service Delivery Performance. Much like a CMDB, an enterprise must create their Service Delivery Performance Database SDPDB. Like a CMDB, an SDPDB records key aspects of all services regardless of delivery mechanisms and underlying technologies. Like a CMDB, the SDPDB records relationships between services, the expected performance, baseline metrics over time such as quantity, timing (min, max, average, etc), alerting threshholds, and rules for detecting complex situations impacting service delivery. Delivering “Quality” services means placing a focus on the efficiency and quality of each individual request for a service regardless of technology and granularity.

We've built our product Vantify in response to helping our customers to implement ITIL v3 and delivery high Quality IT and Business Services.

To find out more contact us