Automating IT Problem Response with IBM Tivoli Solutions

Getting the highest possible return on IT investment means automating IT operations to the fullest extent possible.

For today's budget-challenged enterprise IT organizations, this goal is more important than ever. While IT complexity has increased considerably, the resources available to address the complexity have often shrunk. IT is now widely perceived as the fundamental nervous system of today's largest businesses, and yet IT is increasingly challenged to meet user expectations and fulfill basic business goals with stable or decreasing budgets.

Automating IT problem response is a logical step towards solving this conundrum. If the IT infrastructure can recognize technical problems as they develop, automatically notify IT staff of the problems, and, in some cases, even solve those problems without requiring manual intervention, the business win for the enterprise can be enormous. Not only are technical problems addressed more comprehensively and more quickly, but IT staff are freed to address more complex issues that truly require human resources. The overall business outcome? IT becomes measurably more efficient and the business receives superior IT service.

IBM Tivoli Offers Best-of-Class Integrated Solutions Designed for Automation
Toward that end, IBM delivers the Tivoli portfolio, an integrated suite of industry-leading system management solutions which work in concert to reduce complexity, minimize time-to-solution, and optimize overall IT responsiveness whenever possible.

How, specifically, do IBM Tivoli solutions combine to optimize IT responsiveness?

Solve a Storage Shortfall
Consider a common challenging scenario in enterprise IT: Complex services exhaust allocated storage faster than anticipated.

Under normal circumstances, this situation could have potentially catastrophic effects. Key business applications would fail due to an inability to write incoming data to disk; multiple users would simultaneously report problems to IT; and IT staff would be assigned to troubleshoot and solve the problems with little preliminary diagnostic information aside from the effects. Compounding this already challenging scenario is the fact that the underlying problem—exhausted storage—might manifest in several different ways, generating multiple trouble tickets and leading IT to conclude falsely that several different problems must be solved instead of concentrating resources on the relatively simple, core problem.

Clearly, this is a situation that calls for some optimization. Fortunately, the IBM Tivoli suite has been designed to address problems of just this type.

Suppose, for instance, that this hypothetical enterprise had deployed IBM Tivoli Monitoring. This solution, which continually checks IT resources for emerging problems, would detect the storage shortfall in advance. Furthermore, working in collaboration with network management solution Tivoli Netcool/OMNibus, it could pass the issue along to a service desk solution such as Tivoli Service Desk.

At this point a trouble ticket would be created and IT staff would be made aware of the problem well in advance of user issues and measurable business impact. As a logical first step, IT staff would need to verify which business services were associated with which physical servers to isolate the particular server requiring more storage. This task could easily be fulfilled through IBM Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database (CCMDB), which tracks all IT inventory as it's deployed so that IT is always aware of exactly where, and how, technology is in place in the infrastructure. Here, too, Tivoli Monitoring would be applicable to verify the issue prior to creating a Request for Change (RFC).

At this point the Change Management team would receive the RFC—already aware of nearly every relevant aspect of the problem, and therefore requiring minimal time to evaluate and respond. And that response could take place through IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) and IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center, which work in conjunction to allow enterprise IT to dynamically allocate storage on an as-needed basis by pooling disk arrays and managing them centrally. Finally, response effectiveness is validated and the incident is closed in the tracking system.

What's the business outcome of this approach? What might have been a serious, even crippling technical problem affecting many users and core business services has been anticipated, addressed, and resolved through the help of the IBM Tivoli solutions working in cooperation to deliver an effective, optimized IT response via a governed business process.

Standardize Key Servers and Improve IT Services
Such an approach is also applicable to many other common IT situations which require a similarly efficient process. Imagine, for instance, that an enterprise IT infrastructure includes many dozens of servers which should, but don't always, have completely consistent software installed. The company's inability to update all servers consistently can lead to many different kinds of problems, up to and including security breaches, complete service failures, and others.

Toward resolving this situation, such a business might consider Tivoli Provisioning Manager (TPM), a world-class provisioning solution capable of distributing software to any node on the network, and, through autodiscovery features, determining which servers match the current patch list and which do not.

TPM, once deployed and configured, could quickly reveal servers with problematic software installations and e-mail an appropriate system administration manager who would then open a trouble ticket. The Incident Management team would investigate and classify the issue, opening an RFC for the Change Management team to resolve it.

Just as before, the problem has been discovered and reported by an IBM solution before any users could notice or any business impact could occur. And perhaps still more impressively, an even more automated response is possible because TPM can be customized to work automatically with service desk applications such as Tivoli Service Desk.

What had been a complex technical problem ranging across multiple servers, a problem with potentially serious business consequences, has thus been reduced by the IBM Tivoli solutions to a mouse click. Following validation of the response, the incident would be closed