IBM Service Management

IBM IT Service Management (ITSM) helps organizations better manage their IT infrastructure, to more effectively and efficiently deliver IT services. IT Service Management comes to life through best practice process flows and Autonomic Computing. Building on self–managing autonomic capabilities at the ITSM level, not just at the resource level, IT Service Management solutions can help ensure IT service continuity by:

• optimizing IT costs by automating reactive IT management processes
• creating resilient IT services
• improving IT productivity with a predictive approach to IT management
• managing compliance and risk in the IT environment
• providing data integrity and audit readiness

At the core of the IBM IT Service Management strategy, the IBM Tivoli® Change and Configuration Management Database (CCMDB) provides an enterprise-ready configuration management database and platform, built on Self Managing Autonomic Technology. The Tivoli CCMDB helps you automatically discover and federate IT information spread across the enterprise, including details about servers, storage devices, networks, middleware, applications and data.

The Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database benefits your business by:

• Being a scalable platform for the implementation of successful IT service management initiatives
• Enabling you to better anticipate the impact of changes, lowering the business risks of service failures and inconsistencies
• Helping ensure compliance to internal and regulatory requirements by enforcing policies and tracking changes across your organization

By integrating, automating and optimizing data, workflows and policies, the Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database helps you align the ongoing management of your IT infrastructure with your business priorities. It simplifies architectural complexity and reducing incident and problem management costs.

Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database features include:

• A non-intrusive, agent-free discovery solution which provides fast, automated application discovery, deep configuration detail, enterprise class security and easy integration with other data sources, both in and out. Discovery includes a variety of computer systems, network devices, applications, middleware, and databases
• A portal interface to enabling users to create, assign, monitor, notify, act upon and report on change requests and configuration items leveraging a best practice ITIL process.
• A data integration capability so you can leverage existing investments in operational management products from IBM and other vendors to provide consolidated view of the infrastructure
• A toolkit to allow the creation of custom discovery library adapters and integration modules

Self Managing Autonomic Technology is a group of enabling technologies that support the automation and process changes necessary to deliver end to end IT Service Management solutions. These self managing technologies also make it possible for ISVs and business partners to integrate seamlessly with IBM ITSM solutions or enable their own ITSM solutions. The CCMCD is built using the following Self Managing Autonomic technology to ease integration and deployment:

Integrated Solutions Console - provides a UI framework that aggregates and integrates administrative consoles:

• A presentation framework for the consolidation of the ITSM administration console that allows all of the console components to be organized and delivered in one window
• One consistent user interface across the ITSM portfolio to improve integration and reduce training costs
• A sophisticated, context driven help system to consolidate information and make it easier to find
• Multiple task state maintenance to allow users to work on several tasks at once without losing their place
• A common user registry and authentication system to allow users to log on once to all the console components
• Launch-in-context capabilities to provide for integration with other IBM or 3rd party management tools
• The Integrated Solutions Console provides a uniform CCMDB Administration Portal, sophisticated, context driven help system, and a presentation framework for aggregation with future admin console solutions

IBM Autonomic Log and Trace Analyzer – provides a standardized encapsulation of system events using OASIS WSDM WEF(or Common Base Event, IBM's initial implementation) for consumption by autonomic managers and an analysis and correlation capability to simplify the diagnosis of problems within the ITSM infrastructure, processes, and integrated products by providing:

• The usage of Web Services Distributed Management Event Format (Common Base Events), a consistent format for creating and reporting system events by all components of ITSM
• The usage of the Generic Log Adapter to provide event adapters for existing product and system log files
• The usage of Log Analyzer for event viewing and correlation to assist human analysis when performing problem determination and root cause analysis and planning
• The IBM Autonomic Log and Trace Analyzer provides a consistent format for creating events, event adapters for "legacy" logs, and event viewing and correlation to automate the manual analysis process when performing problem determination and root cause analysis

IBM Autonomic Change Deployment Engine – provides standardized solution descriptors and solution life-cycle management to gain:

• A consistent methodology for describing software building blocks based on the IUDD specification
• Standardized dependency and integrity checking using the Deployment Engine runtime
• Relationship-based change management lifecycle checking
• Autonomic install, update, fix, uninstall, repair, rollback, commit solution management
• Remote multi-target installation for IBM middlware stack provided by COI and driven by user friendly GUI
• Simplified build process that uses platform independent install methodology via the IUDD spec and the Deployment Engine runtime
• Reduces cost of developing aggregated install and improves accuracy of install and solution maintenance.

• Autonomic Computing Problem Determination
• Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM)
• ITSM Home Page
• IBM Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database