vscope by InfraSight Labs

Transcription

1 vscope and ITIL 1

2 vscope by InfraSight Labs vscope makes IT departments work smarter and more efficient. It is a fasttrack to gain comprehensive insights into IT, enabling companies to save costs and reduce their risks. vscope provides a clear and understandable overview of all IT resources in one single place. A powerful auto-updating baseline documentation database of configurations and performance metrics with full history, trends and delta comparisons. Regardless if the user is a CIO or a technician, vscope is a one go-to tool for: Baseline documentation with ability to get quick insights into the IT Infrastructure in a business intelligence-like way, with drill-downs, graphical and table views, search, categorizations and more! License planning and optimization Capacity planning, optimization and budgeting Chargeback & billing Compliance Internal/external audit and due diligence General problem solving Basic monitoring and metering Under the hood vscope is built upon InfraSight Labs data modeling technology - a powerful next generation CMDB. vscope is as easy to use as it is powerful. The application is automatically keeping a timerevisioned view of the infrastructure, merging together data from multiple platforms and technologies, without using any agents. The database keeps track of relations and dependencies, and is equipped with a patent pending smart tagging technique to add business-context meta-data to objects. Furthermore it comes with a powerful compliance engine for automatic testing of wanted and unwanted states and configurations, out-of-the box and customizable reporting and distribution to those who need it. Getting started Getting started with vscope is easy. We mean: Really easy. The application is installed and running in only a few minutes! And vscope is sold as a subscription, without any large upfront investments. Pricing is flexible and follows the size of the infrastructure. Service, support and free upgrades are included. This makes vscope a perfect choice for companies of any size

3 vscope and ITIL ITIL can be easy. This whitepaper shows how vscope by InfraSight Labs relates to ITIL and how it can be used to support the ITIL framework. While vscope is not a full-fledged ITILsoftware, it is still a simple, yet powerful support for companies wanting to adapt to ITIL very small efforts. Any company, regardless of size, can start gaining benefits with vscope in a few minutes! "InfraSight Labs has really managed to create a simple and easy-to-use tool to support important parts of ITIL - especially configuration management. It's fascinating to see how far vscope can take, especially small and medium sized companies, in supporting ITIL with extremely small efforts. Through its structured flexibility and automatic discovery tools, vscope really is ITIL in practice!" -Klas Skogmar, ITIL Service Manager and ITIL Trainer, Arkatay Consulting 3

4 A practical approach to ITIL ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is a collection of best practice coming from many years experience of IT operations in many companies, focusing on aligning IT services with the needs of business. It allows the organization to establish a baseline from which it can plan, implement, and measure. It is used to demonstrate compliance and to measure improvement. Today, ITIL is the most widely adopted approach for IT Service Management in the world. ITIL provides a practical, no-nonsense framework for identifying, planning, delivering and supporting IT services to the business ( ITIL is not a standard, and there is no ITIL blueprint. Unlike what many think, companies may implement ITIL just the way it works out best for them. IT departments probably know best already how the company works and how to best support it when it comes to IT. There are many products out there supporting the ITIL-framework in different ways, but since it is up to each company to decide how to best implement it, there is no specific benchmark that these products can be compliant to. A common misunderstanding is that only large corporations use ITIL. The fact is that anyone can implement ITIL. It is just all about keeping it simple and do the things that make most sense. All there is to it is to have a good knowledge about the IT, and plan ahead in good order. vscope can help in gaining this knowledge fast and cost efficiently. ITIL is process oriented, and not a project. A project is a time limited effort to get something done once. Like upgrading a software or building a house. Once the house is built or the software is upgraded, the project has finished and there is no need to think more about it. When it comes to ITIL, one should look at it as of a number of processes that incorporate into the daily operations. A process never stops. If you look at implementing ITIL as a project, you are likely to fail. However, if you start small and adapt the parts of the ITILframework that makes sense to you in your day-to-day work, you will see that even small changes can have big impact! While vscope was not originally built around ITIL, it is still a simple yet powerful support to many of the fundamental processes in ITIL, which is up and running with small efforts. Any company, regardless of size, can start gaining benefits with vscope in a few minutes! 4

5 The CMDB In ITIL, the Asset and Configuration Management (SACM) process plays a fundamental role. An important tool to support this process is a Content Management System (CMS) or, as mostly referred to, the Configuration Management Database (CMDB). ITIL or not, understanding IT resources is key to succeed in any IT operations. With no understanding, you are planning with blindfolds on. The CMDB is your starting point for understanding The foundation of vscope is a powerful CMDB built upon a NOSQL graph database framework together with InfraSight Labs patent pending tagging technology. vscope comes with a versatile easy-to-use user interface to make the infrastructure data easily accessible and customizable. Like a flight-recorder, vscope automatically records configuration and performance metrics from the IT infrastructure is a simple yet powerful way. Browse the vscope database easily and tailor your view using your own live data. vscope is different than many other CMDBs in various ways. Below are some highlights worth mentioning: Automation of discovery and population by design. Read-only and agent less for fast and safe installation (minutes, not hours, not days) Full history and traceability of configurations and performance metrics. Browse back to past configurations. Compare time states. Trend metrics Merging multiple platforms and silos. Cleverly combines the results into one unified database model of the infrastructure Relationships and dependencies Smart rule-based tagging of resources. Putting them into business context. Powerful customized and out-of-the box reporting on live data. Distribution to deliver understanding to those who need it when they need it! Open API access. Integrate to SharePoint, Billing-systems, ticketing systems, etc Automatic testing capabilities in vscope s Compliance engine Extremely low Total Cost of Ownership 5

6 Companies may use vscope as their ultimate CMDB, or as a complement to other products. In its simplest form, vscope replaces the traditional spreadsheet documentation still used at many IT departments. vscope is extremely versatile and runs on several platforms and configurations: Windows, Linux and Mac Fixed Datacenter installation or Walk-Around -installation on Laptop/Client 6

7 Capacity planning and optimization The primary goal in ITIL s Capacity Management process is to ensure that IT capacity meets current and future business requirements in a cost-effective manner. vscope can assist in this work, and especially in the part of ITIL that is referred to as Component Capacity Management. vscope can serve correct and updated KPIs on almost anything in the datacenter. It gives a historical view where it is possible to trace back any metric see how it has evolved over time. With correct information at hand continuous optimization of the datacenter becomes much easier, and so does budgeting and planning for new investments. Example1: Comparing load and provisioning on a VMware host between 25 October 2011 and 21 March The result can for example be used for optimization purposes or for budgeting. Example2: Following up storage capacity on a VMware datastore. Based on historical usage, vscope reports the average fill rate and predicts when it is about to be full. 7

8 Release- and Change management Release- and Change management in ITIL are closely related. Release management is planning and execution of changes carried out in the best possible way to avoid any disturbance for the users. Change management is a process for controlled authorization of the changes. Throughout these processes, documentation and traceability is important. Release management is Planning and Execution Change management is authorizing the changes and maintain traceability Plan your changes using vscope. Execute in your normal tools. Document your doing automatically in vscope. And use vscope to verify that the doing was correct and historically trace the changes. Gathering a solid and correct understanding of the infrastructure is a good start for planning any change. This is also supporting risk management and prioritization. vscope automatically keeps track of relationships and dependencies between objects in the datacenter, letting users relate anything to anything, across platforms and traditional silo boundaries, in a business intelligence-like way with a few clicks. It gives the user a unique helicopter view of the datacenter, making vscope a perfect tool to plan ahead for any change. Example: When upgrading VMware tools, servers need to be restarted for the changes to take effect. In a few clicks, vscope shows exactly which servers that are subject to the upgrade, what applications that are running on them, and what business units that are affected. vscope can also see which other servers that are associated with the same applications. With this information at hand, planning activity becomes efficient in itself and the result is likely to be more accurate. 8

9 But it does not stop here. In a fully automated process, vscope automatically records the datacenter over time. Press the REC -button, and there is no need to do anything else to capture changes of both configuration and performance metrics. With full traceability of all historical changes in the datacenter it is easy to verify current and historical configurations at any time. Users can easily browse back to a historical state of the IT documentation to see what it looked like at a certain point in time. It is also possible to compare any two times to see what the changes between them are. The vscope time-bar at the bottom lets the user slide back to any desired historical state. Clicking the Delta-view button will set the program in a state where the two times selected are compared and changes are highlighted. With vscope Note-tag, comments can be easily annotated to elements like servers, switches, storage etc. Notes are time-revisioned (just like any other discovered change in vscope), so that they can be historically traced. Tags labels used for sorting and analysis. Tags are time revisioned, just like Notes. 9

10 Problem management Just like Release- and Change management are connected, Problem- and Incident, management are similarly related to each other. Problem management in ITIL is about finding root causes to incidents and make sure they do not happen again. Recurring incidents are defined as problems. Problem management is about proactive planning to avoid future problems Incident management about solving actual incidents Proactive IT management with vscope Compliance engine vscope can help proactively find problems before they are affecting the organization. With the powerful Compliance engine, vscope automatically detects potential problems like configurations inconsistencies or unwanted configurations, predicting when disks and datastores are becoming full etc. These compliance rules may also have a closer business context, such as finding resources without any SLA or business unit, or highlight when a certain configuration for a certain application is not on par. Incorporating vscope compliance testing into your daily operations will facilitate proactive problem management and continuous improvements. 10

11 See things from a different angle vscope serves as an alternative eye into your IT, enabling you to see things from a different angle. Most possibly there are already a number of consoles and management tools available in the datacenter. But these are often tailored for specific systems only. vscope gives a unique way of seeing them in all one consolidated view, verify their configurations and how they perform with new eyes. vscope users often experience that just browsing the datacenter in this way enables them to find potential problems or inconsistencies they would not have captured otherwise, or faster than with other means. vscope presents data in seconds that would otherwise require several hours of manual work to dig through, compile and present. Basic monitoring in vscope When it comes to finding actual incidents or actual states here and now, ITIL refers to Event management. Traditional tools to support this process are monitoring tools. vscope is not a traditional monitoring tool per se, but for many, it is still a good enough for monitoring since it helps keeping track of slow metrics, like predicting when disks or datastores will become full. However, if the IT operation requires a 24/7 monitoring by the minute, a full-fledged monitoring system is recommended as a complement. While a full monitoring solution will give alarms when something goes wrong, vscope will provide the map of the infrastructure and help find the root cause quicker. 11

12 Incident management and Service desk Incident management is about solving actual incidents A tool for 1 st and 2 nd line support vscope is a perfect tool for any first and second line support organization. It gives an up-todate and accurate picture of current- and historical states as well as a delta comparison between them the IT to the people who are set out to solve problems when they occur. With vscope at hand, a support technician may significantly reduce the time needed to find the root cause of the problem by e.g. tracking all recent changes on a certain application or service. Notes and comments, as previously shown, provide help for various people involved. Integration to other systems Working according to ITIL does not require having a full service desk or a ticketing system. For companies of a certain size it does of course help. vscope does not include such system, but it is possible to integrate the data and the findings from vscope into other systems via an open API. This combines the power of a professional ticketing system with the strengths in the vscope database and compliance engine. As an example, vscope can automatically detect problems with its compliance engine, open tickets in a ticketing system when a problem is found and later close it automatically when the problem is fixed. Risk Management Baseline documentation for recovery Since vscope is recording your IT automatically, it can be used to function as a baseline documentation of configurations, in the case one would ever need to recover from a serious problem. Besides being much faster and simpler to create, the benefit with this documentation is that it is more accurate and detailed, compared to a manually updated CMDB or spreadsheet. 12

13 More than ITIL ITIL is a framework for structured and successful IT management. This whitepaper shows how vscope can be used to support the ITIL thinking in a simple way. But remember that vscope is much more than this. vscope makes IT departments work smarter and more efficient. It is a fasttrack to gain comprehensive insights into IT, which is useful in all IT management. This whitepaper was first published , reflecting vscope version v ITIL is a registered trade mark of the Cabinet Office. vscope is a registered trade mark of InfraSight Labs AB. 13