Automation Change Control Expert 2.0

Transcription

1 Product Brief Automation Change Control Expert 2.0 Arbiter Software Automation Change Control Expert TM (ACCE TM ) provides object-level Lifecycle Management for CA Workload Automation AE (formerly CA AutoSys) resulting in end-to-end visibility and control over changes, improved security, and reduced risk. Change Management Plays a Critical Role for Workload Automation Deployments IT Operations teams are realizing the importance of applying lifecycle management practices to their workload automation solutions. As complex job processes and their dependencies span the enterprise, it s critical to understand who is making changes and what is being changed. Lifecycle Management has the same benefits for Workload Objects (Job Definitions for example) as it does for code modifications in Software Development. Change is a source of enterprise risk and batch workloads often support some of the most mission critical business processes in any company such as payroll, invoicing and supply chain management. Enterprise life cycle management solutions are meant to be generic in nature to be able to integrate with the plethora of applications organizations leverage. Because of this, many organizations today are ill equipped to manage changes within their workload management systems. As most Workload Automation solutions do not have native capabilities to manage change internally, companies either forgo managing lifecycle of Workload Objects, or they have several disparate applications loosely patched together. As a result, they do not have the visibility of changes across multiple environments nor can they ensure that any new or modified objects will be successful at run time. Whether it s a result of government regulations or management mandates that drive the need, Lifecycle Management is an often overlooked, yet still important, area for IT Operations teams to gain control of. Arbiter Software s Automation Change Control Expert provides that capability. Communication is Everything Given the great expansion of integrations of applications within organizations, Workload Automation solutions are now being pushed out to much wider audiences. IT Operations manage and administer centralized production automation systems, but IT departments often allow end users such as Application Development, System Administrators and DBA s control over their own workload definitions. There are also stakeholders without user rights that are keen to know the status of requested changes, deletions or the creation of batch or event-based processes. In a typical distributed WA environment, managers are not always aware of the number of changes, the type of changes or even if they are being reviewed by anyone other than the person making the change. When they are implemented without a review cycle or approval process, it decreases accuracy and increases the risk of downtime. In many cases, when changes are thrown into production without oversight it may be very difficult to find a resolution should a failure occur potentially resulting in increased cost or reduced revenue to the business.

2 Time is of the Essence The lack of Workload Automation change management systems has resulted in manual processes and workarounds which tend to have slow turnaround times. In a manual approach, it is difficult for employees to keep up with all the changes in SOPs, policies, and other critical documentation because the training processes are not connected to the rest of the quality control structure. In addition, manual processes may have an increased risk for error. The end result could mean a lack of follow-up, late notifications, tasks not completed by a deadline, missed SLAs and critical failures. Bridging The Gap While organizations are realizing the importance of some measure of change control in a Workload Automation environment, it is difficult to apply traditional Application Lifecycle Management tools or Source Control software to meet this need. CA Workload Automation, like many Workload Automation solutions, has a proprietary format for its scheduling language which makes integration with change management solutions very difficult. ACCE was built keeping the requirement to manage database level objects that were defined with proprietary languages in mind. New Features and Enhancements in ACCE 2.0 Figure 1 - ACCE Dashboard ACCE 2.0 offers a number of strategic and customer requested enhancements as well as improved performance and reliability. More critically, ACCE offers support for CA Workload Automation 11.3 which was a major product launch from our partner, CA Technologies Inc. CA s most recent release introduced new job types and events that leverage the advanced agent technology offered in CA WA Arbiter Software s support for these new job types is a significant enhancement as the product s ability to manage changing workloads offers the greatest return on investment. New workloads, such as those represented by the recent release of CA WA, require requirements collection, definition, testing and promotion. While these new capabilities represent a significant jump forward in realizing the potential of IT Automation software, they can place an interim burden on the change policies and staff resources of IT organizations. ACCE will help early adopters of CA s newest release manage these changes while also helping to evolve the management of legacy workloads. New Features Added in ACCE 2.0 Expanded database support to mirror the same supported databases as CA Workload Automation including Sybase MS SQL, Oracle and Oracle RAC. Full support of LDAP for security and authentication Multi-time zone support Validation enhancements CA WA 11.3 Agent Support Support for all new CA WA 11.3 Job Types

3 Management ACCE allows management to take back control of their workload automation environment by leveraging the following benefits: Automated Back-out ACCE s automated back out of changes allows the user to investigate and make an informed decision on what to recover and then let ACCE handle the resolution of the roll-back. Change Queue Set change queue limits on your staff with ACCE's queue balancer. ACCE can dynamically assign changes to the user with the least amount of work in their queue. Automated Validation Feel confident about your changes as ACCE automatically validates them prior to migrating them to production. Automated Migration Upon approval, ACCE will handle the migration of the change at approval or on a future date. ACCE will track the date and automatically migrate the changes when directed. Mapping Reduce change inaccuracies by leveraging ACCE's field mapping. This feature allows for migration from one environment to another without the manual effort. Simplified Mass Migrations You can select the option of requesting a mass change and ACCE will differentiate between that request and a single object request allowing quicker approvals and migrations. Archival of Prior Changes ACCE will version control the previous generation of an object as well as record all changes to multiple generations. Version control enables roll back while history enables auditing. Sendevent Action Approvals ACCE can monitor the status on commands such as Sendevent providing more oversight into who is requesting and performing job actions in your environment. Assurance In many cases, Schedulers do not have the time or ability to validate the accuracy of changes adequately before they are moved into production. Consequently, they may struggle maintain confidence that changes are being adequately tested before they are migrated into a production environment. This translates into needless downtime for the business. ACCE provides insight into all aspects of the change by performing syntax and testing validation of the change before anyone even looks at it. ACCE ensures the following concerns about testing and validation of changes have been addressed: What is Changing? ACCE highlights exactly what is being changed with side by side comparisons of the current job definition and the new job definition while color coding only the fields that are changing. ACCE takes away the need to manually search through fields to find what is being changed and to ensure accuracy. Has the Change Been Tested? ACCE performs job run validation on the previous environment to ensure testing has been performed. ACCE then provides a recommendation to the scheduler on whether the change should be migrated. Has the Change Been Approved? ACCE helps eliminate unapproved changes by blocking objects from being migrated until they have been through the administrator-defined approval process. Who was involved in each step? ACCE tracks all aspects of a change including: Who requested the change? Who moved the change into production? Who approved the change?

4 Monitoring Workload Automation has moved from an IT Operations tool to an enterprise wide automation platform. This has resulted in tremendous growth in environments and resulted in equivalently large impacts on change oversight. ACCE helps shed light on your environment by providing many pre-canned reports to help you gain more knowledge about what is really happening. Web Based UI ACCE is managed with a web based graphical interface to allow users the flexibility to make requests and check status without having to maintain a thick client. Charge Back Feature Who is using your WA tool the most and how do you determine what to charge back to the separate business units for it? ACCE has developed a charge back option that provides this report that categorizes the usage of your WA solution by displaying each application and a particular users utilization of the system. Weekly/Monthly/Yearly Changes Is your environment more active with changes at month end? Are there more changes on Friday or Monday? To better optimize a WA solution, you need to better predict activity in your environment. ACCE provides you with the information necessary to assist in staffing for the more active days by providing report metrics based on a weekly, monthly or yearly basis. Forecasting of Changes It's easy to forecast changes when there is a standardized move date and time. What about the ad-hoc or emergency changes? ACCE provides a forecast report to see which changes are queued and ready to be moved. Figure 2 Request Status Monitoring Dashboard The ACCE dashboard provides you with insight into all aspects of change. See why changes are stalled and not approved as well the status of the changes currently being worked on. It will also show how many changes are overdue by environment or by application. Notification Tired of changes being put in without any notification to the support staff? ACCE provides granular notification at all levels of a change from the request to the production migration. Change Progress Indicator With current change management solutions, it's very difficult to see where your request is in its lifecycle. With the ACCE progress indicator, you can see what percentage has been completed, what status your change is in and who is responsible for the hold up.

5 Security With the added breadth of capabilities offered in modern Workload Automation solutions, more users are now granted access to Workload Automation environments. With that access, corporate governance has the expectation that know more than just who is accessing the environment. Knowing what s being changed, when it s being changed is now required by most auditors. Can your current deployment provide this information for them? LDAP Integration Leverage the same groups and ID's that you have currently defined within your WA environment with ACCE s full support for LDAP security and authentication. The deployment of ACCE won t require you to change any of your current configurations. Chain of Command Who is responsible for signoff on a request? The chain of command setting in ACCE allows you to establish your own chain of command by selecting groups and IDs from LDAP to be a part of the approval process. The approval chain can have as little or as many users as you require. Auditing Audits have become increasingly granular in nature. Legacy commands in Workload Automation solutions may make it difficult to gather the appropriate data to appease the auditors. ACCE will enable proper auditing standards for Workload Objects to better support both compliance regulations and internal standards. Repeat Offenders Is the same group making the same mistakes over and over? ACCE provides a repeat offender report to easily identify your trouble spots so that you can provide more oversight and training. CHANGE Monitor Assure Manage Secure Arbiter Software LLC, 7449 South Street, Suite 2, Cottage Grove, MN T: 1(651) F: 1(651) Copyright 2011 Arbiter Software LLC. All rights reserved. Arbiter Software, ACCE, the Arbiter and ACCE logos and all other Arbiter product names and slogans are trademarks of Arbiter Software LLC. Other product names and/or slogans mentioned herein may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. Specifications and product offerings are subject to change without notice.