HP OpenView Service Level Manager 5.0 software

Transcription

1 HP OpenView Service Level Manager 5.0 software Data sheet Meet the challenge of running IT as a business with HP OpenView Service Level Manager 5.0. This module of the HP OpenView Service Desk 5.0 a second-generation ITIL-based service desk solution helps you manage both business and operational services with service level agreements (SLAs) and operation level agreements (OLAs). With HP OpenView Service Level Manager 5.0, turn your IT into a customer-focused, competitive and optimized business. Key features and benefits Management of whole life cycle of SLAs and OLAs Flexible model featuring multi-domain, time-based, multi-tiered SLAs Graphical designer enabling easy service/sla design Compliance calculation engine, both near real-time and predictive Service/SLA compliance dashboard Service/SLA compliance smart reports Smart notifications (SLA jeopardy/violation) Out-of-the-box metric adapters for key HP OpenView products and third-party applications Auto-discovery of metrics Open metric adapter to link to any source of metrics Meet the challenge of running IT as a business with HP OpenView Service Level Manager 5.0. Manage both business and operational services with service level agreements (SLAs) and operation level agreements (OLAs), and turn your IT into a customer-focused, competitive and optimized business 1

2 Manage the life cycle of service levels HP OpenView Service Level Manager 5.0 is a module of the HP OpenView Service Desk 5.0 suite, which also includes Help Desk and Change Management modules. HP OpenView Service Desk 5.0 is the first HP OpenView product to benefit from the HP OpenView common architecture, database, reporting and GUI. This architecture has been designed to be shared over time with other key HP OpenView products to provide a comprehensive, integrated and seamless suite of IT management solutions across the enterprise. HP OpenView Service Level Manager 5.0 manages the life cycle of service levels definition, configuration, monitoring and compliance reporting. It handles all the aspects of service levels, from availability and performance, as they are perceived by customers, to how the support organization performs, including any other key indicators, such as time to fulfill service requests. HP OpenView Service Level Manager 5.0 allows the IT organization to anticipate outages and degradations critical to the business proactively and whenever a problem occurs and to act according to business priorities. HP OpenView Service Level Manager 5.0 also allows the IT organization to report on how it performs against OLAs and SLAs. What s more, HP OpenView Service Level Manager 5.0 is an effective communication tool between the IT organization and customers. At any time, the customers of IT services can themselves have access to SLA monitoring and reporting capabilities Product description SLM extends the common Service Desk data model HP OpenView Service Level Manager 5.0 is more than integrated with HP OpenView Service Desk 5.0, it is architected and built within HP OpenView Service Desk 5.0. HP OpenView Service Level Manager 5.0 supports an extended data model, on top of HP OpenView Service Desk s model. The Service Level Manager model includes additional attributes for common object types such as services, service definitions and configuration items (CIs), as well as additional object types such as metric adapters, metrics and objectives. CIs represent all the elements in an IT infrastructure that support a service, such as servers, applications and network elements. These additional object types and attributes enable you to specify the following information for the services you offer to customers: The metrics and objectives that determine the way each service is measured for compliance (availability but also any other metrics) The metrics and objectives that determine the way each CI, part of a service hierarchy, is measured for availability Details about the monitoring applications, management servers and metric adapters that provide metric values for each service and CI 2

3 Additional attributes in the extended object model hold the results of availability and compliance calculations, enabling users to monitor availability and compliance continuously throughout the evaluation period. HP OpenView Service Level Manager 5.0 shares the same data model with the other modules of Service Desk 5.0 and is accessible through the same GUI environment. This allows your service desk staff to benefit from the highest level of integration possible between SLM and the other ITSM processes, in a truly seamless way. Figure 1. The service designer. Designing services catalogs With HP OpenView Service Level Manager 5.0, individuals who design services can do so in a modular, reusable way. They can create a service definition and then instantiate it several times. There is no need to duplicate the work several times. Whenever a new service instance will be built from a particular service definition, the service instance will automatically inherit all the metrics and objectives associated with the service definition. HP OpenView Service Level Manager 5.0 also provides service design features that simplify the task of specifying metrics and objectives. This makes it easier to define all of the attributes of the service, minimizing oversights and errors. At the time of service definition, a graphical view displays the service definition hierarchy. This view shows whether the objects in the hierarchy are fully configured for use in an operational SLM environment. Figure 1 shows an example of a service definition hierarchy. When it comes time to instantiate a service from a service definition, a similar graphical view displays the service hierarchy of the service instance, generated from the service definition. This view shows whether the details of the metrics are fully specified. 3

4 To have availability and compliance calculations performed on a service hierarchy is as easy as relating the top-level service to an SLA. A service instantiated from the same service definition can relate to several SLAs. Conversely, it is possible to relate one SLA to several services. Using hierarchy filters to accelerate service design HP OpenView Service Level Manager 5.0 allows the service designer to automatically construct service hierarchies for SLM using CIs already defined in Service Desk s configuration management database (CMDB), along with their existing CI-to-CI relations and CI categories. This is achieved through service hierarchy filters, filtering service hierarchy elements as required. An interactive user interface enables the addition, modification and deletion of filter rules that determine which CMDB elements must be included in a service hierarchy for SLM. A graphical preview window displays the service hierarchy based on a specific base object and on the currently included filter rules. Service hierarchies can be trimmed by specifying leaf nodes, or elements that have no subordinate elements in the service hierarchy. This facility enables the exclusion of configuration items from availability and compliance calculations without deleting them from the CMDB. An example of such a configuration item might be a non-critical backup server. Metric data collection All availability and compliance calculations are based on metric data values collected from monitoring applications. HP OpenView Service Level Manager 5.0 provides off-the-shelf metric adapters that act as the interface between a monitoring application and the application. Calculation of availability and compliance Availability and compliance calculations are performed repeatedly throughout the evaluation period of an active SLA. Calculations are triggered by the receipt of metric data values delivered by the installed metric adapters. HP OpenView Service Level Manager 5.0 calculates the following: Absolute compliance status of active SLAs, services and individual compliance objectives The absolute compliance represents the status against a given objective. The status is categorized as either compliant, jeopardy or violated. Predicted compliance status of active SLAs, services and individual compliance objectives, projected from the present point in time to the end of the current evaluation period Predicted compliance status is also described as compliant, jeopardy or violated. It is automatically calculated according to a linear trend. Current availability of services and CIs. 4

5 Figure 2. The monitoring GUI. Recent-time availability and compliance monitoring HP OpenView Service Level Manager 5.0 offers a sophisticated GUI to monitor the service levels, according to the user profiles. This helps ensure the confidentiality of customer-sensitive information. Service managers, customer relationship managers and customer business managers can at any time view the compliance and availability of the services. Entry points in the GUI can be either SLAs or services. The near real-time calculations, made throughout the evaluation period, allow for confident reporting on the overall state of active services (it is never out of date by more than a few minutes). Figure 2 shows a screenshot of the monitoring GUI. Proactive monitoring With HP OpenView Service Level Manager 5.0, service desk support staff can proactively monitor the service levels, see exactly which part of the infrastructure or organization may cause a violation over time and address the potential violation before the customer s service is impacted. To facilitate this proactive management, HP OpenView Service Level Manager 5.0 introduces two key concepts: predictive compliance and jeopardy alarms. In the monitoring GUIs, the predictive compliance is automatically shown along with the absolute compliance. Before the absolute compliance is in jeopardy or worse, violated, the service support staff can get an understanding of the current trend with the predictive 5

6 compliance, which is automatically calculated. If the predictive compliance shows a jeopardy or a violation, the compliance is at risk and a proactive action may be required. Jeopardy thresholds can be set on both absolute and predictive compliance. They allow the users to set critical compliance values for which they want to be informed proactively (e.g. predictive availability compliance goes below 98 percent ). There can be up to three jeopardy thresholds for an SLA. Alarms and automated actions Because service support staff cannot spend their time in front of the monitoring GUI, HP OpenView Service Level Manager 5.0 allows for the setting of alarms to automatically notify key individuals of status changes affecting SLAs, services and configuration items (e.g., violation or jeopardy thresholds crossed). Types of status changes that trigger alarms can easily be tuned to meet the individual organization s requirements. Whenever a status change occurs, Service Level Manager automatically creates an incident of family alarm. The incident contains all the relevant information relating to the status change. Database rules can be created that act upon the generation of alarms caused by incidents. The rules that are created can trigger a variety of actions, such as sending an message to a service manager or workgroup specialist and generating an HP OpenView Operations message. Figure 3. SLM report. 6

7 Availability and compliance reporting HP OpenView Service Level Manager benefits from the HP OpenView unified reporting and out-of-the-box SLM reports to show how your IT organization delivers services and matches your business objectives. HP OpenView Service Level Manager 5.0 provides a set of pre-configured reports customized for service users, service customers, service designers, service managers and customer relationship managers. Reports can be produced on demand or scheduled at the end of the evaluation period (e.g. for an SLA), or on a daily, weekly or monthly basis (e.g. for a service). Some reports provide summary information, whereas others go into greater detail. When you generate a summary report and view it online, you can often drill down to more detailed graphical information by highlighting an individual line of interest. Reports may also include hyperlinks to other reports that show information from a different perspective. Figure 3 shows a typical compliance report. Not only SLAs but also OLAs IT operations may define and monitor services that are not necessarily linked to any customer. These are called operation level agreements (OLAs). OLAs correspond to agreements internal to the IT organization on objectives to meet or exceed. They may be put in place as a first step before committing to formal SLAs with customers, or may co-exist with SLAs and focus on particular subsets of critical shared IT resources, often referred to as operational services. Unlike the business services, the operational services are not known by people outside the IT organization. They relate to IT components that are critical to the business, such as shared databases. Service levels for the operational services (i.e., OLAs) can be monitored with HP OpenView Service Level Manager 5.0 in a way quite similar to SLAs. Service hours and planned downtime HP OpenView Service Level Manager 5.0 allows for the specification of service hours. SLA compliance is calculated based upon these service hours, which leaves room for IT operations to carry out maintenance actions outside service hours whenever needed. Moreover, it is also possible for IT operations to define planned downtimes for a CI i.e. for buffers of time available to proceed to maintenance actions during service hours without impacting the SLA compliance. Planned downtimes offer a model less rigid then service hours for maintenance actions. Multi-tiered SLAs HP OpenView Service Level Manager 5.0 can accommodate hierarchies of services. Each service in the hierarchy can be linked to one or several SLAs and OLAs. In such hierarchies, the model allows the users to define services that can be provided either internally or 7

8 externally. In other words, services can either be insourced (managed by a subdivision of the same organization or a regional entity), or outsourced. One typical use of hierarchy of services is when an IT organization wants to comply with SLAs at a national or corporate level, while the service relies on several underlying services provided and managed at a lower level (e.g., regional). The upper and lower organizations may have different OLAs and SLAs then. HP OpenView Service Level Manager 5.0 is capable of taking into account such cases in the way it calculates the availability status of every service for each SLA. If a given service relies on lower-level services, the availability status of the service, for a given SLA, will depend on the underlying services, as if they were CIs. If an underlying service has several SLAs, the most stringent availability status will be used in the calculation. The calculation rules are configurable. Another motivation of creating hierarchies of services is to express a dependency on outsourced services. With HP OpenView Service Level Manager 5.0, it is possible to define service hierarchies, including outsourced services. A virtual CI can then be attached to the outsourced service, on which an SLA and an availability metric is defined. This metric provides the availability status of the outsourced service. It is then possible to determine the availability of a service relying on one or several outsourced services. Out-of-the-box service definitions and SLAs HP OpenView Service Level Manager 5.0 can be provided with predefined service definitions and SLA templates for key use cases. This capability will steadily be introduced over time, providing customers with a comprehensive set of SLA templates that over time will make SLA definition even easier and quicker. Please contact your local HP representative to get the latest list of service definitions and SLAs available. An integrated solution within HP OpenView One of the foundational aspects of HP OpenView Service Level Manager 5.0 is its ability to calculate the compliance of services against SLAs. To achieve this, it needs to regularly receive metric values from data sources. HP OpenView Service Level Manager 5.0 can plug and play with HP OpenView Help Desk Manager, HP OpenView Internet Services, HP OpenView Operations/Service Navigator and HP OpenView Performance Manager, thanks to out-of-the-box metric adapters. These metric adapters are delivered with HP OpenView Service Level Manager 5.0. The metric adapters for the HP OpenView products benefit from an auto-discovery feature that allows HP OpenView Service Level Manager 5.0 to automatically populate its database with the CI metrics to be measured (an intermediary step allows users to filter out metrics not used in SLAs). New metric adapters, for HP OpenView and non-hp OpenView products, will be available on a regular basis. For information on the current list of available metric adapters, as well as the versions of the products compatible with the metric adapters, contact your local HP representative. 8

9 Open adapter to get metrics from anywhere HP OpenView Service Level Manager 5.0 uses the adapter technology to offer customers a way to gather new metric values from any external sources, such as probes, applications, databases, flat files and message buses. Specifically, it uses an open source product called openadapter ( Because it is open source, openadapter has many adapters for many data sources, including flat files, databases, JMS, TIBCO, MQSeries and FTP. 9

10 Powerful features Features Comprehensive ITIL-based solution to manage SLAs and OLAs, including: Multi-domain service levels (availability, performance, support, etc.) Time-based service levels (on service hours, etc.) Multi-tiered service levels (on hierarchies of services) Complete SLA life cycle coverage Graphical service/sla designer Benefits HP OpenView Service Level Manager 5.0 allows for defining and managing all needs for SLAs and OLAs SLAs allow for setting clear expectations between the IT organization and its customers OLAs can be either first steps before committing to SLAs or can coexist with SLAs, focusing on particular subsets of critical IT resources Enables seamless start-to-finish SLA management Delivers unmatched usability to define and instantiate services and SLAs Enables reusability to dramatically decrease implementation time, thanks to the concept of service definitions Provides great flexibility in the design steps Role-based GUI Increases the security and confidentiality of customer-sensitive information Enhances the user experience Service/SLA compliance monitoring Allows the IT organization to detect in near real-time outages and degradations that are critical to the business, and whenever a problem occurs, to react according to business priorities Provides an effective communication tool between the IT organization and its customers Helps decrease costs by avoiding systematic over-provisioning Gives guidance on where there is a need to fix infrastructure and/or processes such as support Predictive SLA compliance calculation Smart notifications Service/SLA compliance smart reports By providing trends, allows for proactively addressing outages and degradations really critical to the business Allows staff to be proactively informed in a asynchronous way, at any time, anywhere, without having to monitor service levels Provides an effective communication tool for the IT organization, executives and customers Guides IT investment priorities for SLA compliance Out-of-the-box metric adapters for key HP OpenView products and third parties Open metric adapter Enables quicker deployment and very low total cost of ownership Provides metric auto-discovery for a plug and play approach Interfaces to any source, which brings flexibility in the implementation, quicker deployment, and easiness to find qualified staff 10

11 Linking IT to the business A key component of management solutions for the Adaptive Enterprise HP OpenView Service Level Manager 5.0 is a key component of HP s management solution for the Adaptive Enterprise, providing the strategic linkage of IT to the business. It achieves this by: Being an integral part of HP OpenView Service Desk 5.0 and its CMDB, the core component in HP s ITSM solution Enabling an outstanding SLA-based total customer experience for increased customer satisfaction Allowing for a right balance between IT investments and business expectations (service levels are tangible objectives to meet for IT) Enabling the optimization of IT services, thus making IT more competitive Serving as a foundation for the business impact assessment of service level violations, in concert with HP OpenView Business Process Insight Synergy with HP OpenView Business Service Management HP OpenView Business Process Insight works synergistically with HP s IT Service Management (ITSM) solution. HP OpenView Business Process Insight monitors the health of business processes through linkage to the SLAs and OLAs and the underpinning infrastructure. Should a business process s health fall below the required standard, the processes and technology provided by ITSM can be used to automatically recover the service to the required level, minimizing the effect on the business units. A complete solution Get the most from your software investment HP provides high-quality software services that address all aspects of your software application life-cycle needs. With HP, you have access to standards-based, modular, multiplatform software coupled with best-in-class services and support. The wide range of HP service offerings from online self-solve support to proactive mission-critical services enables you to choose the services that best match your business needs. For an overview of HP software services, visit: To access technical interactive support, visit Software Support Online at: 11

12 To learn more about HP Software Customer Connection, a one-stop information and learning portal for software products and services, visit: Comprehensive training HP provides a comprehensive curriculum of HP OpenView and IT Service Management courses. These offerings provide the training you need to realize the full potential of your HP solutions, increase your network optimization and responsiveness, and achieve better return on your IT investments. With more than 25 years experience meeting complex education challenges worldwide, HP knows training. This experience, coupled with unique insights into HP OpenView software, positions HP to deliver the optimum training experience. For more information about these educational courses, visit The smartest way to invest in IT HP Financial Services provides innovative financing and financial asset management programs to help you cost-effectively acquire, manage and ultimately retire your HP solutions. For more information on these services, please contact your HP sales representative or find us on the web at: 12

13 Technical specifications System requirements Hardware Software Please refer to the installation guide Please refer to the installation guide Operating system support for GUI client Windows 2000 SP4 and XP SP2 SP2 (32 bits) HP-UX and For other operating systems such as HP-UX Itanium and Solaris, please contact your HP OpenView sales representative. Operating system support for application server Windows 2000 and 2003 (32 bits) HP-UX and Java platform Java 2 platform For other operating systems such as HP-UX Itanium and Solaris, please contact your HP OpenView sales representative. Database Oracle 9.2 and 10g Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Reporting application (optional) HP OpenView Performance Insight 5.1 Ordering information For ordering and configuration information for HP OpenView Service Level Manager 5.0, contact your HP OpenView sales representative. Or to learn more about this and other HP OpenView products, visit: Copyright 2004, 2005 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein. Java is a U.S. trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc. Intel and Itanium are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. Linux is a U.S. registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Microsoft, Windows and Windows NT are U.S. registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Oracle is a registered U.S. trademark of Oracle Corporation, Redwood City, California. For more information, visit 4AA0-3187ENW, December