IBM consolidated operations management solutions To support your business objectives Improve end-to-end management with IBM consolidated operations management solutions.
Accelerate operations with a single pane of glass that delivers end-to-end visibility. IBM was selected a Leader by Gartner in their Event Correlation and Analysis Magic Quadrant for Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute. Consider these facts: IBM consolidated operations management solutions provide the broadest management scope from a single pane of glass of any solution on the market. IBM offers the only solution that can scale to tens of millions of events per day, integrate and leverage existing investments in IBM and thirdparty tools, and help speed identification and resolution of problems through advanced correlation. IBM also provides the broadest range of integrated domain-specific management in the industry, including SOA, transaction, mainframe and business activity monitoring capabilities. IBM consolidated operations management solutions leverage IBM portal capabilities to deliver real-time and historical event views, performance metrics, changes and more in context and for any operational audience.
Why are these facts critical? For today s managers, the reasons are clear. Operations are under tremendous pressures to deliver new, next-generation services more quickly than ever before. At the same time, lines of business (LOBs) and customers demand more services and service level agreements (SLAs) to ensure that they receive the service quality they expect. These challenges are further compounded through increased regulatory and audit requirements that often require budget and labor shifts from more strategic growth initiatives. With IBM, organizations can gain accurate, timely and deep visibility across operational silos, tools and staff without ripping and replacing existing tools and processes. Even better, IBM consolidated operations management solutions can leverage and integrate with hundreds of IBM and thirdparty tools for discovery, monitoring, event management, provisioning and service desk support, as well as change and configuration management databases (CMDBs). The result is a powerful yet flexible solution to help quickly and easily identify and resolve problems, streamline operations and meet the rigorous, complex service demands of today. An integrated, ultrascalable manager-of-managers solution As organizations evolve from silo-centric to service-centric operations, they need to develop a common manager-ofmanagers view that integrates various monitoring tools across multiple management domains, including distributed data centers, network operations centers (NOCs), security operations centers (SOCs) and other areas. IBM consolidated operations management solutions are designed to leverage existing investments in IBM and thirdparty management tools for a broad variety of domains. IBM solutions offer hundreds of out-of-the-box integrations with tools such as BMC Patrol, HP OpenView, NetIQ, CA Unicenter and many others. Integrations are also available for helpdesk systems, operational support systems (OSS), CMDBs, inventory systems, customer relationship management (CRM) applications, event buses and many more ensuring seamless, cost-effective interoperability and improved return on those investments. IBM consolidated operations management solutions also feature an ultrascalable event engine. Organizations can use their powerful manager-of-managers view and advanced out-of-the-box correlation to streamline the management of vast volumes of events across multiple sources all under a single umbrella. By efficiently leveraging existing investments in IBM and third-party tools, IBM improves the return on existing tools and also enables a controlled, strategic and flexible assimilation, migration or reduction in the number of data centers, NOCs and SOCs. Organizations can also implement a follow-the-sun management approach that includes a global management console used by staff at any location around the world, making more effective use of available resources.
[IBM Tivoli] Netcool is widely used as a manager of managers because it is capable of integrating and consolidating data from a broad range of third-party management products that are already deployed. Gartner Magic Quadrant IBM consolidated operations management solutions provide deep visibility across platforms, applications and networks for enhanced operations and service delivery. A flexible interface for more effective management A customizable, Web-based interface allows you to integrate, visualize and report end-to-end event and performance metrics across IBM Tivoli and third-party management tools. Events are automatically collected, consolidated and correlated. Integration within the Tivoli common portal allows for display of real-time and historical metrics in context, speeding resolution of service infrastructure problems. This central point of management allows you to proactively monitor and optimize the availability, performance and integrity of the entire service infrastructure across transaction, application, system, network, mainframe, storage and security domains. Consolidated views of distributed intelligence IBM consolidated operations management solutions also offer a unique customizable operator view that can collect and display distributed data in real time, in context and across multiple sources. These sources can include business systems (for example, enterprise resource planning), service desks, databases or virtually any IBM, third-party or custom application. For the first time, operators have at their fingertips a single virtualized, contextual view of information that would otherwise have to be manually collected and correlated from many different sources.
The virtualized operator view enables users to access information from across distributed data sources including change history, problem resolution history, contact/support details, configuration details, events and trouble tickets in a single contextual view. In addition, organizations can take action directly from a single, Web-based reference point by triggering contextual automations. These capabilities can be used to automate tasks in support of IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL ), etom and other best practices across operational lines and functional roles. Real-time visibility with business service dashboards IBM consolidated operations management solutions offer outof-the-box integration with IBM business service management solutions, further enhancing operations with service-centric capabilities that include real-time business service dashboards. This means that executives, LOB managers, operations personnel and customers can gain real-time visibility into the status of vital services, business processes and other key performance indicators (KPIs). Real-time service modeling, business impact analysis, root-cause analysis and service level tracking allow operations staff to quickly identify and resolve service problems. Furthermore, balanced scorecards provide real-time visibility into KPIs while service level tracking ensures that operations
IBM was ranked Leader for the advanced capabilities provided by IBM business service management solutions in Forrester s 2007 Business Service Management Wave report. Business service dashboards provide visibility into real-time service health, integrity, dependencies and KPIs needed to deliver against operational objectives, including SLA tracking, impact and root-cause analysis, event views, business activity and workflow metrics. staff have the information they need to manage and prioritize according to operational objectives. Highly customizable, these dashboards provide a richly detailed array of real-time KPIs, scorecards, graphical views, SLAs, event lists and more that can be tailored to meet the intelligence requirements of business and operational users. Comprehensive, end-to-end monitoring IBM offers the broadest range of integrated domain-specific management capabilities in the industry, helping organizations achieve a new level of management for their complex service infrastructures. As service infrastructures change, organizations can leverage and rapidly integrate IBM s specialized domain-specific monitoring and analysis in a modular fashion, helping to address their specific environment and business requirements.
IBM domain-specific management capabilities include the following: Transaction monitoring: IBM solutions monitor and analyze end-user response time, Internet services, services enabled through service oriented architecture (SOA) and more (for example, DHCP, Dial, FTP, HTTP, Java EE,.NET, IBM CICS and IBM IMS ). They automatically visualize and measure the transaction s path through application systems, including response-time contributions of each step. Transaction monitoring also proactively recognizes, isolates and resolves transaction performance problems using robotic and realtime techniques. Storage monitoring: IBM offers integration with IBM and third-party storage offerings. Through these integrations and our own direct monitoring capabilities for storage environments, operators can collect and analyze all relevant information on the availability, performance and integrity of storage-related configuration items (CIs). Security monitoring: The IBM security information and event management (SIEM) solution collects security-specific event data from over 100 different products. It also leverages the security-related data collected directly by the IBM cross-domain manager of managers, providing a wealth of information via a shared collection point. Application and system monitoring: IBM solutions monitor and analyze IT infrastructure health, including operating systems, databases and servers across distributed and host environments such as e-mail systems; Microsoft Active Directory ; databases such as IBM DB2, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and Sybase; ERP solutions; Microsoft Cluster Server; and virtual servers. Mainframe monitoring: IBM solutions monitor and analyze IBM System z Parallel Sysplex, IBM z/os and IBM OS/390 systems, providing comprehensive information about components such as Workload Manager, Coupling Facility, Cross System Coupling Facility (XCF), Global Enqueue and shared direct access storage device (DASD). Network monitoring: IBM solutions discover, map and monitor layer 1 through layer 3 networks, including logical and physical environments across all major hardware vendors. Automated root-cause analysis quickly identifies the source of the problem down to the specific port and suppresses symptomatic events. Performance monitoring: Performance monitoring is accomplished across the aforementioned domains and can be delivered in context with events through the Tivoli common portal and through right-click access from the event manager of managers. Performance-related information is processed against intelligent threshold criteria, including critical threshold crossed, SLAs, significant deviation from baseline and duration of a specified time period. Change monitoring: In addition to business activity monitoring capabilities described above, IBM also has the ability to generate change events using its discovery and change tracking engine. As changes occur to configuration, change events are generated and then sent to the event manager of managers. Users also have right-click access to change history reports.
IBM network management software discovers, models and maps logical and physical network relationships. It automatically builds and maintains a knowledge base of network connectivity that enables advanced root-cause analysis and enhanced asset control. Business activity and KPI monitoring: IBM offers its own advanced set of real-time business activity monitoring capabilities that can look at event buses, Web services, databases, log files, business applications and more. This monitoring enables the collection and calculation of real-time business and operational KPIs. Advanced correlation Multiple events happening in rapid succession can signal a serious problem or could simply be the result of normal operations. IBM consolidated operations management solutions offer a wide range of automated correlation capabilities that can greatly reduce event volume in many cases from tens of millions down to a few hundred events to dramatically improve staff productivity and overall service availability. Deduplication and state-based correlation: IBM consolidated operations management solutions provide automated, out-of-the-box deduplication and state-based correlation. Like events are reflected as a single event with the corresponding number for reference via deduplication. During the collection process, probes and monitors analyze the incoming events and classify them as problem or resolution events. A series of automations provide the state-based correlation needed for problem and resolution events to be properly associated and cleared as appropriate.
Topology-based correlation: IBM consolidated operations management solutions can leverage the topology model provided by IBM network management software to perform automated, topology-based, root-cause analysis against events collected by the event manager of managers. This level of integration can be applied to greatly reduce symptomatic events and speed mean time to resolution. Automated host-level correlation: IBM consolidated operations management solutions have the ability to automate host- and device-level correlation (or microcorrelation ) that looks for deviations from expected behavior at the host/device level. Causal-based correlation: IBM consolidated operations management solutions support the creation of advanced correlation based on any range of user-defined criteria. These capabilities are in addition to the hundreds of out-of-the-box correlations provided by the IBM Tivoli Netcool Knowledge Library. Extensive analysis, reporting and automation Along with correlation, IBM consolidated operations management solutions provide a wealth of other tools to optimize and automate information gathering and analysis. Event enrichment: IBM consolidated operations management solutions can dynamically enrich events with business, customer and other vital contextual data from a wide range of sources. These sources include databases, provisioning and inventory systems, trouble ticketing systems, event buses, SOAs and other sources. Through the enrichment of events, operations staff are armed with the vital information they need to manage problems more quickly and easily and to define automated correlation based on contextual information (for example, scheduled downtime).
Change tracking and reporting: By leveraging integrated discovery capabilities, IBM consolidated operations management solutions benefit from change tracking reports across application, system, network and other service infrastructure dependencies. From the event console, operations staff can right-click and see detailed change history reports and configuration details in context, helping identify the root cause of change-related problems. They can also select custom automated actions, helping speed problem resolution (for example, restoring prior configuration). Service level reporting: With comprehensive, real-time and historical SLA reporting capabilities, organizations can define and track compliance with service levels. These reports allow staff to watch SLA compliance for application and service infrastructure configuration items, services, processes and transactions. Staff can receive early warnings of potential SLA breaches, leverage trend data for SLA planning and automate delivery of SLA reports to executives, operations staff and customers. Advanced automation: Typically, operators diagnose and resolve one alarm at a time leaving several other alarms sitting in a queue for lengthy periods. IBM consolidated operations management solutions help organizations improve the efficiency of their problem resolution efforts by providing an advanced capability for automating corrective event correlation and actions to common problems. These automations can be customized to perform any type of action based on user requirements and can leverage realtime data from virtually any source to trigger a variety of contextually related automations. Tivoli Netcool Knowledge Library: This extensive library provides a set of formally tested, ready-to-run rules for specific devices that identify which alarms indicate actual failures. This allows repair efforts to focus on the issues or root causes that truly affect operation of the infrastructure, without the distraction of the symptomatic or informational events. 10
Build the right foundation for end-to-end service management To bring new services to market, organizations need to effectively create and manage value throughout the entire service life cycle. Building on the single-pane-of-glass approach of IBM consolidated operations management solutions, IBM can provide a comprehensive and modular approach to managing the full service life cycle from initial service provisioning and ongoing service upgrades to service desk and final retirement. IBM offers the broadest range of process managers that integrate IBM and third-party tools, best practices and workflow automation across service delivery and support processes, to improve operational efficiency and end-to-end service management. For more information To learn more about IBM consolidated operations management solutions, contact your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit ibm.com 11
Copyright IBM Corporation 2007 IBM Corporation Software Group Route 100 Somers, NY 10589 U.S.A. Produced in the United States of America 9-07 All Rights Reserved CICS, DB2, IBM, the IBM logo, IMS, Netcool, OS/390, Parallel Sysplex, System z, Tivoli and z/os are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries or both. IT Infrastructure Library is a registered trademark of the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency which is now part of the Office of Government Commerce. Active Directory, Microsoft and SQL Server are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States, other countries or both. ITIL is a registered trademark, and a registered community trademark of the Office of Government Commerce, and is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Java and all Java-based trademarks are trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States, other countries or both. Other company, product and service names may be trademarks or service marks of others. Disclaimer: The customer is responsible for ensuring compliance with legal requirements. It is the customer s sole responsibility to obtain advice of competent legal counsel as to the identification and interpretation of any relevant laws and regulatory requirements that may affect the customer s business and any actions the reader may have to take to comply with such laws. IBM does not provide legal advice or represent or warrant that its services or products will ensure that the customer is in compliance with any law or regulation. TIB10439-USEN-00