Implementing ITIL with BMC Software

The best practices documented in the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) are being adopted by customers all over the world and are rapidly becoming the de-facto standard for implementing IT Service Management. Adoption of ITIL recommendations enables customers to: Align IT services with the current and future needs of the business and its customers Improve the quality of the IT services delivered Reduce the long-term cost of service provision

These three fundamental objectives are the cornerstones of BMC Softwares product strategy, culminating in our recent announcement of Business Service Management (BSM), a dynamic method for linking key IT components to the goals of the business through a service model. BMC Software has the most comprehensive set of ITIL solutions available in the marketplace today. This paper highlights how BMC solutions help you implement ITIL and quickly generate real benefits in your IT organization.

ITIL: A Best Practice Solution

The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) was developed in the late 1980s by a branch of the British Government in response to the growing dependence on Information Technology. ITIL is now a public body of knowledge that provides a collection of Service Management best practices to help organizations improve service levels and reduce the cost of IT operations. ITIL guidance allows companies to exploit recognized best practices across the IT organization, thereby helping to align IT with business objectives and drive IT operational improvements. However, successful implementations of the ITIL methodology ultimately need software-based tools to effectively deploy procedure-level processes to IT staff tasked with service delivery and support. While ITIL does describe what best practices should be pursued, it does not define how to implement detailed processes and work-level procedures that enable those recommendations. It provides high-level guidance on what should be done, but leaves it up to each business to develop and implement work-level procedures for daily service delivery and service support activities that match their unique requirements. This document reviews each of the major documents in the ITIL library and shows how the BMC solutions support the implementation of the processes outlined in these documents: Service Support Service Delivery Security Management Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Infrastructure Management Application Management The Business Perspective

Service Support
This book is concerned with ensuring that the User has access to the appropriate business services. Issues discussed in this book are:

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Service Desk Incident Management Problem Management Change Management Configuration Management Release Management

Service Desk Strategically, the Service Desk is the most important function in an IT service support organization. It is the main customer contact with the IT organization and a key driver of customer perception and satisfaction. Remedy Help Desk is an extremely flexible and user-friendly application designed to be the main application used by IT staff to manage all incoming service and support requests. Remedy Help Desk is a multi-channel (Web, phone, email, desktop client) customer request interface for information, install/move/add/change, incidents, and problems. Within the IT organization, Remedy Help Desk provides a common tool to automate and integrate service delivery and service support process and procedures within and between IT functional or regional groups, third party resources, and other parts of the enterprise. However, the Service Desk function cannot rely entirely on customers to report problems whilst internal customers will probably contact the Service Desk in the case of problems, external users (e.g. potential customers on your web site) will probably click elsewhere if there are service problems. BMC has several solutions for measuring the enduser experience and raising alerts to the Service Desk and the Operations department if the agreed/expected Service Levels are not being met. BMC Softwares CONTROL-D product line enables Service Desk personnel to browse the correct documentation pertinent to the case/customer they are working on, and we also have a range of tools available (e.g. CONTROL-M for job scheduling problems, CONTROL-SA for user-id/password problems, PATROL and MAINVIEW for infrastructure problems, DBA tools for DBMS problems), which enable the Service Desk personnel to drill down rapidly to the underlying cause of the problems, and either solve them directly or pass them on to the relevant department. However, without any linkage between IT and business, the IT department will not have the knowledge to prioritize actions according to business needs and will typically look at issues from an IT perspective. Using the service model in BMC Softwares BSM solutions, the business impact of a technology problem can be ascertained with potential associated costs (which may vary depending on time of day / day of week etc.), the Service Desk trouble tickets can be automated, and users can be automatically notified, thus eliminating unnecessary calls to the Service Desk and enabling correct prioritization and escalation of problems. Incident Management The primary goal of the ITIL Incident Management process is to restore normal service operation as quickly as possible and to minimize the adverse impact on business operations, thus ensuring that the highest possible levels of service quality and availability are maintained. Remedy Help Desk is designed as the main support tool used by IT staff to manage the complex process of resolving incidents. Incoming service requests may be submitted by the customer service desk staff, or automatically using system management tools such as BMC Softwares PATROL Enterprise Manager or BMC Service Impact Manager (SIM) solutions. By entering a service request, tracking the configuration item to which it applies, recording the name of the caller, resolving the incident, or dispatching to a specialist, the IT organization uses Remedy Help Desk to track and solve the incident in a procedural manner as specified by the ITIL Incident Management guidance.

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BMC Software has a range of tools (e.g. PATROL Knowledge Modules, MAINVIEW AutoOperator, Alarm Point) for responding to known problems, and fixing them automatically. Problems can also be filtered, prioritized and routed to the appropriate personnel. Whether notifying one engineer of a system failure or notifying 10,000 customers of a service interruption AlarmPoint 's business rules decide who to find, who is on duty, what procedure to follow, how to contact this person or group and ensures they are found. These solutions ensure that these events are assigned, answered and solved in the quickest way possible (in many cases before they occur!).

Problem Management The primary goals of the ITIL Problem Management process are to minimize the adverse impact of errors within the IT Infrastructure and to prevent recurring incidents related to these errors. The reactive aspect of these goals is to quickly solve problems in response to one or more incidents. The proactive aspect of these goals is to reduce the overall number of incidents. BMC Softwares overall problem management strategy is: To fix problems automatically whenever possible, e.g. Pool Advisor will dynamically correct the DB2 buffer pools in response to changing workload, thereby improving performance and throughput. If it is not possible to automatically fix the problem, then we will raise the appropriate alert (via web, email, phone etc.) to the relevant personnel e.g. in the event of a scheduling error, CONTROL-M will raise alerts in PATROL. To give the business view of the problem, so that the impact on the critical business services can be determined.

Problem Management capabilities in Remedy Help Desk include the prioritization, routing, tracking, and resolution of problems. Out-of-box integration of Incident Management and Problem Management processes allows the IT support staff to identify a problem, and to identify all other incidents related to that problem. Changes in the environment are then implemented with a Request for Change a change request in the Remedy Change Management application.

Change Management The primary goal of the ITIL Change Management process is to ensure that standardized methods and procedures are used for efficient and prompt handling of all changes in order to minimize the impact of change-related incidents upon service quality. Although changes often arise as a result of unplanned problems, many also arise from planned requests for change from the business or IT organization. Remedy Change Management delivers a best-practice process to systematically manage the response to a change request in accordance with the ITIL framework. Remedy Change Management tracks a change from the moment it is proposed, through the implementation in the live environment, to the evaluation of the end result. It includes planning changes based on priority, impact, or urgency. Remedy Change Management considers business and technical impact, impact on other services, the effect of not implementing the change, as well as resources required. It includes use of a back out plan and a robust approval server that manages the request through a complex approval and implementation process. BMC Software also has a range of solutions for making and tracking changes to Data Base Management Systems (DBMS) like DB2, UDB, ORACLE, IMS etc., thus delivering greater availability and faster response to business requirements. BMC Softwares Change Manager product line enables customers to make necessary schema changes to DBMS systems accurately and rapidly and migrate these through from test to production, whilst keeping track of all the different versions present in each of the systems. BMC Softwares DELTA product line enables customers to dynamically change IMS systems.

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BMC also has solutions for analyzing the potential impact of changes with our Perform/Predict product line, thus enabling customers to make investment decisions based on true business service needs. Configuration Management The primary goal of the ITIL Configuration Management process is to account for and verify the configuration records of all the components of the IT infrastructure, as well as provide accurate information to support all other support processes, including Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, and Release Management. Remedy Asset Management is Remedys integrated capability for capturing and maintaining IT configuration data for assets and the relationship between them, including software, hardware, documentation, and processes. It provides the Inventory Configuration Management Database that maintains a record of all configuration items that make up the IT infrastructure, such as model, serial number, physical location, user, owner, maintenance contract information, lease, warranty, and financial information. Configuration item data is seamlessly integrated with Remedy Help Desk, Remedy Change Management, and Remedy Service Level Agreements. Remedy Asset Management can also be used as the source of configuration information for the service model, and a shown above the Change Management process can be used to dynamically keep the configuration and hence the model up to date. Furthermore, Remedy Asset Management can be used to dynamically update the service model, hence ensuring that the model is kept up-to-date. BMC Software also has several solutions, which discover the underlying topology. PATROL Visualis Discovers and represents the real topology of new-generation networks with a focus on network traffic modeling. PATROL discovers configurations of e.g. DB Instances/Tables, Filesystems, Web Servers etc. BMC Service Impact Manager (SIM) will accept configuration information from Remedys Asset Management to help build the Service Model and hence enable Service Impact Management

Release Management This discipline of IT Service Management is the management of all software configuration items within the organization. It is responsible for the management of software development, installation and support of an organizations software products. BMC Softwares Deployment Manager for Linux facilitates transparent remote deployment and management of thousands of dissimilar Linux systems from a central location. Through the automation of many administrative tasks relating to the deployment and provisioning of Linux servers, Deployment Manager for Linux is able to reduce the cost of managing Linux images, even in high-density environments.

Service Delivery
This book looks at what service the business requires in order to provide adequate support to the business customers. To provide the necessary support the book covers the following topics: Capacity Management Availability Management Service Level Management IT Service Continuity Management Financial Management for IT Services

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Capacity Management Capacity Management is the discipline that ensures IT infrastructure is provided at the right time in the right volume at the right price, and ensuring that IT is used in the most efficient manner. This involves input from many areas of the business to identify what services are (or will be) required, what IT infrastructure is required to support these services, what level of contingency will be needed, and what the cost of this infrastructure will be. BMC Software has a complete range of performance modeling and capacity planning tools across the enterprise. These provide a comprehensive performance analysis and what-if? planning tools for workload balancing, capacity planning, on-going performance analysis, and tuning of systems. They deliver accurate predictions of future performance while reducing the time and effort required to get results, thus enabling customers to make informed accurate investments without risk. Availability Management Availability Management is the practice of identifying levels of IT Service availability for use in Service Level Reviews with Customers. BMC Software has been helping customers to assure the availability of their business systems for many years, by delivering innovative solutions to the true underlying problems. BMC Softwares solutions can greatly reduce the amount of time required for planned and unplanned outages, thus delivering higher levels of service and availability. BMC Softwares Snapshot solutions allow the necessary process of copying databases to be performed with minimal or no outage, and fully exploit the underlying hardware installed without the need for manual intervention. BMC Softwares Reorganization solutions allow the long-winded process of reorganizing databases (e.g. for performance improvement) to be performed whilst the database is online. As the most frequent cause of unplanned outage is errors during the planned outage, BMC Softwares solutions have built-in intelligence to avoid errors, identify and prioritize the tasks that are really necessary and recovery procedures for rapid return of service.

Service Level Management (SLM) The primary goal of the ITIL Service Level Management process is to ensure that service level agreements are met and that any adverse impact on service quality is kept to a minimum. A critical part of service level management pertains to service level agreements. To meet the needs of the business and to provide SLM, service providers must first understand and then meet the availability and performance expectations of business owners and end users who are engaged in the business process. Although the business unit and the IT team must share responsibility for setting service expectations, judging how well these expectations are being met should be measured from the end users' perspective. To ensure service to end users, all of the technology layers supporting the application must be managed in concert. SLM is a proactive, disciplined methodology for establishing and managing acceptable levels of service in keeping with the business process and costs. The SLM model reflects the continuous process of defining, measuring, managing, reporting and improving IT service quality for the business process with the goal of managing end-to-end performance from the user's perspective. To provide holistic SLM for the entire business, IT must manage the technology components from a businessprocess perspective. Proactively managing these technology components as they relate to the business process and customer expectations is critical to SLM. BMC Software and Remedy provide a range of solutions (e.g. PATROL Express, PATROL End-to-End Response Time Monitor, SLM Express, BMC Service Impact Manager (SIM), PATROL Enterprise Manager, Remedy Service

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Level Agreements) to enable customers to implement SLM for a business process. These solutions allow customers to: Measure response times from the end-users perspective Define and report SLA compliance in terms of performance and availability from the end users' perspective, both real-time and on a historical basis Measure and manage all technology layers that affect the business process through key health indicators Notify appropriate staff with alarms for out-of-compliance SLAs Notify end users of the compliance status of each business process in real time Define processes and responses to take action to regain and maintain compliance Ensure customers get status of the progress of their outstanding issues and get a description of the level of service they are receiving.

IT Service Continuity Management. Continuity management is the process by which plans are put in place and managed to ensure that IT Services can recover and continue should a serious incident occur. It is not just about reactive measures, but also about proactive measures - reducing the risk of a disaster in the first instance. The Remedy solution manages the design and implementation of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plans. This system encodes the recovery policies, procedures and tasks and enables your organization to test your readiness. Furthermore, during an actual incident the system automates the notification of required resources and provides a virtual emergency operations console to enable an Incident Command to control the situation. BMC Softwares Backup and Recovery solutions are designed to Ensure that the system is recoverable by ensuring that all the necessary resources are available and that all the processes have run correctly Ensure that the datasets for recovery are valid Minimize recovery times by identifying the shortest method for recovering, and recovering only those datasets that actually need recovery Have built-in application knowledge e.g. SAP, Peoplesoft so that the correct recovery rules are implemented and adhered to, and the recovery times are minimized

Financial Management for IT Services IT Financial Management is the discipline of ensuring IT infrastructure is obtained at the most effective price (which does not necessarily mean cheapest), and calculating the cost of providing IT services so that an organization can understand the costs of its IT services. These costs may then be recovered from the Customer of the service. Whilst not directly providing a financial management solution, BMC Software products can be used to gather and report on items required for financial planning.

Security Management:
This book covers the process of planning and managing a defined level of security on information and ICT services, including all aspects associated with reaction to security incidents. BMC Softwares security management product suite, CONTROL-SA, addresses the issues of user access management in a heterogeneous environment. It ensures that new users are set up quickly and at the right level of access; current users obtain additional access expeditiously, and perhaps, most importantly, all access for departing users is disabled immediately mitigating risk exposure from rogue accounts. And because of CONTROL-SAs

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extensive real time tracking capabilities, details of every transaction are logged and available for audits. With CONTROL-SA, organizations establish and efficiently enforce password policies and standards associated with user access to IT systems. By providing the users with a web based password reset capabilities, CONTROL-SA minimizes password related calls to the helpdesk, bringing significant and tangible savings to the organization. , CONTROL-SA is recognized by Gartner Group as the leading product suite in the area of Enterprise User Administration.

ICT Infrastructure Management

This book describes how most businesses are absolutely dependent upon the ICT infrastructure and the quantity, quality and the availability of the information that it is able to provide. Many organizations have also moved on from just providing an online service during the day with batch systems overnight; their goal now is the true delivery of 24 x 7. A properly working IT infrastructure has become a competitive tool, which can directly affect customer satisfaction and the bottom line. However, the infrastructure has also become increasingly complex and hence difficult to manage, yet at the same time the business expects it to be totally flexible to changing demands. The move from mainframes to a distributed environment has demonstrated that service management problems do not disappear by moving platform; in fact, they have become almost exponentially more painful and relevant. Most companies today are running a heterogeneous environment, but they want it to appear homogeneous. BMC Software has been monitoring, managing and optimizing the infrastructure for over 20 years, and has a range of solutions to cover the enterprise including: Networks Servers, both distributed and mainframe Operating systems Middleware DBMSs Storage devices

BMC Software is unique in being able to monitor and manage this range of platforms due to our history of responding to customer demand and catering not only for their legacy applications on the S390 platform (e.g. the MAINVIEW range of subsystem monitors), but also the distributed applications using Unix, Windows, Linux, AS/400, VMS etc. (e.g. the PATROL range of solutions). Furthermore, BMC Software is able to present the whole infrastructure on a single pane of glass with our PATROL Enterprise Manager, and this presentation can be from an infrastructure point of view, an application/service point of view or a business point of view. Furthermore, as we show below, BMC Software solutions can show the real-time impact (service impact) of an IT problem on a business service, determine the root cause of a business service problem, and present this information to both business and technical owners. The fundamental reason for investing in all the IT infrastructure is so that customers can run the applications, which make up the business services, which deliver the vital business functions to the end-users. BMC Softwares solutions extend the monitoring and managing of the infrastructure components to the next level namely the application level. Our solutions have built-in application intelligence fro the most common applications like SAP, Peoplesoft, Siebel etc. and can also be used to monitor, manage and optimize customer-developed applications. Linking IT infrastructure and applications to the business via BMC Softwares service model enables customers to prioritize resources when fixing problems and outages, and to make sound investment decisions based on business needs.

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Application Management:
This book describes the application lifecycle and its impact on the implementation, deployment, support and delivery of ICT services. BMC Software has a range of solutions aimed at various stages of the application lifecycle: Tools for analyzing the performance of the application code, e.g. APPTUNE, SQL-Explorer and InTune, and tools for analyzing application performance, e.g. Perform/Predict, to ensure that applications going into production perform according to expectations and to help ascertain where the true bottlenecks are Tools for managing and optimizing the major applications and middleware such as SAP, Peoplesoft, Siebel, BEA Weblogic, MQ Series, Websphere etc. Tools for restarting failed programs, e.g. Application Restart Control, to avoid downtime and hence increase availability Tools for enabling release changes and migrating these through the various stages of development, e.g. Change Manager, to enable applications to be migrated to production in an accurate and timely fashion Tools for analyzing the performance of the underlying DBMS objects, e.g. SmartDBA, to help determine where any performance problems lie

The Business Perspective

This book covers the interfaces involved between the business and ICT and the processes and communication necessary to ensure the alignment of ICT service with current and future business requirements. As business becomes increasingly dependent on correct and efficient IT systems, so the need to respond rapidly and accurately to events in the underlying IT infrastructure from a business perspective rather than an IT perspective has become ever more critical. BMC Software goes beyond technology management to give our customers a holistic view of their business operations and IT infrastructure. Our Business Service Management (BSM) solutions enable customers to manage services from both an IT and business perspective. The result is a greater understanding of how IT processes affect the business, and conversely, how changes in business needs affect the IT infrastructure. Having used BMC Service Impact Manager (SIM) to build a Service Model (taking input from various sources including Remedys Asset Management), customers can then exploit BMC Softwares BSM solutions to provide Service Impact Management (SIM). As events are captured from the underlying Infrastructure Management tools and forwarded to the Event Management components (e.g. BMC SIM, PATROL Enterprise Manager), the service model can be used to determine the business impact of any failure/alert. Decisions can then be made according to business needs and actions prioritized to enable companies to truly exploit their underlying IT infrastructure in the most business efficient manner. To achieve business service management, BMC Software recommends that you start by identifying critical business services. These services are essential for reaching your companys revenue goals, and they often span multiple applications, databases and networks. For example, a customer order management system may involve components of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Supply Chain Management (SCM) applications. BMC Software empowers you to manage your IT operations, infrastructure and applications so that they support your critical business services. Our rich heritage in enterprise management, coupled with leadership in the latest

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technologies, such as Web services, gives you a unique advantage. Our tools enable you to manage and control the key components in your IT infrastructure, including systems, databases, applications, storage, security and networks. With this new business service perspective of your infrastructure, you can begin to tie service-level agreements to business needs, rather than technology metrics. Our core service delivery offerings, combined with Remedy Service Management solutions, provide you with comprehensive solutions for ensuring the success of your IT service and application management goals. You can use a workflow-based approach to improve efficiency across your entire IT organization, delivering a higher quality of response than ever before, and you can use BMCs solutions to measure the true end-user experience, so that you can be 100% certain that your systems are delivering the level of service which is required to the people, who truly need it.

BMC Software, the BMC Software logos and all other BMC Software product or service names are registered trademarks or trademarks of BMC Software, Inc. All other trademarks or registered trademarks belong to their respective companies. 2003 BMC Software, Inc. All rights reserved.

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