SOLUTION BRIEF Service Operations Management
can you help assure the quality and availability of business services to your customers? agility made possible™
Service Operations Management (SOM) from CA Technologies is a next-generation solution for managing business services in traditional and cloud-connected enterprises. Service Operations Management integrates and analyzes information from CA Technologies and third-party IT management tools to pinpoint, prioritize and resolve service problems across your IT supply chain to help minimize risks to your business. Service Operations Management is designed to optimize operational efficiency and accelerate evolution from technology focused management to business focused management.
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executive summary Challenge IT management solutions have evolved dramatically over the last 30 years: from domain managers to managers of managers to business service management. But business’ increasing reliance on interactive services to drive revenue and the rapid pace of new technology introduction (e.g., virtualized data centers, service oriented architectures, virtualized data centers and cloud computing) have created a huge gap between the last generation of management tools and business’ service quality and predictability requirements. A new solution is required to manage the new generation of services and their underlying technology.
Opportunity Service Operations Management (SOM) from CA Technologies is a next-generation solution that harnesses traditional and cloud connected enterprise resources to help assure and improve the quality and predictability of IT-based services that drive businesses. Combined with other products from CA Technologies industry-leading Service Assurance, Service Management and Data Center Automation portfolios, Service Operations Management gives you an extensive, unified understanding of how applications and infrastructure deliver services—and a way automate escalation and remediation of service issues. Service Operations Management also integrates and leverages your investment in third-party IT tools.
Benefits Service Operations Management from CA Technologies gives IT executives, service owners, IT operations managers and staff a common understanding of business service status and sources of service impact and risk. This enables the entire IT organization to align itself and prioritize minute-by-minute manual and automated actions according to the severity of service problems and the importance of the services. In addition to improving collaboration among siloed technology support specialists, Service Operations Management also helps them to communicate and collaborate better with Service Desk, Change and Service Level Management teams. This helps optimize overall IT operational efficiency.
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Section 1: Challenge
Understanding the IT operations-business gap IT services (i.e., networks, processing power, database access and applications) are fundamental to business operations and revenue generation. But IT executives and operations staff are increasingly measured according to the quality and availability of the key business services they deliver, not by the performance or availability of the individual IT sub-services (i.e., network, system, and database and application domains). Examples of business services include email, SharePoint, SAP, expense reporting, payroll, online banking, online shopping, driver license renewal, insurance claims processing, transportation, public safety, national defense and hospital patient care. This requires operations to transform themselves from a technology domain focus (i.e., network, system, database and application silo management) to a business service focus. To adopt a business service mindset, operations needs solutions that enable them to visualize how their various technology domains comprise business services. Business service visualization must include: • Business transactions (e.g., log on, authenticate, browse, choose and add to shopping cart, enter credit card, billing and shipping information, process payment, acknowledge and trigger shipment) • Groups of servers, back-end mainframes, storage devices, application components and databases that together support each business services’ specific transactions • Underlying network components To make this useful to operations, visualization must be a real-time representation of each business service and include analysis to pinpoint sources of business service quality impact and risk. Previous attempts at “business service management” (BSM) had serious drawbacks. They provided business service definitions (largely based on systems and applications) and primarily focused on change management (i.e., ensuring that systems and application changes by operations did not adversely impact business service delivery). The primarily tool was the CMDB (configuration management database). While service definitions for the purpose of change and configuration management are still vitally important today, the traditional BSM approach is characterized by high administrative costs due to a reliance on manual processes; weak integrations with domain management and other tools for service definition discovery, maintenance and impact analysis; incomplete cross-silo views of services; and historical service views that impeded real-time impact analysis. Due to these drawbacks, many IT organizations have not attempted or failed to fully implement BSM or CMDBs and solely rely on siloed domain management tools whose poor integrations can also impede real-time end-to-end business service visualization and analysis.
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IT organizations complain that this has created a gap between business’ expectations for service quality and availability and what operations can actually deliver: • Operations is constantly fighting fires—reacting to service problems—because they have no way to view and proactively manage business services end-to-end • Triage is slow, often involving manual methods and inefficient cross-silo team meetings • Mean-time-to-repair is slow and operational efficiency is derailed Business’ increasing reliance on real-time, interactive revenue-generating services widens the gap, because these are built on composite applications across complex service–oriented architectures. This makes service impact analysis and mean-time-to-repair even more difficult without real-time service visualization and impact analysis. The use of virtualized data centers and cloud computing can offer huge benefits in terms of capital and operational cost savings as well as business agility. Yet the constant movement of virtual machines (that support application components and their transactions) across physical hosts makes business service visualization, impact analysis and business risk mitigation even more challenging. A new solution is required to meet these challenges and harness the power of new virtualization and cloud technologies.
Figure A
Increased deployment of customer-facing real-time services and innovative technologies, such as virtualized datacenter and cloud resources, has widened the gap between business’ expectations and IT operations ability meet them. A next-generation solution—beyond domain managers, manager of managers and business service management—is required to bridge the gap. This new solution is Service Operations Management.
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Section 2: Opportunity
Next-generation solution for managing services Purpose-built to manage business services for traditional and cloud-connected enterprises, service providers and governments, Service Operations Management capabilities provide a common, actionable view of business services for IT executives, operations staff and to stakeholders across the entire IT organization: • Real-time view of business service status displays quality, availability, risk and operational service level agreement compliance. PC-and mobile device-based dashboards can be shared by all levels and disciplines across the IT organization (e.g., executives and operations, service desk and service level management teams). This fosters a common understanding of service status and collaboration. • Real-time cross-domain visualization of service components (networks, systems, applications, databases, etc.) and alerts to speed triage and mean-time-to-repair of service issues and to automate escalation and remediation. PC- and mobile device-based consoles can be shared across operational teams who manage different technology domains. This fosters a common understanding of service impact, risk and root cause for more efficient problem-solving. The Service Operations Management (SOM) solution from CA Technologies integrates with application and infrastructure domain management tools to build views of service status and to analyze and pinpoint service problems. SOM then integrates with other IT management tools to take automated actions for escalating and remediating service problems, mitigating service risks and improving service level performance: • Dynamic business service modeling based on a variety of advanced technologies including: integration with application performance management tools for business transaction model discovery; policy-based service discovery utilizing an enterprise-wide view of all IT assets; importing infrastructure domain models; real-time instrumentation of CMDB service models and more. • Service analytics and alerts to pinpoint service quality problems and risk (i.e., which IT assets across technology domains are the sources of current or immanent service quality degradations and outages). This advanced technology tracks the state of service components (i.e., applications, routers, servers, etc.) based on real-time monitoring information from domain management tools and calculates their effect on service quality. This helps to decrease or eliminate traditional manual triage across domains and helps prioritize actions based on business impact. • Service-driven automation (escalation, synchronization and workflow) alerts trigger businessrelevant service desk tickets and processes. Integration with service desk systems helps ensure that tickets are enriched with service information and are assigned to the right domain expert and given the right level of priority. Service model, alert and maintenance flag synchronization between tools integrated by Service Operations Management helps improve cross-discipline efficiency and collaboration. Integration with process automation tools helps ensure that service alerts trigger allocation of data center and cloud resources according to service priority, alert severity and business requirements.
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• Integrated service level agreement (SLA) performance management measures service quality and availability according to internal and external customer expectations. This helps operations teams to focus attention on key services and to proactively take action before operational SLAs are violated. Service Operations Management provides operational SLA metrics (such as quality, risk and availability levels of business services) and contributes operational service metrics to other tools that manage SLAs from contractual and financial perspectives. The capabilities listed above are designed to provide a fast evolutionary path from domain technology focused management to business service focused management. IT operations can use other Service Operations Management capabilities to provide an intermediary event management-focused phase between domain and business service focused management: • Unified Event Management enables operations to correlate and transform cross-domain events into higher quality, more actionable alerts and exert more control over how alerts are prioritized and escalated. This lets you detect and correlate critical cross-domain events and transform them into higher-level alerts escalated according to standardized best practice policies.
Figure B
To align operations with the demands for predictable, high quality services in today’s dynamically changing business and cloud-connected environment, IT operations needs a comprehensive foundation of domain (application and infrastructure) management, service operations management and, ultimately, service level performance management.
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Integrated solution for closing the business-IT operations gap Service Operations Management from CA Technologies correlates and analyzes real-time information from CA Technologies and third-party IT management solutions to provide real-time, end-to-end views and quality/risk analysis of business services. Best-of-breed integrated solutions include: CA Application Performance Management • Dynamically discovers and models transactions, their application components and back-end systems • Monitors end-user experience to provide high levels of service delivery to customers, partners and employees • Abstracts application data to map transactions and process flows in business terms and context • Traces transactions traversing the infrastructure to proactively identify performance problems and identify the root cause across platforms CA Infrastructure Management • Dynamically discovers physical and virtual infrastructure assets across IT domains; uses inductive modeling technology to discover and map their dependencies even as the changes in real-time • Discovers and monitors the availability and health of infrastructure assets and adapts to and understands infrastructure changes • Identifies performance degradations for proactive corrective action • Conducts advanced traffic analysis to determine how specific applications, locations and users are consuming infrastructure resources to speed remediation of problems and plan for future capacity needs
Section 3: Benefits
Align IT operations with your organizations’ business and strategic mission Service Operations Management capabilities—delivered through the CA Service Operations Insight product—helps improve business service quality and predictability while optimizing your operations: • Improves service quality by quickly pinpointing sources of service-impacting issues across all technology domains—so you can quickly fix them and restore quality • Improves service predictability by pinpointing sources of risk to services across technology domains— so you can address those issues before they impact quality • Optimizes operations by reducing the manual labor for alert and service management, reducing triage and mean-time-to-repair of service issues, and improving cross-discipline communication and collaboration
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Section 4
Delivery approach Service Operations Management and other integrated Service Assurance solutions from CA Technologies are renowned for their fast time-to-value and pay-back. To further accelerate Service Operations Management implementation and results, you can leverage the skills of CA Services. Standard, repeatable deployments address service modeling, security configuration, policy definition and connection with other CA Technologies and third-party software products. Our nine-stage methodology and strict project governance help keep your project on time and on budget.
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The CA Technologies advantage The CA Technologies approach to Service Operations Management is an effective and dynamic way to help assure the quality IT-dependent business services by leveraging your existing investments in CA Technologies, third-party and custom IT management tools. The solution uniquely integrates application performance, infrastructure and other management tools to provide a comprehensive view of services based on end-to-end application performance and transaction visibility and a top-to-bottom understanding of the IT infrastructure. Leveraging technology proven in some of the world’s largest enterprise, government and service provider environments, Service Operations Management provides exceptional reliability and power to build end-to-end real-time views of services. The solution excels in usability, workflows and reporting tailored for each stakeholder. Its open integration platform and scalable architecture are built to update its real-time view of services and automatically respond as the underlying physical, virtual and cloud environments dynamically change.
Section 6
Next Steps To learn more about how the Service Operations Management solution from CA Technologies can meet your needs, visit ca.com/service-operations-management. We can provide web-based demos, personalized consultations and an on-site proof of concept so you can quickly determine how the Service Operations Management solution from CA Technologies can address your challenges with fast time-to-value.
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CA Technologies is an IT management software and solutions company with expertise across all IT environments—from mainframe and distributed, to virtual and cloud. CA Technologies manages and secures IT environments and enables customers to deliver more flexible IT services. CA Technologies innovative products and services provide the insight and control essential for IT organizations to power business agility. The majority of the Global Fortune 500 rely on CA Technologies to manage their evolving IT ecosystems. For additional information, visit CA Technologies at ca.com.
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