a service management enterprise architecture 1/jsms_vol1_no1_2.pdf · advantages of this service...

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A service management enterprise architecture

Jianwen Chen1, Iain Mcintosh

1, George Africa

1, Arthur Sitaramayya

1

1 IBM Australia, St. Leonards, NSW 2065, Australia

[email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a four-layer enterprise architecture for

service management. The aim of the proposed architecture is to provide an

automated, centralized, real-time service management system solution at the

enterprise level. This architecture covers essential service management

functions and integration between these functions. The proposed architecture

can be adopted as service management reference architecture to implement

service management in the real business world.

Keywords: Enterprise Architecture, Service Management, System

Management, Toolset Management

1. Introduction

IT Service Management represents an evolution from managing IT as a

technology to managing IT as a business. Service management is a key enabler

to provide an end-to-end view from business driven perspective. Today, there

are some service management products provided by service vendors include:

IBM Service Management, Remedy Service Management, USD Service

Management, Novell ZENworks, Oracle Enterprise Manager, CA Unicenter, HP

OpenView, and Microsoft Systems Management Server (Alberto, 2010;

Deborah, 2010; Garrison, 2010; Maheswaran, 2010; Patrick, 2010; Rob, 2010;

Troy, 2010). There are different limitations and disadvantages for these service

management products and systems. Most important, what is lacking for service

management is an architecture to bring service management, system

management, toolset management, and integration services together at the

enterprise level.

ISSN 1816-6075 (Print), 1818-0523 (Online)

Journal of System and Management Sciences

Vol. 1 (2011) No. 1, pp. 18-30

Chen et al / Journal of System and Management Sciences Vol. 1 (2011) No.1 18-30

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We propose a four-layer enterprise architecture for service management. The

advantages of this service management architecture include: 1) It provides a

service oriented architectural approach for service delivery; 2) It complies with

ITIL V3 process framework; 3) It integrates with service management, system

management and toolset management; 4) It provides an architecture for

automated, centralised, real-time service management of the following service

management functions: request fulfillment management, incident management,

problem management, change management, asset management, service

level/availability management, service catalogue management, configuration

management, release management, event management, security management,

and performance management; 5) It proposes a service management portal

solution to provide a real time and proactive service management dashboard

with an integrated view from the business, IT management and IT operation

perspective; 6) It provides a report management solution across all service

management functions/disciplines with a single reporting layer.

2. A Service Management Enterprise Architecture

2.1. An Architecture Overview

The overview of proposed four-layer architecture is presented in Figure 1 below:

Fig. 1: Service management architecture overview.


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Layer 1: The system management layer of client environment consists of

various service management ITIL functions and collects data from operational

domains using system management tool agents or agent less methods. The

essential service management functions in this layer are:

Configuration management

Release and deployment management

Event management

Security compliance management

Performance and capacity management

Layer 2: System management and data integration layer: The collection

systems within the client environment integrate to the service management

functions by utilising an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) as transport and the

underlying integration interfaces.

Layer 3: The IT service management layer provides the management for the

data collected from the client environment. The essential ITIL service

management functions in this layer are:

Request fulfillment management

Incident management

Problem management

Change management

Asset management

Service level/availability management

Service catalogue management

Layer 4: Service management portal and the presentation layer: Service

management staff can access the service management layer via a single service

management portal and a presentation layer common to all service management

tools.

2.2. Integration Services in Service Management Architecture

The proposed service management functions and service integrations in service

management architecture are presented in Figure 2 below:


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Fig. 2: Service integration.

In our service management enterprise architecture, we adopt IBM service

management system (ISM) to provide essential IT service management

functions of proposed automatic, centralised and real-time service management

system:

ISM has automatic bridges between request, incident, problem and change

(RIPC) records.

ISM has integrated RIPC, request fulfillment, SLA/availability, asset, service

catalogue management functions in one system.

ISM is a centralized service management system with no additional client

service management system required.

ISM integrates service management functions with system management

functions: event management, configuration management, release management,

security management, and performance/capacity management.

The inputs from event management, configuration management, security

compliance management, performance & capacity management are

automatically sent to ISM service management.

The outputs from ISM service management are automatically sent to release

management.

In our service management enterprise architecture, we propose a real time and

automatic event management with a central point for event collecting,

aggregation and correlation, event enrichment and auto ticketing functions; a


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centralized and automated configuration management; an integration service

between event management and configuration management for event

enrichment; a centralized, process driven, automated asset management ; an

automated release management; an automated, real-time, historical and

proactive performance management; an automated and centralized security

management for security compliance; report management that can provide the

completed report across all service management functions, single presentation

layer for reporting; a service management dashboard for real time, proactive

service management with an integrated view from business perspective, IT

management and IT operation.

Event Management

In most existing service management system, there are following major issues

for event management:

No central point for event collecting, aggregation and correlation

No real time event management

No automated event ticket system

No event history repository

We propose an event management architecture that can address the issues

above and have more features and benefits. Our event management architecture

is presented below:

Fig. 3: Event management architecture.


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We propose a real time, automated event management system solution with

following features and advantages:

Event capture tools are all directed into IBM Omnibus to provide rules

based centralized event collection, correlation and aggregation.

An auto ticking event management and event enrichment with business

context through Impact which integrates configuration management

data with service management.

An event management solution with a historical repository provided by

Tivoli Data Warehouse (TDW).

A single reporting/presentation layer for event management provided by

GSMRT.

Event monitoring across all operational domains through ITM6-

ITCAM-Omegamon monitoring family and other integrated alerting

toolsets.

Asset and Configuration Management

There are the following major issues in most existing service management

system for asset and configuration management:

No centralized and automatic asset and configuration management.

No data integration and reconciliation between configuration

management and asset management.

No integration between reporting for asset and configuration

management.

We propose an asset and configuration management architecture that can

address the issues above by automating the discovery, collection and

aggregation and integration of configuration data to assist client in achieving

and maintaining a baseline of assets and related configurations. It is presented in

Figure 4 below:


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Fig. 4: Asset and configuration management architecture.

Our asset and configuration management architecture proposes a solution

with following features and advantages:

It provides a centralized and automated configuration management.

TADDM is adopted for configuration item (CI) collection, application

relationships and population into a configuration database. Another set

of tools TAD4D and TAD4Z are adopted for scanning and discovery of

hardware and software data across operational domains.

It provides a centralized, process driven, automated asset management.

TAMIT is adopted for asset management and integration with the ISM

system. It utilizes and integrates the data from the configuration

management database and the ISM database.

It provides data integration and reconciliation between configuration

and asset management. Configuration management is integrated with

asset management through TAMIT and ITIC. TAMIT manages the

relationship between asset and CIs and ITIC performs database

integration mapping from configuration database to asset database.

It provides asset and configuration management integration reporting

through IBM GSMRT reporting system.


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Release Management

In most existing service management system, there is no automatic release

management across operational layers, manual intervention is normally required.

Our proposed release management architecture includes automated provisioning

of system OS, hardware, software, storage, applications and middleware across

platforms and operational layers, for both physical and virtual environments. It

is presented in Figure 5 below:

Fig. 5: Release management architecture.

Our proposed release management architecture has following features and

advantages:

It provides automated release management integrated with the ISM

system.

It provides the automated provisioning of system OS, hardware,

software, storage, application and middleware across platforms and

layers, and for both physical and virtual environment. It is achieved

through a set of provisioning tools integrated with ISM system to

provide workflow based approvals and notifications as shown in figure

above.

It provides full reporting for release management through GSMRT.

Performance and Capacity Management


for performance and capacity management:


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No real-time performance and capacity management

No proactive performance and capacity management

No centralized historical repository for performance and capacity

management data

Our proposed performance and capacity management architecture addresses

the issues above and provides more features and advantages as presented in

Figure 6 below:

Fig. 6: Performance and capacity architecture.

Our proposed performance and capacity management architecture meets the

following objectives:

It provides the coverage for performance and capacity data collection

across the layers.

It provides a system that is automated, both real-time/historical and

proactive.

It provides a centralized repository for real-time and historical

performance analysis.

It provides reporting that is both real-time and historical.

It provides an enterprise service management portal for performance

and capacity analysis and reporting.


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The cornerstone products for performance and capacity management are IBM

ITM6-ITCAM-Omegamon family products for midrange and mainframe. The

Tivoli Data Warehouse is used as the central data repository, TPA for analysis

and proactive management, and GSMRT as the reporting solution. Tivoli

Integrated Portal is adopted to provide service management portal view for

client and support staff.

Security Management


for security management:

There is no central repository for security data.

There is no automated provisioning of security patch management.

There is no automated integration with service management system.

There is no single layer reporting for security compliance.

Our proposed security management architecture addresses the issues above

and provides more features and advantages:

Fig. 7: Security management architecture.


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We propose security management architecture to provide an automated and

centralized security management architecture with following features and

advantages:

An automated, consistent and repeatable toolset and process for

undertaking security compliance checks on devices.

A data warehouse as the central repository for security data.

An automated provisioning of security patch management through TPM.

A single layer compliance reporting through GSMRT.

The automated alert integration with ISM service management through

OMNIBUS and Impact.

Reporting and Dashboard

In most existing service management system, there is no single layer

reporting across all service management functions and disciplines to produce

real-time/historical reporting. There are following major issues in most existing

service management system:

No real time and proactive service view for SLA management.

No business perspective view of service management.

No integration view and single presentation layer from business, IT

management and IT operation for service management.

Our proposed security management architecture can address issues above and

offer more features and advantages:

Fig. 8: Reporting and dashboard management architecture.


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Our service management reporting architecture provides a single, integrated

reporting solution that enables reporting across all service management

functions/disciplines and produces real-time/historical reports:

IBM GSMRT is adopted to provide the completed report from ISM system,

event management, security compliance management, configuration

management, performance and capacity management.

GSMRT is adopted to provide a single presentation layer for all reports

across service management functions.

Tivoli Data Warehouse can supply historical data to be extracted by GSMRT

for historical reporting.

Our service management dashboard architecture provides a real time,

proactive service management with an integrated view from the business

perspective, IT management and IT operations. The service management portal

integrates the following products to produce the dashboard views:

PriSM and TBSM are adopted for service management dashboard to provide

real time and proactive service management especially SLA management.

TBSM provides a business perspective of service management. PriSM

integrates with TBSM, TDW, Impact to provide an integrated and graphical

view from business user, IT Management, and IT operations perspectives.

3. Conclusion

In this paper, we propose a four-layer enterprise architecture for service

management. This architecture provides an automated, centralized, real-time

service management system at the enterprise level. The proposed service

management system 1) provides the following service management functions:

request fulfillment management, incident management, problem management,

change management, asset management, service level/availability management,

service catalogue management, business continuity management; 2) integrates

service management, system management and toolset management

automatically. The integrated system management include: configuration

management, release and deployment management, event management, security

compliance management, and performance/capacity management; 3) proposes a

service management dashboard and reporting solution to provide a real time and

proactive service management and report management all service management

functions and disciplines; 4) complies with ITIL V3 process framework; 5)

provides a service oriented architectural approach for service delivery.


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The proposed architecture can be adopted as a service management reference

architecture to guide the development of a technology roadmap for the

implementation of service management in real business world.

References

Alberto, L. G. (2010). Designing the future network. CNSM 2010, 6th

International Conference on Network and Service Management， Ontario,

Canada.

Deborah, L.A. (2010). Frameworks, methodologies and standards: determining

the right mix of each for ITSM success. IT Service Management Conference

(ITSM) Fusion 10, U.S.A..

Garrison, H. (2010). Leveraging a service CI model as a strategy for service

improvement. 14th Annual International IT Service Management Conference.

Maheswaran, S. (2010). IT service management and delivery for an enterprise.

CNSM 2010, 6th International Conference on Network and Service

Management, Niagara Falls, Canada.

Patrick, B. (2010). ITIL state of the nation: the reality of ITIL. In IT Service

Management Conference (ITSM) Fusion 10, U.S.A..

Rob, E. (2010). Making ITSM real. In 14th Annual International IT Service

Management Conference.

Troy, G. (2010). Modeling services linked to business value. In 14th Annual

International IT Service Management Conference.

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