Availability Management
Ensure Service Availability
By determining an organization’s availability requirements and matching these requirements to the capability of the IT infrastructure, Availability Management yields business value and cost efficiency.
Implementing Availability Management
Historically, Availability Management has not been a priority for most ITSM deployments, but service availability is the No. 1 concern of a business for an IT organization and should be considered early in the implementation. As defined by ITIL, this discipline optimizes the IT infrastructure, services and supporting organization to deliver a cost-effective and sustained level of availability that enables the business to satisfy its objectives. In order to be cost-effective, administrators must understand the availability priorities of the business by service.
NetIQ AppManager Control Center provides the foundation to achieve this level of maturity:
Step 1: Implement Business Service Maps. Availability of individual elements is less important to the business than availability of the service from an end-user perspective. Grouping elements into a Service Map View, which demonstrates the relationships between elements necessary to provide the service, allows administrators to gain a service perspective and enables impact visibility.
This Service Map View in AppManager Control Center provides the Exchange administrator a service perspective and enables impact visibility.
Step 2: Analyze Key Performance Indicators. Management Groups can be built in AppManager Control Center by service, allowing Key Performance Indicators (metrics) to be established, alerting on threats to availability by service.
Step 3: Prioritize Systems Administration. There never seems to be enough hours in a day for administrators to both respond to incidents and complete tasks to ensure and improve availability. Once a service perspective is gained, the prioritization of events can be established in AppManager to ensure that elements that support the most critical services are receiving appropriate attention.
Key Features
- ResponseTime Modules allow monitoring from an end user perspective through the employment of synthetic transactions, which can pinpoint faults in applications, databases and networks, as well as measure availability of services from a business perspective.
- Collect data efficiently and easily - Benefit from AppManager’s single repository containing all of your management information—both events and performance data—enabling a central view of all servers and resources. This single repository enables efficient and comprehensive reporting with automated distribution via email, Sharepoint dashboards or the AppManager consoles.
- Perform advanced analysis - Use interactive charting to get a sophisticated view of your systems with NetIQ Analysis Center’s OLAP-based performance data warehouse and predictive analysis capabilities.
- Get the broadest and deepest management view of your cross-platform infrastructure - Centrally manage the health, performance and availability of more than 60 applications across Windows, Unix, Linux, VoIP and network devices. You can also extend monitoring to a broad range of systems and devices through customized scripts or by using the AppManager SNMP Toolkit.
- Rapidly detect and anticipate impending problems – Use AppManager Performance Profiler to automatically establish normal server profiles and generate alarms when the system detects deviations and/or impending problems.
- Manage your IT infrastructure in a business service context - With AppManager Control Center, you can take advantage of a visual representation of IT resources mapped to business applications or services, enabling you to prioritize problem response. By mapping services to elements, you will understand ownership and headcount for all elements the service depends upon, as well as understand how element failure impacts the service.
- Easily adapt to your unique infrastructure – Customize your solution without learning proprietary languages or technologies with AppManager’s use of industry-standard technologies, such as XML, VBA, Perl and Java. AppManager also minimizes training costs by using the technologies with which your staff is most familiar.
- Snap in seamlessly with other management products - Integrate AppManager with systems and network management products, such as Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM), Micromuse Netcool/OMNIbus, Computer Associates Unicenter, Tivoli Enterprise, HP OpenView Network Node Manager, HP OpenView Operations and Remedy AR System. This single system view enables more efficient management of your IT environment.
- Scale your architecture to match your business - Robust, flexible architecture enables you to efficiently manage thousands of servers. This enables administrators to more efficiently manage large server configurations.
- Diagnostic Console improves administrator productivity by allowing entry-level operators to perform some high-permission activities without being granted full Windows administration rights, extending their abilities with minimal risk.
