1.1 Product Overview

To integrate information and make it meaningful for your business, Operations Center provides the following tools:

  • Service Level Manager (SLM): measures service levels and agreement health and compliance, both in real time and historically.

  • Service Configuration Manager (SCM): enables you to create service models for managing and monitoring your entire service cycle.

In addition to the Operations Center console, the following Web clients/interfaces are available:

  • Dashboard: a Web portal that allows users to receive custom content from Operations Center as well as other sources.

  • Configuration Management System (CMS): a Web application that combines Web 2.0 and structured social networking principles to build and maintain CMDB projects.

To integrate Operations Center with other third-party applications and to expand its reporting capabilities, Operations Center provides the following:

  • SQL Views: provides functionality in Operations Center that allows for third-party applications to have read access to Operations Center data for reporting purposes.

  • Operations Center Web Services Application Programmer Interface: an integration point for customer or third-party applications to interact with data warehoused in the Operations Center server for query, insert, update, and delete functions.

  • Web 2.0 Connect: a tool for developers of Rich Internet Applications to access and utilize Operations Center resources (data and/or functions) in their applications.

To gather technology and information, Operations Center uses adapters that connect to and communicate with third-party management systems. In addition, Operations Center provides the following management applications for data collection:

  • Data Integrator: mines data such as business metrics and service configuration items (CI) and change data from databases; including service CIs, sales totals, help desk metrics, and analytics from business intelligence tools.

  • Experience Manager: proactively monitors Web site and application availability in real time, from the user perspective.

  • Event Manager: gathers and processes line-oriented ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) data, sometimes referred to as “raw events,” which are alarms or informational messages that can originate from many different sources.

  • F/X adapter: provides the capability to distribute file and XML-based data collection, parsing, processing, and alarm generation using F/X Monitors into multiple Operations Center servers.

  • Guard adapter: a special purpose adapter developed to meet the need for secure exchange of infrastructure and service management information between networks within Multi-Level Security environments.

  • SNMP adapter: allows you to poll, gather, and view data available on your SNMP agents.