Introduction

The first article in this series introduces IBM's IT Service Management strategy and the benefits it provides for an on demand enterprise. It discusses some aspects of this initiative, including IT process modeling, process choreography, and self-managing autonomic technology, all of which are contained in Tivoli® products. It shows how process modeling and process choreography allow an IT organization to integrate its processes according to business goals. The article then discusses self-managing autonomic technology and how it plays a part in the IT Service Management strategy by simplifying and automating tasks involved in service-level management.

This article, Part 2, continues the discussion by showing how IT Service Management applies to other crucial IT management tasks such as managing software, configuration, change and release cycles, security, storage, workloads, and the IT life cycle. This article highlights Tivoli systems management products that illuminate the benefits of the self-managing autonomic technology inherent in those solutions.

Back to top

IT Service Management and self-managing autonomic technology

IT Service Management is IBM's strategy to move an IT organization from managing disjoint resources, systems, and technologies to managing integrated processes according to business policies. IT Service Management provides a vision for companies to reuse their existing systems management assets and to leverage the power of Web services in the development of new Java™ 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE)-based software. Realization of the IT Service Management strategy involves modeling IT processes using WebSphere® Business Integration Modeler (Modeler) and defining interactions between process tasks using WebSphere Process Choreographer. When the systems management tools that implement the process tasks feature self-managing autonomic technology, the benefits for the entire IT organization are enormous.

Self-managing autonomic technology reduces the repetitive tasks IT administrators must do, resulting in time and cost savings for the enterprise. An important aspect of self-managing autonomic technology is the problem determination closed loop. In such a loop, the systems management solution automatically identifies problems and responds to them either by solving the problems itself or by providing recommended actions to IT administrators. Self-managing autonomic technology automatically senses variations in load or demand and responds to maintain the system's availability and performance. Self-managing autonomic technology plays a role in maintaining system security by detecting, identifying, and protecting itself from viruses and security threats. Solution deployment, centralized administration, problem determination, and provisioning are key aspects of self-managing autonomic technology.

This article describes the self-managing autonomic technology behind six key IT process categories involved in the IT Service Management strategy:

• Application management
• Configuration, change, and release management
• Security management
• Storage management
• Workload management
• IT life cycle management

Back to top

Application management

Ensuring that business critical software is available, reliable, and performing adequately is a very high focus area for IT departments. Historically, the IT infrastructure has been managed using management tools that are focused on individual resources. Those resources include network devices (such as routers and hubs), desktop systems, and databases.

Although the methodology used in the past was usually sufficient for single-platform software products, those products have become increasingly more complex today. The IT infrastructure now consists of multiple software components, spans a heterogeneous set of platforms, and runs in a client/server environment. These complex products have created a whole new set of management and administration problems.

Monitoring an array of software products, or simply keeping track of where the pieces are deployed, is difficult. Troubleshooting can be nearly impossible. The relentless 24 hours a day, seven days a week availability requirements for mission-critical applications demands that IT monitoring software deliver more than health status. In order for organizations to meet their business objectives, IT systems will have to become autonomic, demonstrating the ability to heal themselves from failures.

Automation of application management

To provide automated discovery and monitoring in complex environments, IBM Tivoli OMEGAMON® XE for WebSphere Business Integration lets you monitor and manage WebSphere MQ on distributed systems, WebSphere InterChange Server, and WebSphere Business Integration Message Broker (Message Broker) environments. OMEGAMOM identifies common problems, built around industry best-practice resource models, and automates corrective actions by monitoring key WebSphere MQ and Message Broker metrics. Tivoli OMEGAMON for WebSphere Business Integration also sends event notification, provides data collection for real-time and historical data analysis, and provides Web-enabled real-time availability and performance reporting. Its self-managing autonomic technology reduces administration costs.

On demand applications often involve J2EE transactions linked with legacy back-end systems. IBM WebSphere Studio Application Monitor (Application Monitor) provides the monitoring infrastructure for J2EE applications. It enables you to perform problem determination, availability monitoring, and performance management for enterprise J2EE, IMS™ and CICS® applications running on a wide range of platforms. Application Monitor is a non-intrusive management solution. It can be used by multiple IT roles across the process life cycle to assist in the identification, analysis, and resolution of problems that adversely affect performance in production data centers.

Application Monitor offers optional data collectors for CICS and IMS. These collectors give you complete visibility into complex transactions that span WebSphere and legacy platforms. Application Monitor enables application independence by method-level application visibility without having to modify or understand the application. The comprehensive J2EE diagnostics and problem determination capabilities of Application Monitor let you detect, analyze, and fix application problems, often before they affect business users.

Back to top

Configuration, change, and release management

Configuration, change, and release management consists of IT tasks such as software distribution, asset inventory, and remote system control. Again, self-managing autonomic technology seeks to balance the need to simplify the task of controlling a complex IT infrastructure with the need to allow the infrastructure to grow and scale up. A first step is to automate error-prone and low value-add tasks.

Leveraging best practices

For example, IBM Tivoli Configuration Manager can capture and automate best practices through the use of a workflow. Configuration Manager collects configuration information and can provide automated actions to make systems compliant to defined standards. It can automatically distribute security patches when they become available. IBM TotalStorage® Productivity Center for Fabric provides automatic resource and topology discovery, monitoring and alerts, zone control, and SAN error prediction capabilities.

Back to top

Security management

Security management hinges upon securing a company's networks and resources and making them resilient to attack. An IT infrastructure may receive security alerts from routers, firewalls, networks, and desktops. Predictive analysis of potential threats allows for an automated counterattack by revoking user accounts, deploying security patches, and reconfiguring servers.

For example, IBM Tivoli Risk Manager provides real-time, scalable, visualization and management of security incidents. It analyzes and correlates data at several levels so that only the significant vulnerabilities are highlighted on the Web-based administration console. IBM Tivoli Risk Manager provides several predefined actions for responding to denial of service attacks, viruses, or unauthorized access. The autonomic problem determination closed loop comes into play when a security threat is identified and analyzed, and corrective action is automatically taken.

Complying with security policies

Ensuring that all resources adhere to business security policies is an important aspect of security management. Automated problem determination technologies serve as an early warning system of security policy violations. Self-protecting measures such as stopping services, changing permissions, upgrading software products, and installing patches can then be done automatically.

For instance, IBM Tivoli Security Compliance Manager deploys agents on heterogeneous platforms. Its agents collect data on which services are running, password age, password length, whether an anti-virus software product is installed, and its patch level. User-defined or predefined policies monitor the collected data and show compliance or violations according to business policies. IBM Tivoli Security Compliance Manager provides automated monitoring and reporting of the security health of the entire IT organization. When combined with IBM Tivoli Risk Manager and IBM Tivoli Configuration Manager, the problem determination loop is complete.

Security provisioning

Automated provisioning is important in security management to automate routine administrative tasks. Such repetitive tasks are user account creation, password reset, synchronization, and identity life cycle management.

IBM Tivoli Identity Manager automates the approval process for the above requests using its workflow engine. It automatically provisions accounts by applying policies about which rights users are allowed when their role or employee status changes. It includes several predefined reports to help an administrator analyze compliance. Autonomic technologies in IBM Tivoli Identity Manager decrease a user's time needed to access system services and increase IT staff productivity.

Federated identity management

Common systems administration simplifies identity management across company boundaries. Federated identity management allows one company to team with other companies in a federation to ensure that user identities from a provider's domain can access the services of another domain. It involves automatically provisioning identity data to trusted third-party groups such as business partners and suppliers. Federated identity management can provide an employee access to services outsourced to another vendor, services provided by customers, distributors, suppliers, and contractors, as well as access to corporate services.

IBM Tivoli Federated Identity Manager provides single sign-on, key, trust, provisioning, session management, and authentication services to achieve federated identity management. IBM's Integrated Solutions Console is the centralized user interface to simplify configuration of its component services.

Back to top

Storage management

Storage management challenges include the ability to change in a complex environment while adhering to business policies and objectives. Handling the demand for more storage and the need for resilient storage infrastructures are two such examples. The storage administrator must monitor storage assets to watch for policy-determined predefined events to occur. The administrator must then take action based upon alerts to prevent problem situations before they occur.

Self-healing capabilities

Rather than having the administrator initiate management activities, in a self-managing autonomic technology, the system performs these activities based on the conditions it observes or senses in the IT environment. IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center for Data can detect potential problems and automatically make adjustments based on actions established by the enterprise. IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center for Data includes automated file system extension, which is invoked when the need for more space is detected.

Policy-based corrective actions

IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center for Data enables administrators to set thresholds in their policy definitions. Its monitoring capabilities detect when thresholds have been exceeded and automatically issue alerts or initiate a predefined automated action. IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center for Fabric automatically discovers, monitors, and manages the SAN, providing storage alerts for the administrator when actions need to be taken.

Back to top

IT Workload Management

IT production workload management today is a patchwork of jcl, batch commands, scripts, and point software products spread over an array of disparate platforms, environments, and locations. The staff required to build, monitor, and maintain this infrastructure is a major cost for enterprise IT departments. In addition, the resources part of this infrastructure are often poorly utilized.

IT Service Management manages IT workloads

IT Service Management transforms IT workload management into a process based on self-managing autonomic technology. It specifies a process characterized by automatic centralized planning, scheduling, and management of production workloads. It supports automated job handling in both distributed and mainframe environments. Capabilities include the definition and monitoring of job events and completion, job sequencing, and job deadline handling. It also includes robust security features, automated error detection and disaster recovery, fault tolerance, and support for optimizing IT resource utilization.

Mastering workload management best practices

The IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler includes all of these features and many others. It provides advanced capabilities to schedule, initiate, and monitor job workloads from a central point of administration and control. It interoperates easily with applications spanning from SAP R/3, Oracle and PeopleSoft, and Tivoli Data Warehouse to legacy host applications.

It provides fault-tolerant network switch management to eliminate single points of failure and reduce the potential for lost data and messages. IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler also works with IBM Load Leveler to optimize server capacity and workloads. Its standard scheduling interfaces manage multiple cluster and grid environments. It allows querying of jobs and job streams from a single console and simplifies forecasting and troubleshooting by providing timely information on job status and statistics.

These capabilities can be marshaled to foster autonomic behavior in the enterprise. For example, job failure events can be detected and used to restart a failing job after problem determination. At the same time, dependent jobs downstream cab be rescheduled or placed on hold pending the successful completion of the first job.

The role of the IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler in the IT Service Management strategy is to provide cost-effective, centralized workload management for IT processes. It unlocks value from existing investments by optimizing the use of existing IT resources and by simplifying forecasting and problem diagnosis. It turbocharges mission-critical processes by mapping service levels to application execution. Finally, it supports opportunities for market growth by simplifying collaboration of enterprise-wide and intra-enterprise business scheduling. This increases on-time, on-demand efficiencies and elevates the competitive profile of that organization.

Back to top

IT life cycle management

The IT life cycle is composed of multiple, distinct but interrelated activities that share a single purpose, the cost-effective delivery of high quality software products and IT processes, aligned with business priorities and supported by an optimized IT environment. Effective IT life cycle management enables efficient development, deployment and maintenance of software and IT process assets. It supports flexibility in responding to a fast-moving global business environment.

The virtual walls among the executive, development, and operations teams can be lowered by applying tools and processes that support integration and management of the IT life cycle. Such processes foster problem resolution that spans roles and responsibilities and bestows IT life cycle governance in a cohesive manner.

An autonomic solution

The IT Service Management initiative includes a set of solutions that work together to provide the foundation for a more efficient and flexible IT life cycle. The IBM Software Development Platform consists of a set of integrated tools, best practices, and services that support a proven end-to-end process for the application development life cycle.

The Rational® Functional Tester delivers functional quality; the Rational Performance Tester boosts performance and ensures scalability while reducing resource needs for applications. The Rational Portfolio Manager provides both technical and business teams with the visibility and control they need to effectively manage projects, portfolios, and programs. The Rational Performance Analyst offers a path to automatic, closed-loop problem determination, repair, and redeployment.

Back to top

Conclusion

The self-managing autonomic technology in systems management software solutions such as IBM WebSphere Studio Application Monitor and IBM Tivoli Omegamon XE for WebSphere Business Integration provide numerous benefits for application management. IBM Tivoli Configuration Manager and IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center for Fabric demonstrate autonomic provisioning and error detection. The IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler automates, plans, and controls the production workload to optimize throughput and resource utilization. The IBM Rational product suite guarantees state-of-the-art IT life cycle management.

The IT Service Management strategy provides a unified approach to help IT organizations improve the services that they deliver to support business requirements. It integrates a set of IT management programs, services, processes, workflows, and best practices to offer a roadmap from information and resource management to on demand IT services.

The benefits of IT Service Management include efficient automation of IT tasks, end-to-end management of IT processes, and delivery on service levels through timely prediction and resolution of problems. IT Service Management provides a strategy for integrating systems management software tools that provide common IT services. The result of this strategy is to significantly reduce resource requirements and workload and to lower enterprise IT expenses. Self-managing autonomic technology plays a major role in making an IT infrastructure configure, heal, optimize, and provision itself. When such technology is present in the systems management software tools that implement crucial IT processes, there are enormous benefits to the enterprise in the reduction of workload and increased cost effectiveness. IT Service Management and self-managing autonomic technology go hand in hand to help companies deliver IT services efficiently and effectively according to business policies.

Resources

• The article "Getting started with the Eclipse Platform" (developerWorks, November 2002) provides a history and overview of Eclipse, including details on how to install Eclipse and plug-ins.
  
  
• The white paper ITIL: The most widely recognized approach to IT service management provides an in-depth discussion about ITIL.
  
  
• For information on integrating WebSphere Business Integration Modeler and WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition, read Integration Cookbook for WebSphere Business Integration Modeler and WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition (developerWorks, March 2005).
  
  
• The article "WebSphere Application Server Enterprise Process Choreographer: Concepts and Architecture" (developerWorks, October 2002) provides a wealth of information on Process Choreographer.
  
  
• Check out the article "Develop a custom agent for IBM Tivoli Identity Manager with IBM Tivoli Directory Integrator" (developerWorks, May 2004) for some great tips.
  
  
• See "Build Your Own Tivoli Risk Manager 4.2 Adapter" (developerWorks, July 2004) for more information about securing your IT environment.
  
  
• Download a demo of IBM Tivoli Security Compliance Manager.
  
  
• Check the Federated Identity Management with IBM Tivoli Security Solutions Redbook (November 2004) for details about federated identity management.
  
  
• Read more about IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager and IBM Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator.
  
  
• Take a look at the Web site for IBM Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator.
  
  
• Find details about on demand storage and the IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center for Data and Fabric here.
  
  
• The Web site IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler supplies detailed information about the IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler.
  
  
• The Web site IBM Rational Products provides an abundance of information about IBM Rational products.
  
  
• To download autonomic computing tools and technologies, try the Autonomic Computing Toolkit.
  
  

About the authors

Lori Simcox is an Advisory Software Engineer in Tivoli Storage software development at IBM in San Jose, California. She received a B.S. degree in Mathematics from Pennsylvania State University and a M.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of Southern California. For the past eight years she has worked on IBM Tivoli Storage Manager and IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center. Her interests also include graphical user interface development and usability.

Kavita Shah is a Staff Software Engineer working with Tivoli Storage software development in San Jose, California. She received a B.S. degree in Computer Science from Washington State University. She currently works on the IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center Suite of products, and had previously worked for three years on IBM Tivoli Storage Manager. She can be reached at kashah@us.ibm.com.

Tina Dunton is an Advisory Software Engineer at IBM working with TotalStorage Productivity Center software development in San Jose, California. She received a B.S. degree in Computer Science from California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. Having previously worked in development for zOS products, for the past six years she has been involved in GUI development and, most recently, functional test. Her interests include usability and test architecture. She can be reached at duntontl@us.ibm.com.

David Groves earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1982, where he studied hard and enjoyed the bountiful cultural resources of the San Francisco Bay Area. He earned his Master of Computer Science Degree in 1993 from Stanford University, focusing on database and computer network design.

Rate this article

Comments

Back to top

Table of contents

• Introduction
• IT Service Management and self-managing autonomic technology
• Application management
• Configuration, change, and release management
• Security management
• Storage management
• IT Workload Management
• IT life cycle management
• Conclusion
• Resources
• About the authors
• Comments