Solving Business Problems with 10.1

IT Service Analyzer and IT Service Reporter offer three new technologies to help companies better identify, access and solve business problems.

These latest innovations were done to fully align capacity planning and performance management with business units and IT services; group and manage IT resources to that a large and complex data center can break its infrastructure down into more manageable components; and establish relationships that can be mapped throughout the enterprise.

• IT Resources - these identify physical or logical components within a data center or IT organization. They can be business units, administrative groups, systems, services, workloads, tiers of servers, applications, CPUs and geographies. IT resources are the enablers, and TeamQuest Performance Software has a complete set already included. Customers can use these, or add others to tailor the software to their unique environment
• Federated capacity management database - users don't have to know which database contains specific capacity data. The software can access everything within the enterprise regardless of where it resides. This enables the integration of multiple autonomous databases even if geographically decentralized. The federated database can also be partitioned to deny access to certain users and databases.
• Rich web applications - offer the features and functionality of traditional desktop applications. Thus the capacity planner can access TeamQuest from anywhere simply by logging in via any browser. There is no need to install a TeamQuest Client on a workstation.

IT Service Analyzer
IT Service Analyzer is a major addition to the TeamQuest portfolio. It has been integrated into TeamQuest Performance Software. It can be used by capacity planners, performance analysts, system administrators and help desk personnel. They can use it to optimize IT Service performance, diagnose problems quickly, track service levels, identify problems and analyze performance in business terms

IT Service Reporter
IT Service Reporter, on the other hand, is used more by IT executives, IT managers, line of business managers and IT clients. They use Reporter to demonstrate IT value and efficiency, mitigate risk and maximize availability, communicate IT service performance as it relates to the business, and show where excess or insufficient capacity exists.

Reporter eliminates the detailed capacity planning data and presents it in a way that non-technical personnel can understand. Thus executives gain access to the treasure trove of data that is made available by Analyzer and makes it available to those who need it in order to view the bigger picture.

Further, Reporter can be used to schedule regular reports for individual users or for groups of users. This feature is useful for such functions as scheduling weekly, monthly or quarterly reports, saving an ad hoc report and requesting that it be run at specific time intervals, and for scheduling other data to be generated automatically.

IT Service Optimization
IT Service Optimization (ITSO) is all about optimizing the planning and delivery of IT services, consistently meeting IT service levels, and minimizing infrastructure costs and mitigating risks. It can be preventative, proactive, continuous, and cost effective in terms of both IT-oriented and business-centric service levels.

ITSO is built upon knowledge gathered over many years by TeamQuest in the development of its capacity management software and in assisting its many customers implement it successfully. The overriding concept is to make capacity planning into a simple repeatable process in order to facilitate the delivery of quality services.

Step 1: Understand business objectives
On step one, understand business objectives, IT has to meet with the business and fully understand their needs. In many ways, this can be the biggest hurdle to IT success. But it must be done.

Take the case of a large insurance company that is acquiring a smaller medical claims firm. ITSO would enable it to handle the additional claims using the existing claims system and while maintaining the existing SLA. Although there is not much TeamQuest software utilization in this step, it must be done thoroughly.

Step 2: Prioritize services and assess risk levels
Step two, prioritize services and assess service risks, involves checking the service inventory, understanding the service components, researching service usage and finding any gaps that might be present.

TeamQuest adds tremendous value to this step in the ITSO process. IT Service Analyzer displays, for example, each service as an IT Resource. This enables the capacity manager to immediately see the various dependencies in terms of hardware, software, workloads and partitions. In addition, it can show the history of the alarms generated for those services, as well as historical resources trends and patterns.

Upstream and downstream relationships are also immediately viewable. Users can drill down further into individual components of services, as well as the services they depend upon. Take the case of a claims service for an insurance firm. Drilling into it might reveal several underlying IT Resources such as an EMC disk array and an AIX server. Clicking on that server highlights what else it is used for or, perhaps, that it is actually a partition on an IBM pSeries machine.

If the user wishes to look at things at a higher level, this would reveal claims to be part of an IT Resource known as Health Insurance Business that is one of the many lines of business within this company. This view might also serve to demonstrate that one IT service was shared by several different divisions of the business.

IT Service Analyzer would be invaluable in such an example. By viewing the history of that service, the capacity manager could discover all incidents related to it, as well as ongoing issues. This is very easy to do. And important findings can be turned into a report via a simple drag and drop.

Users can introduce their own information into TeamQuest such as data from an Oracle database or from an existing Configuration Management Database (CMDB). This data can be easily imported via XML. Alternatively, the data within TeamQuest can be exported to a CMDB.

Step 3: Establish service levels
Step three, establish service levels, is another aspect of ITSO which involves interaction with the business. Business managers need to be met with in order to agree upon service levels and their associated costs. Like step one, this step is important for the long-term success of ITSO efforts.

Step 4: Plan and provision services
Step four, plan and provision services, entails several aspects. A baseline should be built of the existing service components in order to determine options and any additional costs. The service catalog must also be updated.

Everything here can be modeled to determine how best to provision services using TeamQuest Model. Results can be modeled, for instance, to show the impact of an increased workload or to predict future needs.

Take the case of a workload on an AIX server. Model showcases the impact of workloads increases on an SLA. Graphs show various growth rates for that workload and what that would mean to service levels - say the maintenance of a response time of 0.5 seconds. If the SLA was exceeded, Model could also be utilized to work out how to fix any potential problems. To meet the 0.5 second mark under those workload increases, for instance, it might only require a simple increase in available CPU power. The various options could then be evaluated in terms of cost and overall effectiveness.

Step 5: Manage service performance
On step 5, IT Service Reporter really comes into its own.

Management reporting, analysis, monitoring and capacity plans are the activities of this phase. Reporter allows managers to customize their reports on the fly with such features as names, positions, explanatory text, charts and graphs, as well as corporate logos. These items can be imported in moments without the need to involve IT in report compilation or generation.

Every aspect of TeamQuest Performance Management Software comes into play when following through these five steps of the ITSO process. Each of the tools within the TeamQuest suite has relevance to different areas of IT.

• IT Service Analyzer - performance analysts, DBAs and system administrators
• IT Service Reporter - management reporting and remote access
• TeamQuest Alert - operations and help desk
• TeamQuest Model - Capacity planners
• TeamQuest View - performance analysts, DBAs and system administrators
• TeamQuest On the Web - management reporting and remote access