The Challenge

As large parts of the business increasingly depend on a functional IT infrastructure and business-critical applications and systems span multiple operational areas, the need to monitor systems from a business perspective grows. The challenge was to model and calculate the root cause of the customer’s most business-critical systems from a service perspective while presenting the results and current status in real-time in a consumable and easy-to-understand manner.

The Solution

The solution involved leveraging Tivoli Business Service Management (TBSM), Tivoli Netcool Omnibus, and the existing CMDB to model each business system in a relational model, monitor them in real time, and present the results on a Business Dashboard. By automatically retrieving all relationships, a dynamic service model was created. Ensuring that the entire infrastructure was monitored and that all events were classified according to defined KPIs made it possible to read the current alarm status for each business system in a structured manner through the existing alarm collection in Netcool Omnibus.

TBSM calculated the root cause of the current alarm status for each business system and presented the results from a service perspective. By visualizing the current status of each business application on a simplified Business Dashboard, the solution enabled quick and easy overviews of the situation. Projecting this visualization in the NOC provided an understanding of the state of each business-critical system.

The Result

With the solution implemented and operational, the customer can now ensure the uptime of their business-critical systems. Since the entire solution is dynamic and all services are modeled automatically, administrative maintenance is minimal. In case of an issue, the impact on production and the problem’s location are immediately visible. This allows for deploying the right resources to resolve the issue, minimizing production downtime.

“With the solution implemented by Compose IT, we can ensure the operation of our business-critical systems. The requirements we set for the system were that it should be dynamic, deliver status in real time, and update automatically. By ensuring that all business systems are correctly documented, we have transitioned from delivering event-based monitoring to providing Business Service Management,” says Niklas Håkansson, Lead Service Architect at the customer.