ITSM literacy program: why you need to manage IT services, and not just IT infrastructure

I present the next translation of the article. Today, this is a short promotional article from the Optanix blog. "Why You Need to Manage Services, Not Just Infrastructure" , by Kishore Ramamurthy .

Why do you spend your time on another advertisement? Do not rush to draw conclusions. In my opinion, the article is interesting, because gives a clear example of describing the value of a service approach to IT management. It can be taken as a template to justify the usefulness of the CMDB and service-resource models to its management, both from IT and not from IT.

Interesting? I ask under the cat. Do not agree? Please leave comments. Not only disagree, but want to lower the rating of the publication? Especially please leave comments.
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Hereinafter, the comments of the translator.

Imagine you are going on a train ride. Come to the station and see the composition ready for departure, but there are no signs, no clues on what platform it is, not to mention in which direction it follows. There are only half a dozen platforms with trains awaiting departure. How to get to your destination? All the infrastructure is in front of you, but nothing is known about the train services departing from the station.

If you simply manage your IT infrastructure, then you have a similar situation. You know where the servers, databases, storage arrays and network devices are, but you have no idea how the data is transmitted through the IT environment. For example, does the said database support the e-commerce portal, or is it used to track production residues, or can it be used in both cases?

Simple understanding at the level of individual components of your IT infrastructure is not enough. It is necessary to understand how all these components work together, providing Business Services, otherwise it is equivalent to traveling to the blind. It is necessary to know which components are involved in the provision of a specific Business Service and their relationship. And while this is not there, your Service consumed by Business is at risk.

In order to avoid this, it is necessary to manage the Services.

Understanding the Impact of Changes on Business

The first reason is the changes themselves. Every time you make a change, you are the first and you need to be aware of their potential impact on Business Services. For example, if you reconfigure a separate software module that supports the Service, do you hope that it will continue to work successfully with all other components of this software package? If not, then this is the way to serious problems that will harm Business: a decline in productivity, loss of customers, or revenue.

As Business Services become more and more complex, understanding the interconnections between the Services and the infrastructure becomes more and more important. This knowledge is now not only about an application running on one server and accessing a database on another. Now many applications interact with each other, creating a multiplicity of basic technological elements. Virtualization adds complexity due to the ability of virtual machines and other components to dynamic changes that can occur autonomously. In the absence of an understanding of these multifaceted connections, changes become extremely time consuming and risky in their consequences. Understanding how infrastructure changes affect Business Services eases change planning. For example, you might know that you need to disable it to upgrade the server. The consequences of this are known and inevitable. However, if you do not know which Business Services it supports, you will not have a chance to agree on a technological window for these changes or notify the owners of Business Services about the planned changes before they are implemented.

Avoiding Long Service Crashes

The second is Service Availability. When Business Services become unavailable due to an accident or their quality deteriorates, your task is to recover the data associated with it and run it as quickly as possible. For example, Delta Air Lines at the last five-hour downtime due to the failure of just one device, lost $ 500 million and got publicized in headlines in newspapers around the world. The reason for the incident was the cascading shutdown of equipment due to a failure of the power control module, which led to devastating consequences on other critical infrastructure.

However, as always, things are not so simple. IT infrastructure is extremely noisy, creating thousands or even hundreds of thousands of event-alerts every day. Some of them are only symptoms, but the rest reflect the true causes of existing problems. To understand which of the alerts are related and give the true cause, it is necessary to understand how the bowels of the IT environment generate them.

To highlight the causes of problems, you need to know how IT infrastructure delivers Business Services. Otherwise, you will encounter the inaccessibility of the Services and an avalanche of seemingly unrelated events, each of which may be the root (true) cause of the problem. Is it a data storage failure, or lack of a network, or an application crash? It is not yet known how Business Services are provided and what role each infrastructure component plays in this, it is difficult to determine the root of the problem.

Otherwise, if there is an understanding of these relationships, you can significantly speed up the diagnosis and elimination of the causes of problems with the Services. In fact, understanding this at the level of the Services is one of the main reasons why ( product advertising has gone ) The Optanix platform is able, under normal conditions, to reveal the true cause of the problem with the Service in no more than 30 seconds. When every minute is worth thousands of dollars or more, the visibility of the state of the Services is not a luxury, but a necessity.

Balance of quality and cost of service.

The third reason is the optimization of the Services, i.e. ensuring compliance with the required quality at the lowest possible cost. For example, it could be renting out excess capacity, rationalizing IT architecture, or migrating IT infrastructure to you public clouds.

Again, this requires the visibility of the dependencies of the Services. While there is no understanding of how they are provided, it is impossible to decide which functions ( here, apparently, the concept of function, as a complex of resources and organizational measures ) is used to be planned in the backup data center, as part of the Disaster Recovery Plan. Similarly, during partial migration to the clouds, there is no other way to ensure the continuity of the provision of the Services, how to know which components can only be moved together.

Also, the lack of understanding, due to which the Services are provided, means the lack of opportunity with low risks to get the maximum value from the IT environment. This can be achieved by either finding and removing infrastructure bottlenecks, or redesigning Business Services for the sake of lower prices, but without loss of quality.

Let's summarize

Many IT organizations continue to manage infrastructure, and not Business Services. Using the infrastructure approach that has worked in the past no longer allows you to increase the complexity of today's Business Services. The lack of understanding of how your Business Services relate to your IT infrastructure leads to a more frequent deterioration in the quality of the Services and makes their recovery longer. This is why it is so important to look for IT management solutions that destroy the fragmentation of the infrastructure and provide the end-to-end visibility of the Services. If you do not do this, then put the entire Business at risk. Contact us ( and again advertising ) with us today to learn more about how Optanix can help you manage critical Business Services.

That's all for today. Thanks for attention. Leave your feedback.