In my previous blogs I explained what business services are, why we need them, and how we can use them. Today, let’s dive deeper into how to leverage CA Spectrum to create business services in CA Service Operations Insight (CA SOI).
As you may know, the first iteration of CA Spectrum, CA Spectrum Service Manager, was the “grandfather” of CA SOI. Since its inception back in the Cabletron days, Spectrum was the original standard for managing one’s network. In other words, like the ring in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Spectrum is the original enterprise management tool that ruled them all!
If you’ve installed Spectrum and your user status gives you authority to view Spectrum Service Manager (SSM) options, you’ve probably seen the SSM menu option on the right side of the CA OneClick web page. If you’re in the OneClick Java console and click on the Tools menu, the SSM menu options appear at the bottom. Click on the Service Dashboard view to see business services that have been created; if none have been created, the dashboard will be blank. A clean slate to start off with!
Let’s discuss business services in the context of SSM. Upon opening the SSM editor you have the option to create or edit business services. If you choose to create a service, the SSM editor will open a dialog window asking for basic service information: name, description, etc. The meat and potatoes of creating the service goes into effect when you focus on the middle section of the window, where you identify and define the resources (known as CIs) used in the service. As you recall from my previous posts, defining a business service starts with identifying each CI that plays a role in the service. This logic holds true in the SSM environment.
This is where the maturity of CA SOI shows through as compared to Spectrum’s SSM. In SSM you can create containers, called resource monitors, that group any number of Spectrum models together. In the resource monitor you group CIs that will affect the business service in similar ways. In doing this, you’re applying a policy to the resource monitor that defines a significance level to CIs. In other words, the policy answers the question, “How does degradation or outage of the CI(s) affect the service?”. In CA SOI, you can also combine CIs into groups and assign policies to these groups that answer the same question. The critical advantage of CA SOI over Spectrum’s SSM is that in CA SOI, individual CIs (not just the groups) contain a significance value, a level of granularity that greatly enhances the ability to define how the CI will affect the service.
To refine a business service and allow for a more granular service health approach, you can create additional resource monitors and/or define custom policies.
Two great advantages of creating business services in SSM is that you can maximize CA Spectrum’s ability to use its root cause analytics engine, which allows users to identify the true cause of an outage, and CA SOI’s ability to import services from SSM to CA SOI. Once the service is in CA SOI, you can further refine the business service by, for instance, applying different significance levels to each CI. Creating services in SSM and importing them to CA SOI allows you to define a business service while capitalizing on the domain manager’s (in this case, CA Spectrum) inherent abilities.
In CA SOI, you can also import services from other domain managers, such as CA APM, CA UIM, etc. This enables the user to exploit the best of each domain manager within CA SOI, giving the user a true end-to-end, comprehensive inside look into each business service.
So as in the Lord of the Rings, the ring (or in this case, the enterprise management tool) that ruled them all is a great place to start in building out business services. Let’s get started!
My inquiring mind wants to know: What challenges have you run up against when defining and managing services? Please let us know by posting a comment below.