Aug
04
The 9 Habits of Highly Effective ITIL People
While some habits are vital to attain fulfillment in life, our habits are especially important for those of us in IT striving for effective business systems that meet the requirements of the business. Now lets look at 9 areas where a Change Monitoring solution can play a strategic role in enhancing ITIL v3 processes – helping IT managers to achieve less risk, more uptime and greater stability. Change Monitoring solution is a new strategy that focuses on the visibility and control of an IT Environment's configuration and bill-of-material at the most granular level.
| Habit 1 | Look for the Root-cause of Incidents |
| In the ITIL Incident Management, when a Change Monitoring solution can quickly provide the granular information about the root-cause of environment incidents (including changes, differences, environment configuration and bill of material), you can cut incident investigation time and restore normal service operations as quickly as possible, minimizing the impact on business operations. 1st Level Support can use visualized information to identify change areas that could potentially trigger an incident without diving into the change details. If no ad-hoc solution can be achieved they can hand off appropriate detailed information to relevant 2nd or 3rd Level Support. In the case of Major Incident analysis, a Granular Configuration solution would provide a single picture of the environment bill-of-material and configuration, its' drift and consistency. This information could be used by the Major Incident Team to quickly map the cause of the incident. | |
| Habit 2 | Accurately Diagnose Problems |
| For Problem Management, or Incident Management a Change Monitoring solution would automatically capture the root-cause of environment incidents (including changes, differences, environment configuration and bill of material), allowing problem managers to accurately diagnose the problem and identify resolutions or work-arounds. This proactive approach enables the prevention of high-impact incidents and the reduction of the number and severity of incidents. | |
| Habit 3 |
Validate Your Releases |
| In Release Validation, any little mis-configuration of a single parameter can possibly instigate a high impact incident, putting releases into long, drawn out stabilization periods, that even result in production outages. A Change Monitoring solution would provide detailed visibility of what is being released down to the most granular level of the configuration parameter; validating that the integrity of the live environment is protected and that execution adheres to the release plan. | |
| Habit 4 |
Ensure Your CMDB Represents Accurately Your Environment |
| For Service Asset and Configuration Management, a Change Monitoring solution would enrich existing configuration management processes with granular information at a level not available before, contributing to the process of Configuration Management Support by keeping the CMDB updated with granular configuration information related to CIs. In addition, it enhances Configuration Verification and Audit by carrying out regular checks, ensuring that the information contained in the CMS/CMDBs is an exact representation of the CIs actually installed in the live production environment. | |
| Habit 5 |
Identify Risks to Service Availability |
| For Availability Management, a Granular Configuration Automation solution would identify any undesired changes and differences that pose risk to service availability. Any deviation from the predefined baseline set in order to meet agreed availability targets, is automatically identified and reported. This way, availability risks can be identified and mitigated before affecting availability targets. A Change Monitoring solution would also provide the Service Desk and Incident teams with root-cause information allowing them to quickly resolve incidents, thus preventing incidents from having a major impact on availability. For Service Recovery, a Change Monitoring solution would verify the accuracy of the recovery environment, ensuring the smooth return of services to a working state. | |
| Habit 6 |
Validate and Test Services |
| For Service Validation and Testing, a Change Monitoring solution would validate and test services by comparing production and pre-production environments prior to release in order to ensure that pre-production sufficiently emulates production; detecting changes introduced by release in pre-production to ensure that testing and release teams are aware of the exact release content; and compare production and pre-production after release to verify the accurate transition of release content and configuration. In addition, a Granular Configuration solution would help ensure integrity of numerous test environments during the application development lifecycle (e.g. system, integration, UAT). It would ensure accuracy of an environments' configuration and validates transitions between the environments. | |
| Habit 7 |
Ensure a Resilient Recovery Plan |
| In IT Service Continuity Management, applying a Change Monitoring solution's scheduled testing capability would ensure a resilient recovery plan: it would validate required synchronization of Disaster Recovery and production, compare the configuration of these environments. The resulting mismatches are prioritized and visualized, making it easy to act upon them. When "drifts" happen over time, a Granular Configuration solution would proactively identify them, providing accurate visibility of those changes, in order to make informed decisions regarding the changes that need to be replicated. | |
| Habit 8 |
Leverage and Share Configuration Knowledge |
| For Knowledge Management, a Change Monitoring solution would contain an extensive, and growing knowledgebase containing some hundreds of thousands of unique configuration parameters spanning various technologies. This knowledge grows fast as new parameters are added on a monthly basis from a network of domain experts, and to partnerships with key infrastructure vendors. This knowledgebase can easily be customized by various stakeholders allowing the organization to leverage knowledge spread among various stakeholders. Sharing knowledge among various stakeholders and domain and specialists would be smooth, helping to tap into existing organizational knowledge and improve efficiency. | |
| Habit 9 |
Always Look For Additional Opportunities |
| A Change Monitoring solution can positively impact many additional ITIL v3 practices. Keep looking at your ITIL processes and see how you can optimize them with the visibility into granular level information. | |
