Maintaining Quality of Service Based on ITIL-Based IT Service Management
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Maintaining Quality of Service Based on ITIL-Based IT Service Management V Koji Ishibashi (Manuscript received January 18, 2007) Interest in the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) of system management best practices has increased in recent years, and corporations are starting to incorporate ITIL in their IT systems. To help with this incorporation, Fujitsu provides the Systemwalker product group, which supports ITIL-based IT service management. ITIL contains many kinds of management processes. In this paper, we focus on the service deliv- ery area, which includes capacity, availability, and service level managements, and discuss the functions provided by Systemwalker Service Quality Coordinator (SSQC) and Systemwalker Availability View (SAView) from the ITIL perspective. An overview of the architecture used to implement these functions is also included. 1. Introduction functions and has been widely accepted in the The IT service management processes of the Japanese IT market. IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)1) arise from the SAView is a new product that was launched following two core areas: in 2006 and provides visualization of business 1) Service support: Processes related to the service availability. daily operation and support of an IT service SSQC and SAView can be positioned as 2) Service delivery: Long-term planning and products that play a supporting role in imple- improvement processes related to IT service menting the following management processes provision that fall under the ITIL service delivery core In this paper, we mainly discuss the service area: delivery part of these two core areas, which con- 1) Capacity management tains the processes used to maintain the high 2) Availability management quality of the services provided by an IT system. 3) Service level management In 2006, the Systemwalker products, which The functions and architecture of SSQC and were launched in 1995 as Japan’s first integrated SAView are described below. IT service management products, were enhanced to the V13 versions to support all of ITIL. 2. Capacity management Especially, Systemwalker Service Quality The aim of capacity management is the Coordinator (SSQC) and Systemwalker Availa- continued provision, now and in the future, of bility View (SAView) are related to the service business services that are highly cost-effective delivery area. Figure 1 shows the Systemwalker in terms of capacity and performance. To achieve architecture. this end, capacity management clarifies the SSQC was launched at the end of 2003. It business service requirements, the business ser- provides capacity and performance management vice capabilities that the current IT system can 334 FUJITSU Sci. Tech. J., 43,3,p.334-344(July 2007) K. Ishibashi: Maintaining Quality of Service Based on ITIL-Based IT Service Management Systems operations know-how Availability mgmt/capacity mgmt Incident mgmt Process mgmt Service Quality Coordinator IT Service Management IT Process Master Availability View Incident mgmt Change mgmt Availability mgmt Capacity mgmt Enterprise operations management Centric Manager JOB scheduling/automatic operations Operation Manager Prevention of information leaks from PCs Desktop series Resource control Resource Coordinator Server/Network Client PCs Figure 1 Systemwalker architecture. provide, and the IT infrastructure required to tion software. provide business services in the future. The capacity and performance information Some examples of the use of capacity man- collected by SSQC is about the following types of agement are: resource usage in the IT system infrastructure: 1) Expanding the IT infrastructure in 1) CPU usage rate, CPU queue length preparation for future increases in 2) Disk busy rate, number of disk queue transaction throughput requests 2) Performance tuning so IT system resources 3) Available memory capacity, number of are used effectively swap-in/swap-out operations 3) Predicting the requirements of business 4) Disk usage rate services in the future SSQC can also collect the following types of The personnel of an IT infrastructure sup- performance information concerning the middle- port organization must perform various processes ware of an IT system: to implement capacity management. For exam- 1) Response time at each client PC ple, they must measure and monitor IT system 2) Number of Web server processing requests performance, predict service deployment and and the response times for those requests demand, and perform capacity planning and 3) Number of application (AP) server requests, tuning. wait time, and processing time To assist in these capacity management 4) Execution multiplicity for batch processing processes, SSQC provides functions for collecting 5) SQL execution time on the DB server and analyzing capacity and performance infor- 6) Amount of free table space area for the DB mation from all parts of an IT system, ranging In addition, SSQC can collect the through- from the infrastructure to the business applica- put of business applications by establishing a FUJITSU Sci. Tech. J., 43,3,(July 2007) 335 K. Ishibashi: Maintaining Quality of Service Based on ITIL-Based IT Service Management data import interface with them. of a time series analysis. The above information can be used to per- SSQC provides many kinds of analyses form, for example, the following types of capacity functions, and by using these functions, the IT management: infrastructure support organization can eas- 1) Establishment of the criteria for the ily perform the capacity management processes resource capacity required for business defined in ITIL. based on correlation analysis of business application throughput, Web server through- 3. Availability management put, and CPU usage rates The purpose of availability management is 2) Prediction of future processing demands to maintain a high level of availability for the based on time series analysis of business services provided by an IT infrastructure with a application throughput favorable cost-effectiveness in order to achieve 3) Prediction of CPU and disk resource capaci- business goals. ties that will be required in the future based For example, availability management can on predictions of future business throughput be used to: Figure 2 shows some example SSQC 1) Monitor whether IT services are being reports. Figure 2 (a) shows the result of a corre- processed as planned lation analysis, and Figure 2 (b) shows the result 2) Reduce the fault occurrence frequency in an (a) Result of correlation analysis (b) Result of time series analysis Figure 2 Example SSQC reports. 336 FUJITSU Sci. Tech. J., 43,3,(July 2007) K. Ishibashi: Maintaining Quality of Service Based on ITIL-Based IT Service Management IT infrastructure by performing preventive 3) Response time breakdown analysis maintenance SSQC monitors the responses of Web appli- 3) Keep the mean time between failures (MTBF) cations. It also measures and displays the time at a high level by minimizing the downtime taken for these responses and the time taken to due to faults download the elements of the displayed HTML The personnel of an IT infrastructure screen. SSQC, therefore, not only monitors support organization must perform various availability but also provides functions for inves- processes to implement availability management. tigating the causes of problems. For example, they must design and implement To maintain IT system availability, period- the IT system availability and measure, monitor, ic IT system reviews about failures and system report, and improve the IT system availability. weaknesses are important. Furthermore, Fujitsu To assist in these availability management regards these investigation functions as being processes, SAView provides a function for important for maintaining availability from the monitoring business services according to their viewpoint of reducing the mean time to repair operation plans. SAView can also maintain activity logs of business services to enable the availability to be visualized. Figure 3 shows two examples of SAView screens. SSQC also assists in availability visualiza- tion by polling to check the service availability and by providing service downtime reports. In addition, SSQC provides the following troubleshooting functions for minimizing service interruptions caused by performance problems in the IT infrastructure: 1) Drill Down View screen SSQC can display detailed IT infrastructure resource information and middleware perfor- mance information from the time a performance (a) Monitoring business services problem arises. Users can compare these values with the values obtained at times of normal oper- ation to see at a glance the cause of the problem. Items showing large fluctuations in value can be considered related to the cause of the problem. Figure 4 shows an example of a Drill Down View screen. 2) Transaction breakdown analysis When SSQC is used together with Fujitsu’s Interstage2) Application Server and Symfoware3) Server, it can detect the location of performance bottlenecks in online transactions. Figure 5 shows an overview of transaction (b) Activity logs of business services breakdown analysis. Figure 3 Example SAView screens. FUJITSU Sci. Tech. J., 43,3,(July 2007) 337 K. Ishibashi: Maintaining Quality of Service Based on ITIL-Based IT Service Management Figure 4 Drill Down View screen. Web server AP server Request DB server IBAS IBAS ■ Monitoring of transaction ■ Analysis of processing time ■ Analysis of processing time throughput and average/ breakdown, in transaction breakdown,