ITIL

Capacity Management is a process used to manage the capacity of an IT service to ensure that it meets current and future business requirements in a cost-effective and efficient manner. As the usage profile of an IT service changes over time and the service itself evolves, the amount of physical computing processing power, data storage requirements, staffing levels needed to deliver and support the service also changes. If it is possible to understand the demands being made currently, and how they are likely to change over time, then the planning for growth or shrinkage becomes easier and less reactive i.e. painful. If there are peaks in, for example, the processing power consumed by the service at a particular time of the day,

The ITIL implementation is one of the hottest topics in IT today. In order to gain a good understanding of the value of configuration management, we must clearly understand what ITIL is and what it is not. Fundamentally, ITIL is exactly what its name implies—a collection of books. The common theme of the library is that all of the books provide guidelines that can help organizations implement the best practices that have been learned the hard way by the pioneering few. There is a volume about security, one about planning, one about software assets, and one about managing applications. The library continues to grow as more successful techniques are documented and guidelines established for what can make others successful.

The latest information on ITIL comes from the UK Office of Government Commerce (OGC) through its web site at http://www.best-management-practice.com/. Be sure to visit the “Terms and Conditions” link at the bottom of the page for the appropriate uses of that web site.

Although a CMDB can be extremely complex, it is built of only two elementary constructs, called configuration items and relationships. Configuration items represent static portions of the IT environment, such as computers, software programs, or process documents. Relationships, as the name implies, track how these configuration items are related to one another, and are much more dynamic because these relationships can change frequently. Given these simple building blocks, defining the scope of a configuration management system is as simple as deciding which types of configuration items you want to track and which relationships will be important.

Note that we define scope as which types of configuration items will be tracked, not which configuration items. Once we decide that a particular type of thing is going to be tracked, it becomes part of our scope, even if we choose to track only a single instance of that type of thing. The choice of how many of each type, and exactly which ones, is part of the span of the CMDB

Consider, for example, the many decisions that are made around the cost of support. Should we outsource our IT support? Perhaps we can move some of the support off shore to leverage lower labor rates. How much longer should we support those old dot-matrix printers? Is the value of the redundancy really worth the cost of supporting the load balancer? These are just a few of the many questions that come up around support costs in IT shops every day. In an era of global economic competition, making wise decisions can be a matter of survival. But wise decisions are fueled by adequate information. Having an accurate CMDB allows the IT manager to understand which components of the infrastructure fail most often, how much change activity is occurring to antiquated equipment, and when to drop support of certain applications or types of equipment.

Although configuration management should never be confused with IT asset management, there is certainly value to having more information as part of the IT purchase cycle. The CMDB can help determine when it’s appropriate to refresh hardware sooner than expected, or when it is acceptable to let the refresh cycle lag behind the original schedule. If a server is hosting businesscritical applications and has had a whole series of minor incidents reported against it, it might be time to escalate the refresh time of that server, or perhaps swap it into a less critical part of the environment. But rather than simply deciding based on the annoyance of the most recent incident, you can have concrete information from the CMDB on which to base this kind of decision.

So where do you go to get good requirements? The best place to start is where you are. Most likely you are involved in building configuration management because of your role in the enterprise. Look at your job description. If it says anything about configuration management, those are probably some requirements. Look at the problems that you, your team, and your organization are experiencing because you don’t have good configuration data. Those problems are a great place to look for a description of what’s needed. Attend some incident management meetings— document what you learn about how configuration data could help, being careful to get only configuration management requirements. Do the same with meetings regarding change approvals, capacity planning, or service levels. In each of these disciplines, you’re likely to discover some way in which configuration management data could help. In addition to these formal meetings, you also want to talk to people both inside your organization and in other organizations who are implementing ITIL. All these areas will help you when looking for requirements.

Certainly you’ll want to schedule time with your stakeholders. Anyone who has a dream, hope, wish, or expectation of configuration management is a stakeholder, and the more of them you can listen to,

There are several challenges every business user should facing about managing the SLA (Service Level Agreement) compliances

• Establish performance-based SLAs with your service providers that reflect how you actually use business services, instead of just measuring the availability of generic IT components.
• Independently verify real-time SLA compliance so that you will have first-hand knowledge of how well your service providers are performing.
• Understand the quality of your end-users’ experience with each particular application or service.

However this challenges facing a lot of difficulties about how to measure the network compliance

Configuration management tools basically come in three different flavors:

1. Tools to discover configurations in the environment,
2. Tools that are dedicated to creating a Configuration Management Database (CMDB),
3. Suites of service management tools that include some level of configuration management capability.

1. Discovery Tools

The strength of point solutions:
Capability captures the target environment with the highest possible accuracy. Because of their narrow focus, and because the publishers of these tools are often in significant business relationships with the suppliers of the components they discover, point solutions are often the first tools capable of identifying the latest infrastructure components. If your organization lives on the leading edge of technology, this may be a significant factor in the choice of which discovery tools you use.

Sample tools: Cisco Routers, Novell Network Directory Service

The weakness of point tools:
Cover only a narrow piece of the overall environment. To get complete coverage across the entire space often requires a hodge-podge of tools and a significant amount of integration effort to get data from all the point solutions into a single integrated CMDB. More tools to purchase and more integration to perform generally leads to a higher cost of initial implementation and ongoing maintenance.

Sample tools: Microsoft SMS, CA Unicenter, Opsware, IBM Tivoli Configuration Manager

There are five new categories for ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library), compare to latest ITIL v2. Here is the list

1. Service Strategy Area

Focuses on the identification of market opportunities for which services could be developed in order to meet a requirement on the part of internal or external customers. The output is a strategy for the design, implementation, maintenance and continual improvement of the service as an organizational capability and a strategic asset. Key areas of this volume are Service Portfolio Management and Financial Management.

2. Service Design Area

Focuses on the activities that take place in order to develop the strategy into a design document which addresses all aspects of the proposed service, as well as the processes intended to support it. Key areas of this volume are Availability Management, Capacity Management, Continuity Management and Security Management.

3. Service Transition Area

Focuses on the implementation of the output of the service design activities and the creation of a production service or modification of an existing service. There is an area of overlap between Service Transition and Service Operation. Key areas of this volume are Change Management, Release Management, Configuration Management and Service Knowledge Management.

1. Spice Works 2.1
Centralized management tools, good ticketing system, used by 250,000 IT pros in 194 countries. Spiceworks has the IT features you need every day:
- Automatic PC and software inventory and IT asset reporting to simplify your job.
- Network monitoring and troubleshooting to keep things running smoothly.
- PCMagazine Editor Choice May 4, 2007

2. f2w Help desk Software
It's a helpdesk support system based on requests (some people call them tickets), with a simple web interface. Requests can be classified into categories and assigned a priority. Categories are associated with specific well-defined problem areas, and f2w helpdesk provides a way to maintain an expert knowledge base of problems and solutions based on request categories.

3. MyHelpDesk

Many friend of mine keep asking me about what is should be implemented first to improve their information system management: whether taking Cobit, ITIL, or ISO27001. And the next question usually which one is the easiest to be implemented in their company.

To be able to answer this question, let me tell you the definition of this three major standard in information system, who has a little bit difference in basic concept.

COBIT

Cobit is stand for Control Objective over Information and Related Technology. Cobit issued by ISACA (Information System Control Standard) a non profit organization for IT Governance. The Cobit main function is to help the company, mapping their IT process to ISACA best practices standard. Cobit usually choosen by the company who performing information system audit, whether related to financial audit or general IT audit.

ITIL

ITIL is stand for Information Technology Library. ITIL issued by OGC, is a set of framework for managing IT Service Level. Although ITIL is quite similar with COBIT in many ways, but the basic difference is Cobit set the standard by seeing the process based and risk, and in the other hand ITIL set the standard from basic IT service.

ISO27001

ISO27001 is much more different between COBIT and ITIL, because ISO27001 is a security standard, so it has smaller but deeper domain compare to COBIT and ITIL.