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ITIL Best Practices with OracleEnterprise Manager 10 g andOracle PeopleSoft Help Desk

An Oracle White PaperSeptember 2007

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ITIL Best Practices with Oracle Enterprise Manager10g and Oracle PeopleSoft Help Desk

EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW

Integration and alignment of IT and business goals is one of the key issues facing seniorbusiness and IT managers today. By facilitating communication through standardized

processes, the ITIL framework can help bridge the gap between IT and the businesscommunity. By focusing on the standardization and discipline that ITIL emphasizes,enterprises can reduce the ongoing cost of delivering IT services while improving the qualitand consistency of service. Unfortunately, the lack of an integrated solution that supportsthe ITIL process lifecycle has been a major inhibitor in widespread adoption. ITmanagers are concerned about adopting point solutions for a single ITIL process that does

not seamlessly integrate well with other processes. Oracle Enterprise Manager provides arich, comprehensive support for ITIL and with the integration with Oracle PeopleSoftHelp Desk seamlessly supports the ITIL processes.

ITIL is a set of guidelines that describes an integrated, process based, bestpractice framework for managing IT services that can be tailored to meetthe unique business needs of IT organizations. It was developed in the late1980s by the British government in response to the growing dependenceon Information Technology. Over time, ITIL has evolved to become the defacto standard for service management.

The ITIL framework provides broad service managementrecommendations as well as common definitions and terminology.

Adopting ITIL guidelines and architecture will enable organizations toensure that IT processes are closely aligned to business processes and thatIT delivers the correct and appropriate business solutions. Through suchalignment, businesses can achieve significant benefits in areas such as riskmanagement, change management, and service provisioning: resulting inimproved execution and achievement of key business objectives.

By adopting the ITIL framework and implementing best practices,organizations can expect to reap the following benefits:

Improved service levels and quality of service leading to increasedcustomer satisfaction.

Closer alignment of IT services and processes with businessrequirements, expectations, and goals.

A closed loop change management lifecycle resulting in greater visibility into the impact of planned and unplanned changes.

A reduction in overall management and support costs leading toreduce IT total cost of ownership (TCO).

ITIL is a set of guidelines thatdescribes an integrated,

processbased, best practice framework

for managing IT services thatcan be tailored to meet the

unique business needs of ITorganizations.

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Improved service availability and performance, leading to increasedbusiness profitability.

ITIL is about IT Service Management (ITSM). ITSM is a top-down,business driven approach to the management of IT that specificallyaddresses the strategic business value generated by the IT organization andthe need to deliver a high quality IT service.

ITSM itself is generally divided into two main areas: service support andservice delivery.Service Support is the practice of those disciplines that enableIT Services to be provided effectively. Service Delivery covers themanagement of the IT services themselves. This whitepaper will focus onthe Service Support processes. It will also include Service LevelManagement- a Service Delivery process.

Service Support

Service Supportis composed of the following disciplines and the Oraclesolutions maps to these disciplines:

Incident Management Problem Management Configuration Management Change Management Release Management

Successful implementation of the ITIL framework ultimately needsadaptable software-based tools to effectively manage and controlprocedure-level processes and functions. Oracle provides an integratedsolution for managing and automating critical service support and servicedelivery functions. IT organizations can leverage many of the out-of-boxcapabilities to deploy ITIL best practices. The focus of this paper will be onhow Oracle can help organizations achieve their goals in the five key ITILService Support processes: Incident Management, Problem Management,Configuration Management, Change and Release Management. It will alsoinclude Service Level Management- aService Delivery process that is tightlyintegrated with the Service Support processes for a seamless ITIL solution.

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Incident Management

In ITIL terminology, an Incident is defined as:

An event which is not part of the standard operation of a service and which causes, ormay cause, an interruption to, or reduction in, the quality of that service .

The goal of Incident Management is to restore normal service operation asquickly as possible and minimize the adverse impact on businessoperations.

Oracle provides a number of out-of-box best practice capabilities tosupport the ITIL Incident Management process.

Oracle Enterprise Manager (referred henceforward as EM) proactivelydetects events that could lead to incidents by offering complete, end-to-endmonitoring of business applications, from the real end-user experience ofthe application down through its underlying technology stack

applications, middleware, database, storage, servers. Datacenterinfrastructure components such as routers, server load balancers andfirewalls could also affect the availability of services and hence are similarlymonitored in EM, giving a complete and integrated view of the entirehealth of the data center. Incidents detected by EM are raised as 'alerts'

which can be visually monitored using the EM System Dashboard andnotifications for these can also be sent to the appropriate administrators.EM's notification system enables the mapping of the specific alerts(incidents) to specific administrators thus ensuring that the administrators

with the appropriate skills are notified when such incidents are detected.

Alerts (incidents) that have a well-known solution can be automaticallyresolved using 'Corrective Actions'. Corrective Actions enableadministrators to specify the corrective tasks that should be executed if thealert is detected (e.g. restart a process if it becomes unavailable). Thiseliminates the need for operator intervention and expedites the timelyresolution of the incident before it impacts your end users.

If operator intervention is required to resolve an alert detected by EM, aPeopleSoft Helpdesk incident can be automatically (or manually) generatedusing the Oracle Management Connector, which interfaces between EMand PeopleSoft Helpdesk. The generated incident will contain critical detailsabout the alert such as the software component that caused the incident,error message, time of incident, priority, and so on. Initial classification ofthe incident could also be done automatically based on attributes of the

alert. For example, the type of component on which the alert was detectedcould be used as a basis for setting the classification of the incident. Thusalerts detected on databases could result in incidents classified under theDatabase area; alerts detected on the application server could result inincidents classified under the Application Server area.

The primary goal of the ITILIncident Management process is

torestore normal service operation

asquickly as possible and to

minimizethe adverse impact on business

perations, thus ensuring that thehighest possible levels of service

quality and availability aremaintained.

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Figure 1: Enterprise Manager shows information about detected alerts andassociated. You can click the incident ID to launch PeopleSoft Helpdesk incontext of the incident.

PeopleSoft Helpdesk also provides workflow features that ensure theappropriate helpdesk analyst is assigned and notified of the incident. Ifneeded, further classification and prioritization of the incident can also beperformed. The helpdesk analyst can assess the impact and urgency of aparticular incident and thereby recommend a priority level with a suitableresolve date/time and escalation date/time. In the meantime, EM willcontinue to monitor the component for which the incident was created. A

worsening condition could cause an EM alert of higher severity to be raised(such as from warning to critical) and this severity change will beautomatically propagated to the Helpdesk incident via the connector.

If the specified escalation time for the incident is passed, workflow caneither increase the priority level or notify the incident owner's manager. A

visual indicator shows at a glance whether the incident is active, closed, orhas breached the associated Service Level Agreement (SLA).

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Figure 2: PeopleSoft Helpdesk incident based on an Enterprise Managerdetected alert. Information about the alert is automatically passed to theincident.

The helpdesk analyst assigned to the incident can use the knowledgebase to find known corrective actions for the incident. If a solution isidentified, a link back to EM is provided in the incident, enabling theanalyst to easily access EMs administration features to implement thesolution (restart the database, add a data file, and so on).

Since EMs monitoring system continues to monitor the componentassociated with the incident, once the solution has been implemented; EM'smonitoring system will detect that the issue no longer exists (has beenresolved). This could, in turn, cause the Helpdesk incident to be closedautomatically.

Customers who have an existing non-Oracle help desk solution canleverage the Enterprise Manager Connector solution for an integrated ITservice management solution. For example, the Oracle ManagementConnector for Remedy Help Desk enables IT organizations to proactivelydetect and respond to incidents to ensure high quality of service levels aremaintained. The connector integrates proactive alert detection andresolution features with Remedys help desk capabilities to provide aseamless workflow for incident management and resolution from thecreation of incidents based on alerts to bidirectional console links forincident resolution to automatic incident closure based on the clearing ofalerts.

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Problem Management

The primary goal of the ITIL Problem Management process is to minimizethe adverse impact of errors within the IT infrastructure and to preventrecurring incidents related to these errors. The reactive aspect of this goal isto quickly solve problems in response to one or more incidents. The

proactive aspect of this goal is to reduce the overall number of incidents byidentifying and solving problems before incidents occur.

In ITIL terminology, a problem may be defined as:

An unknown underlying cause of one or more incidents.

Similarly, a known error may be defined as:

A Problem that is successfully diagnosed and for which a work-around has beenidentified.

The ITIL Problem Management process eliminates recurring incidents bycategorizing the underlying root cause of the problem and then initiatingactions to improve or correct the situation. If a solution isn't readilyidentified, then a new problem can be created within PeopleSoft Helpdesk,automatically associating the new problem with the incident. By associatingthe problem with the incident, a parent-child relationship is automaticallyestablished. When the problem record is closed, all the associated incidentsare closed using a single click.

To assist with the identification of the root cause of incidents, EM offers a wealth of diagnostic features. These features range from identifying recentconfiguration changes that could have caused the incident to occur, toidentifying where time was most spent in an application call stack to evenidentifying the SQL statement that caused poor performance in anapplication's transaction. For application failures, EM automaticallyperforms root cause analysis that identifies probable causes of failure. Thisinformation is especially critical in complex applications where knowledgeof the underlying application stack and its dependencies is not wellunderstood by the administrator that is handling the problem. After a fixhas been implemented, the problem record is closed in PeopleSoftHelpdesk and all incidents associated with the problem record are alsoclosed.

On the proactive side, Problem Management is also concerned withidentifying and solving problems and known errors before incidents occur.

One type of activity toward this goal is trend analysis, which is identifyingrecurring problems of a particular type. EM's Configuration ManagementDatabase (CMDB) stores historical information about all incidents detected,as well as configuration information about the component and environmenton which these incidents have occurred. Using EM's Information Publisherfeatures with the CMDB, administrators can generate trend analysis reportsidentifying the most common incidents by time or by type, and correlatethese with their configuration information enabling them to perform rootcause analysis and take preventive measures for these incidents.

The primary goal of the ITILroblem Management process

is to minimize the adversempact of errors within the IT

infrastructure and to preventrecurring incidents related tothese errors.

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Figure 3: Associating multiple incidents to a single problem in thePeopleSoft Help Desk

Similarly, the query engine enables support staff to pull up historicalinformation on both problems and known errors. This information canthen be used during the investigation process.

The CMDB facilitates Incident Problem Management by automaticallypopulating incident records with Configuration Item (CI) attributeinformation when an incident is automatically created. The CMDB alsohelps facilitate the Help Desk operator in the prioritization of incidents byreviewing change history and SLAs impacted by the CI. By maintainingrelationships between CIs, the CMDB facilitates incident matching -linking known errors to CIs. Since changes can introduce new incidents;the CMDB tracks incidents, problems, and change records for easyquerying and reporting.

Configuration Management

The primary goal of the ITIL Configuration Management process is toaccount for and verify the configuration records of all the components ofthe IT infrastructure, as well as provide accurate information to support allother key processes.

According to ITIL:

Configuration Management provides a logical model of the infrastructure or a service byidentifying, controlling, maintaining, and verifying the versions of Configuration Items(CI's) in existence and their relationships to each other.

Configuration Management consists of 4 main tasks: Identification The specification, identification of all ITcomponents and their inclusion in the CMDB.

Control The management of each Configuration Item. Status The recording of the status of all Configuration Items in

the CMDB and the maintenance of this information. Verification The review and audit to ensure the information

contained in the CMDB is accurate.

The primary goal ofConfiguration Management is

to provide a logical model ofthe IT infrastructure or a

service, by identifying,controlling, maintaining, and

verifying the versions ofConfiguration Items (CIs) in

existence.

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The EM Configuration Management solution manages configurationdiscovery, enforces configuration changes and automates IT processes.Using agent and agent-less technologies, it discovers and collects detailedconfiguration information about all hardware and software resources in theenterprise, patches, the relationships and associations between them,topologies, systems and services, and availability and performance metrics.

This information includes: Hardware (CPU, memory, storage, network etc) Operating system packages, patches and kernel parameter settings Relationships between CIs including runs on, depends on,

connected to and so on Oracle installed software including interim patches, patch sets and

other configuration settings, components, DB parameters Systems, Service and Groups Topologies Metrics and Notifications

Change History Third-party software that include, among others, databases (SQL Server and DB2), storage (NetApp and EMC), networking

solutions (Juniper and Cisco) and middleware (BEA Weblogic andIBM WebSphere, IBM WebSphere MQ5)

The EM CMDB also collects configuration information for packagedapplications. For example, for the Oracle eBusiness Suite, the CMDBcollects over 100 configuration metrics and facilitates topological root causeanalysis. For PeopleSoft, over 500 metrics, automation of configurationpolicy management and discovery of application relationships is collected.

The configuration is automatically collected at regular intervals and storedin the Enterprise Manager CMDB repository. Ad-hoc collections are alsosupported. Enterprise Manager provides the ability to not only takesnapshots of CIs but also assign version numbers to the CI baseline andsave it for managing configuration drift.

Figure 4: Server CI Details: Hardware, Operating System and Applications

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Enterprise Manager also tracks all changes to hardware and softwareinstallations and configurations. This is critical in problem management androot cause analysis because it makes it quick and easy for the administratorto view changes that have been made since the last time the machine wasfunctioning appropriately. This feature is also critical in managingcompliance. By capturing and storing all configuration changes, EM

facilitates change analysis- who changed what, when, and to what value.

Figure 5: Detailed Configuration History is calculated and stored for allCIs

Enterprise Manager also provides tools for comparing systems enterprise- wide at great detail, allowing an administrator to quickly and easily pinpointany potential differences. The comparison spans the entire stack from thehardware to the application. This helps to keep systems synchronized andreduces configuration drift. It also simplifies investigations into whysystems that are presumed to be identical may behave differently, forexample nodes in a RAC cluster. The ad hoc or scheduled comparisonbetween selected multiple (1-n) targets and a 'gold' configuration can bemade against a reference configuration, a saved configuration baseline, or a

live configuration.

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Figure 6: Comparison of Oracle Database SGA parameters between twodatabase instances

Enterprise Manager possesses the ability to search for specific configuration values across all the targets to verify drift from a gold standard. This canhelp in finding out if problem configurations are in use and if theappropriate patches have been applied.

In summary, Enterprise Manager not only provides a rich, comprehensiveConfiguration Management Database that not only serves as a primary

repository for CI information; but also supports other key ITIL processesincluding Incident Management, Problem Management, Change andRelease Management

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Change Management

Change Management is the discipline of ensuring that standardizedmethods and procedures are established for efficient and prompt handlingof all changes to an organizations IT infrastructure in order to minimizethe impact of change related incidents upon service quality. This includes

ensuring that there is a business reason behind each change, identifying thespecific Configuration Items and IT Services affected by the change,planning the change, testing the change, and having a back out plan shouldthe change result in an unexpected state of the Configuration Item.

In ITIL terminology, a change may be defined as:

The addition, modification or removal of approved, supported or baseline hardware,network, software, application, environment, system, desktop build or associateddocumentation.

PeopleSoft provides a comprehensive full change lifecycle management

solution, leading to more effective resolution to incident, problem andknown error management.

Figure 7: Request for Change (RFC) details

The PeopleSoft Change Management process enforces standard methodsand procedures for efficient, prompt handling of all changes to anorganization's IT infrastructure. It minimizes the impact of change-relatedincidents on service quality, and improves day-to-day operations.

PeopleSoft Change Management: Provides visibility into IT infrastructure components and business

services that may be impacted by planned changes. Facilitates accurate classification of incoming change requests. Tracks and automatically routes multi-level approvals for change

requests. Monitors and tracks the lifecycle of the change request.

The goal of ChangeManagement is to ensure that

standardized methods and procedures are used for

fficient and prompt handlingf all changes to minimize the

impact of change-relatedncidents and improve routine

operations

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Automates task assignment, escalation processes, notifications, andapprovals for optimal workforce deployment.

The Change Management solution gives a comprehensive picture of theimpact of IT changes to the organizations infrastructure. The solution notonly discovers rich and detailed configuration information but alsodiscovers the detailed associations and relationships between configurationitems. Being able to query these relationships, such as parent childrelationships is critical to understanding the impact of any planned changes.

This is more critical in distributed, loosely couple, service orientedarchitecture environments where the dependencies are not always soobvious. This process allows for identification of the items, impact thechanges would have on existing objects, ability to schedule the action tooccur at the appropriate time, and providing a means to back out thechange if necessary.

Changes are prioritized and categorized based on the impact to businessand risk assessment. Help Desk helps determine the availability of the

required resources to implement the planned changes. By identifying theimpact of the change on the IT infrastructure and staff, IT and businessmanagers can work together to maintain a smooth change process thatensures efficient utilization of the IT staff and minimizes disruption to thebusiness.

The approval process is automated and approvals are sent to theappropriate personnel and can be tracked to avoid delays. Automaticassignment and escalation rules can be defined allowing for the routing ofapprovals and notifications to alternate personnel and geographies.

The comprehensive collaboration environment allows management of theChange Advisory Board (CAB) process and change scheduling based onintegration with project management tools.

Analytics can be used in conjunction to scope the effort required toimplement the planned changes by reviewing similar changes performed inthe past.

Release Management

Release Management is the management of all software configuration items within the organization. It is responsible for the management of softwaredevelopment, installation, and support of an organizations softwareproducts.

In ITIL terminology, Release Management may be defined as:

The addition, modification or removal of approved, supported or baseline hardware,network, software, application, environment, system, desktop build or associateddocumentation.

The goal of ReleaseManagement is to plan, design,

and implement procedures forthe distribution and installation

of software and to oversee therollout process

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Release Management procedures include the lifecycle management of thesoftware Configuration Items and their distribution and implementationinto a production environment. These include:

Design and implement procedures for the distribution andinstallation of changes to IT systems.

Control the distribution and installation of changes to IT systems.

Oracle Enterprise Manager provides a deep solution that governs thecoordinated rollout of software within an enterprise. By centralizing therelease process around the Software Library, it allows for adequate planningand control. As a downstream discipline of the Change ManagementProcess, it can perform automated determination of impact and conflict

with other software releases. It also orchestrates the release rollout processby sequencing the blackout, shutdown, and startup of services. Whilerolling out the software, Enterprise Manager notifies interested parties ofstatus changes, giving them the opportunity to take corrective action.Enterprise Manager has built-in capabilities to rollback and re-try a releaseoperation in case the release process did not meet release goals. After the

software has been rolled out, Enterprise Manager ensures that theconfiguration changes to the CIs are updated in the CMDB.

The first step in the release management process is to build and store andconfigure standard software components in a Definitive Software Library.Oracle Enterprise Manager provides the infrastructure for a centralizedDefinitive Software Library that facilitates the planning, management andsuccessful rollout of the software. The Definitive Software Library(henceforward referred to as Software Library) allows for the creation ofan organizations gold image(s) from reference installations.

The Software Library supports a hierarchy of software entities such as

components and images. The components serve as ingredients for theimages and several components can be mixed and matched to form goldimages. Software Library can also store versioned scripts that can be reusedacross different images and their related operations. A Super Administratormay create and maintain these images, while administrators of individualmanaged entities can use them over and over again to deploy software tonew destinations. Oracle provides out-of-box templates that can beassociated with these images. Images can also be assigned custom tags and

versions for ease of reference; this allows users to build up a stockpile ofcertified, reliable, and reusable software packages for redeploymentcompletely independent from their original source locations. Thefigure below (Figure 8) shows the taxonomy of different software entities inthe Software Library. By providing an ITIL standard Software Library, theOracle solution also supports creation of gold images" for deploying anysoftware-Oracle, third-party or in-house applications in a consistent, unifiedmanner. Data centers, as well as integrators can package their customsolution into repeatable solutions and roll them out for deployment.

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provisioning, database and middleware provisioning and scale out, andpackaged applications cloning.

One can edit the deployment procedure to insert or delete a step or a phase,or to enable or disable a step or a phase.

In summary, Enterprise Manager Release Management solution facilitatesthe planning, management and successful rollout of software,documentation and procedures; as well as the versioning of releasecomponents and packages for comprehensive control and traceability.

Service Level Management

Service Level Management (SLM) is the constant cyclic process in whichcustomers and the IT service provider together define, negotiate, agree,monitor, and report on levels of service. The Service Level Managementprocess pivots around Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in which the goal

is to enable the continuous maintenance and improvement of IT servicequality in order to meet the customers business objectives. The processensures that any adverse impact on service quality is kept to a minimum.

In ITIL terminology, Service Level Management may be defined as:

The process of planning, coordinating, drafting, agreeing, monitoring, and reporting onSLAs; and the on-going review of service achievements to ensure that the required andcost-justifiable service quality is maintained and gradually improved.

Oracle Enterprise Manager provides several best approach capabilities tosupport the ITIL SLM process. Enterprise Managers SLM methodologyenables IT service providers to define SLAs based on business objectives,monitor service quality using a rich set of metrics, and report on actualservice levels.

Before any service can be monitored, it must be accurately modeled anddefined in the context of the consumer or customer of the service. Real

world services are modeled and defined in Enterprise Manager from theend-users perspective, where the services themselves are also mapped to ITresources. End-user tasks are modeled as service tests for proactive 24X7monitoring of services using Enterprise Managers Service LevelManagement functionality. A service test represents end user businessprocesses or actions that are used to evaluate the availability andperformance of a service. Service tests are defined and replayed

at regular intervals from remote agents (beacons) that are typically located atrepresentative critical end-user locations. Using Enterprise Manager, servicelevel goals can be defined and determined using either the availability ofthese service tests or of the critical system components of the service.

Key service indicators are monitored for availability, performance, usage,and service level compliance. A rich set of metrics are available for definingand measuring service levels; including performance metrics derived fromservice tests and transactions or system components and usage metrics

The goal of Service Levelnagement is to maintain and

improve IT service qualitythrough a constant cycle ofagreeing, monitoring, and

reporting to meet theustomers business objectives

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derived from monitoring the throughput activity of system components. Inaddition Enterprise Manager provides the ability to define other coreservice level criteria including: the expected service level goal percentage,availability, and service days and hours.

Centralized reporting and viewing of service levels are provided from a real-

time and historical perspective through the customizable ServiceDashboard where SLA compliance can be monitored at intervals such asthe last 24 hours, 7 days or 31 days. Drilldowns from the ServiceDashboard provide insight into service level details. The Service Dashboardprovides a one stop management console for all critical services, and aconsolidated view into their overall health and SLA status.

Figure 9: Service level compliance is monitored and displayed on theServices Dashboard

In addition to the various out-of-box service reports provided, EnterpriseManagers Information Publisher feature allows the customization ofservice reports. Both out-of-box and customizable reports provide flexiblereporting options for executives and administrators.

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Summary

Outlined above were ITIL recommended processes and how OracleEnterprise Manager 10g Grid Control and PeopleSoft Help Desk cangreatly improve the level of service they provide as well as increaseresource efficiency and reduce the cost of IT operations. Equally important,

adopting the ITIL framework will enable organizations to align IT andbusiness goals and improve return on IT investment.

While ITIL provides basic guidelines on common sets of best practices, theactual implementation will vary based on the changing needs of theorganization. Oracle Enterprise Manager and PeopleSoft Help Deskprovide the necessary tools for IT organizations to deploy the ITILframework by providing out-of-box capabilities that can be adopted by anyorganization to implement a fully integrated ITIL solution.

Acknowledgements:

ITIL is a Registered Trade Mark, and a Registered Community TradeMark of the Office of Government Commerce, and is Registered in theU.S. Patent and Trademark Officehttp://www.itil.co.uk/

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ITIL Best Practices with Oracle Enterprise Manager 10 g and Oracle PeopleSoft Help DeskSeptember 2007Author: Ratnesh SharmaContributing Authors: Ana Maria McCollum, Melinda Uhland, Sudip Datta, Julie Wong, Walter Romanski, Simon Rutgers

Oracle CorporationWorld Headquarters500 Oracle ParkwayRedwood Shores, CA 94065U.S.A.

Worldwide Inquiries:Phone: +1.650.506.7000Fax: +1.650.506.7200oracle.com

Copyright 2005, Oracle. All rights reserved.This document is provided for information purposes onl y and thecontents hereof are subject to change without notice.This document is not warranted to be error-free, nor subject to anyother warranties or conditions, whether expressed orally or impliedin law, including implied warranties and condi tions of merchantabilityor fitness for a particular purpose. We specifically disclaim anyliability with respect to this document and no contractual obligationsare formed either directly or indirectly by this document. This documentmay not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,electronic or mechanical, for any purpose, without our prior written permission.Oracle, JD Edwards, and PeopleSoft are registered trademarks ofOracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarksof their respective owners.