The process model describes how platform elements interoperate to realize full ITOM functionality. The following figure shows the generalized workflow sequence and functional areas involved, from account set up to interactive resource management:
Strategically, the process model flows from design or planning activities to implementation activities. Design activities are shown in step 1 of the diagram but also include the planning activities of step 2, which involve an understanding of best practices and your infrastructure requirements. Implementation activities are shown in the hands-on, configuration work of steps 2 and 3. During design, you assess organizational capabilities, assets, and requirements and create a management environment that meets business needs. You then implement policies and processes that satisfy the design criteria.
Design activities result in partitioning, populating, and configuring the platform according to requirements for supporting the managed resources. Design elements include:
- Partitioning your multi-tenant environment into client entities that match your organizational structure.
- Defining users, and assigning permissions, and access-level roles to control system access.
- Specifying the kind of instrumentation needed, depending on the resources that need to be managed.
- Grouping resources so they can be managed as a class instead of individually.
Implementation activities that realize design goals include:
- Defining management policies that automate actions performed on the resource when the resource is discovered.
- Collecting credentials is needed to discover and monitor resources.
- Finding and onboarding managed resources, employing the available integrations.
- Validating that resources are successfully onboarded, using dashboards and reports.
In operation, discovered resources are monitored according to defined resource management policies. The following figure gives a more detailed view of the platform and solution components involved in the operational workflow:
When an alerting event occurs, one that satisfied the management policy criteria, it is handled by the event management and remediation subsystem. The following figure shows a more detailed representation of event management and remediation components and workflow:
Event management involves the following actions, depending on context:
Event aggregation using:
- monitoring templates that generate alerts.
- a third-party monitoring integration.
Event de-duplication.
Event suppression for unwanted alerts.
Event correlation, which correlates similarity-based events and co-occurrence-based events, using machine learning.
The following figure shows how templates are applied to managed resource metric data to classify and handle alerts:
Monitoring templates are specific to the monitored resource.
Event remediation involves notification using the reporting and ticketing systems. The process definition feature provides for automated event remediation, with or without operator intervention.