Value to business

Event Management’s value to the business is generally indirect; however, it is possible to determine the basis for its value as follows:

• Event Management provides mechanisms for early detection of incidents. In many cases it is possible for the incident to be detected and assigned to the appropriate group for action before any actual service outage occurs.
• Event Management makes it possible for some types of automated activity to be monitored by exception – thus removing the need for expensive and resource intensive real-time monitoring, while reducing downtime.
• When integrated into other Service Management processes (such as, for example, Availability or Capacity Management), Event Management can signal status changes or exceptions that allow the appropriate person or team to perform early response, thus improving the performance of the process. This, in turn, will allow the business to benefit from more effective and more efficient Service Management overall.
• Event Management provides a basis for automated operations, thus increasing efficiencies and allowing expensive human resources to be used for more innovative work, such as designing new or improved functionality or defining new ways in which the business can exploit technology for increased competitive advantage.

4.1.4 Policies/principles/basic concepts

There are many different types of events, for example:

• Events that signify regular operation:
• notification that a scheduled workload has completed
• a user has logged in to use an application
• an e-mail has reached its intended recipient.
• Events that signify an exception
• a user attempts to log on to an application with the incorrect password
• an unusual situation has occurred in a business process that may indicate an exception requiring further business investigation (e.g. a web page alert indicates that a payment authorization site is unavailable – impacting financial approval of business transactions)
• a device’s CPU is above the acceptable utilization rate
• a PC scan reveals the installation of unauthorized software.
• Events that signify unusual, but not exceptional, operation. These are an indication that the situation may require closer monitoring. In some cases the condition will resolve itself, for example in the case of an unusual combination of workloads – as they are completed, normal operation is restored. In other cases, operator intervention may be required if the situation is repeated or if it continues for too long. These rules or policies are defined in the Monitoring and Control Objectives for that device or service. Examples of this type of event are:
• A server’s memory utilization reaches within 5% of its highest acceptable performance level
• The completion time of a transaction is 10% longer than normal.

Two things are significant about the above examples:

• Exactly what constitutes normal versus unusual operation, versus an exception? There is no definitive rule about this. For example, a manufacturer may provide that a benchmark of 75% memory utilization is optimal for application X. However, it is discovered that, under the specific conditions of our organization, response times begin to degrade above 70% utilization. The next section will explore how these figures are determined.
• Each relies on the sending and receipt of a message of some type. These are generally referred to as Event notifications and they don’t just happen. The next paragraphs will explore exactly how events are defined, generated and captured.

Date: 2014-12-29; view: 1100