Visualize business service relationships

The Visualize Business Service Relationships use case shows business managers and IT administrators how a server is involved in delivering business services.

Most large enterprises are adopting ITIL and other disciplines for managing and streamlining business processes. Many of these organizations want to provide a centralized view of all configuration items (that is, infrastructure assets, reference data, relationships, and so on). This central view identifies the connections between business services, business applications, and infrastructure components. Being able to visualize this information helps data center administrators plan effectively and avoid potential business disruptions.

Benefits

This use case lets data center administrators and business managers who are using the BMC Server Automation product view configuration items (CIs) stored in a central location — the BMC Atrium Configuration Management Database (CMDB). The CIs in BMC Atrium CMDB catalog the relationships and dependencies between business services. BMC Server Automation lets you manage change on individual servers that are used for these different business services. Providing BMC Server Automation users with a simple, graphical view of CIs helps these users easily understand the relationships between servers used for different business purposes.

The ability to visualize business service relationships is particularly useful when an administrator plans to change a server's configuration or troubleshoot server problems. Before taking any actions that could potentially destabilize the server, an administrator can quickly see what business services would be affected. The administrator can directly access current information about how the server is related to business services without consulting other parties or applications that might be out of date. After viewing all related CIs, the administrator can use the appropriate change management functionality to plan and track changes that might impact business services (see Documenting operator-initiated changes for servers). For example, if you experience problems with a server, this use case lets you use BMC Server Automation to quickly access BMC Atrium Explorer and see the  business and infrastructure relationships related to that server.

What to do next

To visualize business service relationships, you must perform the following tasks: