Use cases for centralized service models

This section gives an overview of use cases for centralized service models:

Use case for a discrete service model

Calbro Systems is a telephone service provider that provides both landline services and cell phone services in a small rural town. Calbro Systems requires a service model that spans a large number of CIs. The needs of Calbro Systems can be met by a single BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server that can accommodate a service model containing a large number of CIs and a Publishing Server that can publish these CIs. Such a service model allows Calbro Systems to perform the following tasks:

• View and query its services from a central system (Central Server) which is used as a single point of navigation for the operational user interfaces.
• Identify the root cause of an impact to a business service by using root cause analysis on the Child Server.

Use case for a distributed service model

Calbro Systems is a telephone service provider that provides both landline services and GPRS phone services. Calbro Systems requires a service model that spans a large number of CIs. At present, a single BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server can only accommodate a service model that contains a limited number of CIs and the Publishing Server can publish only few CIs at a time. 

To build and manage a large number of CIs, Calbro Systems must be able to perform the following tasks:

• Split a service model across multiple BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Servers.
• Have a way to view and query the service model from the central system (Central Server) which is used as a single point of navigation for the operational user interfaces.
• View the impact to business services across multiple BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Servers.
• Identify which top-level CI belongs to which BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server.
• Identify the root cause of an impact to a business service by using root cause analysis across multiple BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Servers.

To achieve these objectives, Calbro Systems needs to create a distributed service model.

To view the centralized service model from the Central Server

Prerequisite: Calbro Systems has created a discrete service model on a Child Server. The service model has been promoted and published to the Child Server and can be viewed from the Central Server.

Assume that a database storage problem leads to a critical impact of the landline service database. If you view the service model in the Operations Console of the Central Server, not only the landline service database CI (impacting CI) but all its parent CIs are also impacted as illustrated below. That is, the impact is propagated from the impacting CI to all its parent CIs (impacted CIs).

Impacted discrete model

 

Consider the same scenario for a distributed service model. That is, the landline systems CI is the impacting CI and the impact is propagated to the parent CIs. The following figure illustrates the impacted distributed service model:

Impacted distributed model

 

You can view details about the CIs on the Related CIs area of the Details Notebook pane. Select a particular CI and click the Details Notebook pane to view its ID, cell details, details of its status and so on. For example, the Details Notebook pane of the discrete service model scenario would resemble the following figure:

Viewing CI details in the Details Notebook

For more information about the Details Notebook pane, see Viewing the Details notebook.

To fix an impacting CI

To fix an impacting CI, perform the following steps:

1. Right-click the impacting CI that is published on the Child Server, and click Menu > Launch > Events View - Child Console.
   The events view in the Operations Console of the Child Server to which the impacting CI belongs is displayed.
2. Select the wrench icon for the impacting event and select Probable Cause Analysis. You can use this feature to analyze the cause of the impact and take necessary steps to fix it. For more information about probable cause analysis, see the Infrastructure Management User Guide.
   After fixing the impacting event, in the Operations Console of the Central Server, you can see that not only the impacting event but its parent CIs are also fixed.