Perform intelligent server automation

A typical customer's data center infrastructure consists of servers, networks, storage devices, databases, and application assets. Infrastructure components like servers themselves do not serve any purpose unless they are configured to run a business process by deploying business applications and associating business applications with business services. It elevates the maturity of the data center staff to have a thorough understanding of the business purpose served by infrastructure components such as servers. The intelligent server automation use case is a step toward improving the understanding of a customer's data center staff, so they can make more business-savvy decisions before performing any server oriented tasks.

Before performing BMC Server Automation tasks on a server, it can be helpful to know what BMC Atrium business service(s) the server is associated with. This can help you assess the impact of your server automation tasks on different parts of the company. Understanding this impact lets you perform "intelligent" server automation.

Intelligent server automation example

The diagram below shows that Server A is associated with the Human Resources business service.



Within the BMC Server Automation Console, this relationship is captured by Server A containing a BUSINESS_SERVICES custom property that is set to Human Resources.

Use case summary

This use case shows you how to:

• Populate each server's BUSINESS_SERVICES property.
• Create smart groups based on the value of the BUSINESS_SERVICES property.
• Use those smart groups to:
  • Report on compliance and change activity by business service.
  • Make intelligent decisions about the impact of your server automation tasks on various parts of the company.

What to do next