Atrium Impact Simulator analysis for change requests
Using this tool provides many benefits for the change management staff:
- Generates "What if?" impact simulations to determine if the change request will affect critical upstream business services. Using the Atrium Impact Simulator could potentially reduce the number of CAB meetings.
- Determines the approvers for the change request, based on the simulation result.
- Generates simulation reports for audit or compliance purposes.
You might also use BMC Atrium Impact Simulator to plan for disaster recovery. You can run simulations to determine where the network is weakest, and plan accordingly.
BMC Atrium Impact Simulator uses the impact relationships that you create between CIs. For information about creating relationships, see Working-with-relationships.
When you run a simulation, you can specify an impact state for each CI in the simulation. The following table lists the states that you can select in BMC Atrium Impact Simulator.
Impact states in BMC Atrium Impact Simulator
BMC Atrium Impact Simulator state | Description |
|---|---|
Slightly Impaired | The CI is delivering services normally, but some problem might affect it. |
Impaired | The CI's delivery of service is slightly affected. |
Very Impaired | The CI's delivery of service is affected. |
Unavailable | The CI has a failure and is unable to deliver service. |
When you run a simulation, BMC Atrium Impact Simulator uses these states and the impact relationships defined between CIs to predict the corresponding impact on those CIs. For example, a simulation that includes a server with an impact state of Unavailable might return several related CIs that are predicated to be unavailable as a result of the unavailable server. However, an Impaired server in that same simulation might return impacted CIs that are predicted to be only Slightly Impaired.
Priorities can help you understand the problems that you should address first if you were to make the changes that you simulated. For example, a simulation might reveal that if a server were to fail, email and payroll services might be disabled. The computed priority for these services would help you decide which service to restore first.
For more information, see Simulating the impact of changes to CIs in the BMC CMDB documentation.