Supporting ITIL Objectives

The key ITIL processes that drive cost optimization are configuration management, capacity management and problem management.

Source: “Cost Optimization: Three ITIL Processes Can Play an Important Role,” Gartner Inc.

YOUR GOAL: SUPPORT AND QUICK WINS WITH ITIL

Many IT organizations are implementing ITIL as a strategy for improving IT Service Management. The ITIL framework provides best practices and structured processes for managing and delivering IT services. ITIL is a major undertaking for any size organization, requiring the mobilization of significant resources. Many companies are looking for tools, data, and reporting to support their ITIL objectives and help ensure documented success. Other companies are still determining the best starting point for gaining quick, early wins and positive project momentum.

The decision to pursue an ITIL initiative has many potential business upsides if implemented correctly. Alternatively, if ignored, ITIL can create significant advantages for competitors who have implemented it.

• Are your IT services as efficient and cost effective as your competitors who have embraced ITIL best practices?
• Do your business units understand the value of IT?
• Do you find it difficult to work cooperatively with business units when identifying and prioritizing IT investments?
• Are you able to assess the true impact of business projects on IT in terms of productivity and financial gains?
• Do you struggle to determine ROI either before or after implementation of a new IT project?

RETHINKING THE PROBLEM

Vityl’s performance and capacity management toolset provides the data and reports that create the foundation for the core operational and business disciplines contained in ITIL. Having a single toolset to leverage across key ITIL processes and best practices helps minimize the cost and risk, as well as reduce the workload for ITIL implementations.

• Justifying expense of implementing ITIL best practices
• Identifying a simple starting point for quick, early wins
• Establishing consistent and repeatable processes across key ITIL components
• Overcoming lack of capacity and performance tools, data and reporting
• Defining service level agreements (SLAs) or objectives
• Documenting performance against SLA metrics
• Integrating multiple systems required for ITIL processes

HOW VITYL SUPPORTS YOUR ITIL SERVICE DELIVERY OBJECTIVES

Service Level Management: Predict Attainable SLA Performance Targets

Determine optimal performance levels needed to meet business unit goals while ensuring these metrics can be tracked and reported on an ongoing basis.

Service Level Management: Document Performance Against SLAs

Document performance against SLA metrics with flexible analysis and historical trend reporting, and add value by proactively predicting issues and addressing them before they become problems.

Availability Management: Deliver Optimal Performance

Use modeling capabilities to show business units the impact of various availability management decisions and agree on optimal performance levels to meet business unit goals.

Availability Management: Problem/Cause Prediction and Determination

Quickly determine the cause of an outage and prevent recurrence. Prevent potential business issues and address them before they become problems.

Financial Management: Chargeback Data and Reports

Generate chargeback reports directly from tracking data, with no need for a separate billing system. Allow business units to easily match their bills to original data, reducing errors, questions, and concerns.

Financial Management: Budget Tracking

Automate reports against historical data and track actual usage to your technology plan. Easily identify deviations, understand the impact today, and predict the impact for the rest of the year.

Service Continuity: Hot Site Performance Testing

Simulate operating your mission-critical applications on a limited-size, hot-site platform in order to understand the consequences of executing recovery scenarios. Sizing the smallest effective capacity increment required maximizes the value of disaster recovery dollars.

CONSIDERATIONS

What if, when negotiating SLAs with business units, you could easily run different scenarios to create benchmark data and establish meaningful metrics that satisfy business units and can be delivered by IT?

What if you could quickly and easily determine the optimal configuration requirements to ensure service availability for mission-critical applications?

What if you could predict service degradation and proactively resolve it before it caused a major problem?

HOW VITYL SUPPORTS YOUR ITIL SERVICE DELIVERY OBJECTIVES CONTINUED...

Capacity Management: Capacity Planning

Provision and allocate the right hardware and configurations to meet demand levels, predict how systems will respond to workload changes, and avoid outages or performance problems.

Capacity Management: Predictive Modeling

Proactively partner with business units to simulate the impact of new applications. Predict IT impact and provide accurate cost data for making more informed business decisions.

Capacity Management: Performance and Capacity Analysis

Easily identify underutilized capacity and opportunities for consolidation, then monitor and document improvements.

In fact:

Vityl has demonstrated that by starting ITIL projects within the Capacity Management discipline, IT departments can generate enough cost savings through improvements to fund the remainder of an ITIL project. Once the tools are in place they can be used to create the data and reporting needed for follow-on implementations. This maximizes the benefits of ITIL, while avoiding many of the concerns regarding service disruption, resource drains, and ROI.

CONSIDERATIONS

What if you could determine precisely how much and what type of capacity is required to meet business objectives?

What if you could quickly and accurately determine the IT infrastructure and resources needed to support new applications or changes in IT requirements?

What if you could easily access infrastructure and capacity data needed for IT accounting when monitoring actual expenses against your budget?

Considerations

What if you could find potential application performance problems that go undetected by standard QA functionality tests?

What if you could perform stress tests that accurately represent your production environment without incurring the expense of a duplicate production environment?

What if you could access real-time performance data to identify problems and resolve them before users call?

What if you could access both current and historical performance data from the same tool when addressing a Level II problem?

HOW VITYL SUPPORTS YOUR ITIL SERVICE SUPPORT OBJECTIVES

Application Management: QA Performance Testing

Identify whether new applications will run efficiently and provide desired service levels. Detect potential performance problems even when application code appears to function properly.

Application Management: Performance Volume Stress Testing

Simulate numerous production stress levels to see exactly how your production environment will handle volume. Run small-scale production tests and apply the data to models for an affordable best practice.

HOW VITYL SUPPORTS YOUR ITIL IT INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT

Computer Operations: Real-Time Performance Monitoring

Perform both reactive and proactive performance monitoring. Collect detailed performance data and alert enterprise command centers of exceptions; or provide detailed data behind a problem detected by

existing alert systems.

Computer Operations: Historical Problem Management

Vityl Capacity Management not only provides current data, it also maintains detailed historical records to help with trend analysis needed for problem determination. Since both sets of data

 are generated and reside in a common tool, this provides a much quicker, smoother and less error-prone hand-off between problem determination groups.