solution brief

Proactive Incident and Problem Management

Reduce the number, duration, and severity of business disruptions

If your organization is like most, your service desk is continually flooded with
incidents that are often brought to your attention by end users who can’t
access one or more critical business services. Although you envision a future
time when your support organization proactively prevents business service
disruptions, right now, just staying afloat is quite a challenge. What’s more,
the flood waters continue to rise as you deploy more business services into
an increasingly complex IT infrastructure. You’re under intense pressure to
meet service level agreements (SLAs) that dictate not only application service
availability and performance levels, but that also support service levels, such
as incident resolution times. As if this weren’t enough, you’re also expected to
reduce costs.

AN IMPORTANT STEP TOWARD BUSINESS SERVICE MANAGEMENT

Business Service Management (BSM) is the most effective approach for
managing IT from the perspective of the business. BMC solutions for Proactive
Incident and Problem Management connect several IT disciplines to deliver a
focused, pragmatic, and proactive approach to BSM based on best practices
that comply with IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) guidelines. With BMC solutions
for Proactive Incident and Problem Management, you will be able to deliver
a far more consistent, proactive approach to service management. Most
importantly, you will be able to prioritize and efficiently coordinate actions
based on their business impact, so that you can put BSM into practice.

BMC solutions for Proactive Incident and

®

As a result, you will move from being reactive to being proactive: improving
Problem Management provide a consistent, the efficiency of your support staff, shortening resolution times, and cost-
proactive approach to service management effectively reducing the number of incidents you have to handle. What’s more,
you’ll be able to resolve impending issues before they result in system outages,
based on best practices that comply with IT
or worse, business disruptions.
Infrastructure Library (ITIL ) guidelines.
®
“These tightly integrated solutions represent an advanced
approach to service management that brings together the
service desk and the operations team along with their toolsets”
Enterprise Management Associates
“Ensuring Business Services with Proactive Incident and Problem Management”
Lisa Erickson-Harris, July 2006

THE INGREDIENTS OF SUCCESS The BMC Atrium CMDB can also accept input from your existing
To move from reactive to proactive incident and problem discovery tools, so you can continue to gain value from your invest-
management, you need to have several capabilities in place: ment in those tools. In addition, through federation, the BMC Atrium
CMDB can link to data in existing data stores, such as network
1. An enterprisewide view of your IT environment — Provide the
and user directories, so you don’t have to move the data to use it.
service desk with a comprehensive, accurate, and holistic view of
your IT environment
UNDERSTANDING OF THE BUSINESS IMPACT OF EVENTS
2. An understanding of the business impact of events — Just knowing what’s out there is not enough. To put BSM into
Determine the business implications of incidents and problems in practice, you need to know the business implications of incidents
order to prioritize efforts based on business impact and problems, including the business services impacted, as well as
the users of those services. Only by knowing this information can
3. An early warning system — Detect and act on exceptions before
the service desk staff prioritize efforts based on business impact
they are reported by users, and head off issues before they result
rather than merely operating on a first-in/first-out basis. It also
in service degradation
permits the staff to notify affected users when necessary.
4. Best practice workflow — Remove trial-and-error and reduce
risk by operating with best practice service support and service BMC solutions for Proactive Incident and Problem Management
delivery processes permit you to tie assets to business services and people. Using a
visual editor in BMC ® Service Impact Manager, you can create a
BMC solutions for Proactive Incident and Problem Management
model that maps the IT assets depicted in the BMC Atrium CMDB to
provide all four. You can implement each of these capabilities
the business services and users they support. The resulting model
incrementally, increasing the value to your organization and your
is available to service desk technicians, allowing them to quickly
BSM maturity as you progress.
determine the business impact of incidents and problems.

ENTERPRISEWIDE VIEW OF YOUR I.T. ENVIRONMENT You can also use BMC ® Service Level Management to create
A major capability necessary for proactive incident and problem contracts with business managers that define the levels of service
management is to provide a comprehensive, accurate, and holistic required for each key service delivered by IT, including support
view of the IT environment. Service technicians need to know what service. These contracts also define the metrics used by BMC
IT assets are out there, what their configurations are, how they Service Impact Manager to set business priorities.
interrelate, and who is using them. With this information at their
fingertips, technicians can speed diagnosis and resolution. What’s Finally, you can take advantage of BMC ® User Administration
more, they can see what resources and what users are impacted and Provisioning to integrate user identity information with asset
by an issue, so they can quickly assess its scope. information. In this way, you can achieve identity-aware BSM by
linking user identity information management to discovery, the
BMC solutions for Proactive Incident and Problem Management CMDB, and incident management.
automatically gather the information you need and maintain it
in a centralized repository — the BMC ® Atrium™ Configuration
EARLY WARNING SYSTEM
Management Database (CMDB). What’s more, the BMC ® Discovery
A frequent issue plaguing many service desks is that in many, if
solution automatically captures and continuously updates the BMC
not most, cases, users are the first to report issues. That puts
Atrium CMDB with information on the assets in your infrastructure.
the service desk in a continual firefighting mode. To transition to
Information can include asset configurations, physical and logical
proactive incident and problem management, you need an early
dependencies of the assets, and their associated users.
warning system in place that keeps you abreast of the status of the identity information supplied by BMC User Administration and
IT environment. Merely monitoring the environment and passing raw Provisioning, to prioritize response and maximize efficiency. Also,
events to the service desk doesn’t solve the problem. the staff can automatically and proactively notify users of impacted
business services, reducing calls to the service desk, cutting costs,
That’s where BMC solutions for Proactive Incident and Problem and demonstrate responsiveness to the business.
Management come in. BMC ® Event Manager transforms raw events
from across the IT infrastructure into a meaningful early warning If service technicians cannot resolve an incident quickly, they can
system. It automatically consolidates and processes the events, while declare it a problem. BMC Remedy Service Desk provides separate
also filtering, correlating, and enriching them with contextual data. and distinct workflows optimized for problem resolution. These
BMC Event Manager operates in conjunction with BMC ® Performance workflows encompass root cause analysis for problem control,
Manager, BMC MAINVIEW, BMC Batch Impact Manager, and
® ® ®
known error management for error control, and knowledge solution
BMC ® Transaction Management applications. These applications management for trend identification and future problem prevention.
continuously monitor the availability and performance of the resources
and services in your infrastructure, including mainframes, databases, If a change is required to resolve a problem, the service technician
batch processes, and transactions. What’s more, they can predict can seamlessly submit a change request through BMC ® Remedy®
problems before they occur, providing sophisticated recovery routintes Change Management, which tracks and manages the change
that automatically circumvent problems and avoid costly disruptions. through its entire lifecycle and notifies the help desk upon successful
Whenever these solutions detect an exception, they generate an completion. This closed-loop change management process fulfills the
event to BMC Event Manager. BMC Event Manager can also accept ITIL guidelines processes of workflow, authorization, verification, and
events from your existing monitoring tools and can forward processed audit. Closed-loop change management minimizes the risk of failed
events to your existing consoles, preserving your investments. changes and facilitates compliance with government regulations.

BMC Event Manager sends events to BMC Service Impact Manager BASED ON BSM ROUTES TO VALUE ™

for assessment of their business impact. Based on the business BMC ® solutions for Proactive Incident and Problem Management
impact of events, BMC Service Impact Manager automatically and are built on BSM Routes to Value — a flexible, milestone-based
proactively generates “intelligent service desk incidents” that are approach to BSM. Each of the eight BSM Routes to Value leverages
prioritized according to business criticality and affected users. field-proven BMC solutions to address particular disciplines within
BSM, in this case, incident and problem management.
With the early warning system enabled by BMC solutions for Proactive
Incident and Problem Management, you can detect and act on Because BSM Routes to Value are highly flexible, you can build your
exceptions before they are reported by users, and head off issues solution according to your specific needs. What’s more, they allow
before they result in service degradation. You’ll not only improve service you to build a solution that addresses your most pressing business
quality but also decrease the number of calls to the service desk. and IT needs. BSM Routes to Value work with the tools, solutions,
and data sources you currently have in place to protect your
BEST PRACTICE WORKFLOW investment in existing resources.
To remove trial-and-error and reduce risk, you need to operate
with best practice service support and service delivery processes. Best of all, BSM Routes to Value work together within and across IT
For example, BMC solutions for Proactive Incident and Problem disciplines and share a common view of how IT services support the
Management include the market-leading BMC Remedy Service
® ®
business through the BMC Atrium CMDB.
Desk, which delivers flexible, built-in workflow for guiding service
agents through best-practice incident and problem management A FLEXIBLE, INTEGRATED SOLUTION
processes. BMC Remedy Service Desk can accept incidents from With BMC solutions for Proactive Incident and Problem
a variety of sources, including issues reported by users through Management, you can build a solution that addresses your specific
telephone, fax, and e-mail, as well as “intelligent incidents” needs — at the pace best suited to your organization. The solution
automatically reported by BMC Service Impact Manager, thus offerings include:
allowing you to automate workflow for incident creation and
handling. BMC Remedy Service Desk can automatically trigger Capability 1
corrective actions, such as those required to restore critical database > BMC Discovery – builds and maintains an accurate, complete,
applications and related business services, by integrating with tools and up-to-date picture of your IT environment, including assets,
such as BMC ® Recovery Manager. Service technicians can also use their configurations and dependencies, and the business users
BMC Remedy Knowledge Management to help resolve incidents
® ® who depend upon them.
more quickly.
> BMC Atrium CMDB – offers a “single source of truth” to provide
accurate, pervasive, and business-aware visibility into the depen-
Service desk staff are able to use business service impact data
dencies between business processes, users, and IT infrastructure.
provided by BMC Service Impact Manager, combined with the
Capability 2
> BMC Service Impact Manager — processes events against service models that relate
IT to business, enabling BSM through real-time business-aware information about IT
services and infrastructure. about bmc software
BMC Software delivers the solutions IT
> BMC Service Level Management — provides real-time service level management, needs to increase business value through
while integrating with existing IT management tools and service desk processes to better management of technology and
deliver business-aware information about the real-time state of services. IT processes. Our industry-leading
Business Service Management solutions
> BMC User Administration and Provisioning — simplifies and standardizes user account help you reduce cost, lower risk of busi-
management by integrating information about relationships, roles, and access rules into ness disruption, and benefit from an IT
infrastructure built to support business
automated processes and linking identity management people data into the CMDB.
growth and flexibility. Known for enterprise
Capability 3 solutions that span mainframe, distributed
systems, and end-user devices, BMC also
> BMC Event Manager — receives events from IT components, enriches them with
delivers solutions that address the unique
information to help speed problem resolution, and automatically responds to events
challenges of the midsized business.
according to business and operations priorities. Founded in 1980, BMC has offices world-
wide and fiscal 2006 revenues of more
> BMC Performance Manager — manages the performance and availability of a wide
than $1.49 billion. Activate your business
variety of infrastructure resources, including servers, applications, storage, network with the power of IT.
devices, and Web transactions.
Learn more at www.bmc.com
> BMC MAINVIEW — Delivers business-centric zSeries systems management and
intelligent optimization for your mainframe infrastructure that supports business-critical
applications.

> BMC Batch Impact Manager — helps to ensure the successful, on-time completion of
critical batch business processes.

> BMC Transaction Manager — integrates and correlates transactional data, end-user
experience, and infrastructure monitoring to ensure real-time business service delivery.

Capability 4
> BMC Remedy Service Desk — automates your ability to submit, monitor, and manage
help desk cases, change tasks, and asset inventory records; as well as indicates which
business services are impacted by a given incident or problem, letting you determine
priorities based on business need.

> BMC Remedy Knowledge Management — provides service desk agents with quick
answers and solutions to their customers’ issues, and delivers Web-based self-service
options to allow employees or customers to find their own answers using natural
language search.

> BMC Remedy Change Management — delivers comprehensive policy, process

management, and planning capabilities, including the assessment of impact, risk, and
resource requirements, to help increase the speed and consistency in which changes
are implemented, while also minimizing risk.

> BMC Recovery Manager — automates the database recovery management process to
ensure consistent activity across related databases and increase the speed of recovery
utility processing.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

To find out more about how BMC solutions for Proactive Incident and Problem Management *63316*
can help you improve efficiency, shorten resolution times, and cost-effectively reduce the
number, duration, and severity of business disruptions, visit www.bmc.com/bsm.