IT Ops configuration management for a large health care provider
One of the nation's largest health care providers was seeking to improve the uptime and availability of its critical delivery, pharmacy, and member service applications to over nine million patient members across eight regions in the U.S. To achieve these goals, it looked to Effect-Tech for help in implementing a configuration management system (CMS) that would enable greater accuracy and detail of the underlying configuration items (CIs) and their relationships.
About the project:
Details about the critical applications and supporting infrastructure, as well as the interconnectivity between the applications, were siloed and spread across several legacy systems. As a result of the complex data environment and the lack of a common repository, the IT operations teams experienced ongoing operational issues, including the following challenges:
- Troubleshooting incidents and identifying the appropriate teams to correct the incidents
- Anticipating the adverse impacts that result from changes
- Understanding which CIs fell under process controls
- Viewing correlation of events across applications
It became evident that a centralized and trusted CMS would address many of the operational issues and support process maturity and integration with Event Management, Incident Management, and Change Management systems. The customer partnered with Effect-Tech to develop the architecture, design, implementation, and integration services for an enterprise solution that would drive down the mean time to resolution (MTTR) of events and incidents, and deliver change-impact details that are typically not part of standard change reports.
The project team took a unique approach, steering away from a typical discovery-based CMS implementation—where millions of CIs are simply loaded into the CMDB and then reconciled—and towards a targeted, operationally focused solution. The CMS was built to leverage the service models (that were defined and loaded into BMC Atrium CMDB) to automatically determine the impacted services and update the appropriate Remedy tickets without the need for additional vendor products. Furthermore, the Effect-Tech consultants designed and implemented additional operational features, including a custom module that enabled the CMS to initiate automated remediation scripts based on the impacted CI and the event situation. Implemented as a seamless extension to Remedy and Atrium CMDB, this module leveraged the service automation rules managed in the CMS to trigger the necessary automation scripts. With this automation framework in place, the customer now had the capabilities necessary to adopt a service-centric approach to manage and automate events within its infrastructure.
To find out more:
Technology Scope:
- BMC Remedy ITSM for event and incident management
- BMC Atrium CMDB for configuration management
- HP Operations Orchestrator for automation
- IBM Tivoli / Netcool for event management
- IBM Tivoli ADDM for discovery
- Other monitoring tools