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You’ve probably heard much lately about Information Technology Service Management (ITSM)—and you may be wondering what it means for you as an IT professional. ITSM is a standard approach for managing IT infrastructure to deliver IT services that satisfy business needs. This service-centric approach contrasts to traditional technology-centric approaches that do not explicitly couple technology management with business needs. The subset of ITSM fundamentals that apply to operations quality is called Infrastructure Performance Management (IPM).
Implemented well, IPM frees you from constant firefighting and can transform your role from tactical first responder to strategic business enabler. Applying good IPM technology and processes can deliver a number of benefits to your career as well as to your organization.
For large enterprises, successful IPM implementation generally frees up from one to four IT staffers who can then be re-deployed to new projects. Not only does IPM improve productivity, it also allows employees to graduate from mundane and repetitive tasks to more interesting and strategic new projects.
In addition, good IPM practices improve by almost 30 percent the likelihood that performance problems will be discovered by management systems rather than end users—and good IPM practices produce 80 percent better mean time to repair (MTTR) results. Finally, companies with good IPM practices spend 16 percent less than their counterparts on network management visibility hardware and software. This report introduces IPM, offers tips for successful IPM implementation, and explores how IPM can benefit your enterprise as well as your career.
Building IPM on an ITIL Foundation Seen as a catalyst for business growth, IPM is an increasingly popular means to align IT infrastructure with business goals.
IPM is a strategic business-oriented activity that can transform management’s view of IT as a mysterious world peopled by “gnomes” who work in windowless silos and have little connection with the business. For network operations managers wishing to expand their horizons, IPM opens opportunities for integral involvement in strategic business initiatives.
IPM is coming your way. Among the initial implementers are: large multi-nationals, enterprises that have grown through merger and acquisition, IT service and outsourcing firms, "pure play" IT companies, government agencies and service providers. These enterprises have much to gain by aligning their IT infrastructure with the goals of the business.
Infrastructure Performance Management monitors for variables that cross fixed thresholds or deviate from dynamically defined normal behavior, enabling action to prevent degradation that could adversely affect users or business processes. Beyond measuring utilization for CPUs, memory, storage, ports, LAN/WAN segments, etc., performance management includes many additional key performance indicators such as connect time, latency, broadcast/multicast, errors per second, discarded frames per second, and more.
IPM is also about implementing best practices in four fundamental IT process areas— incident management, availability management, capacity management and service level management.
If you are familiar with the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), you may recognize that these process areas align with the ITIL service delivery frameworks. In total ITIL encompasses more than 25 process areas, although few organizations adopt all 25. Note that although IPM aligns with ITIL frameworks, ITIL is only one of many possible paths to IPM adoption.
Applying IPM processes to your infrastructure’s performance can be extremely rewarding. Regardless of where your organization is in deploying technology or rolling out new services, your infrastructure can benefit from proper infrastructure performance management.
Good IPM not only ensures that your services meet your business needs, but also serves as the proverbial “canary in the coal mine” to proactively point to needed changes. For example, you will know in advance of problems when server capacity, router memory, circuit bandwidth, etc., need upgrading. This information enables you to upgrade capacity proactively rather than in hurried response to user complaints. Fundamental IPM Building Blocks IPM comprises four fundamental processes that build upon one another. Incident management comprises the foundation building block, with availability management above it, then capacity management, and service level management positioned as the most sophisticated “capstone” building block. Here is what these building blocks include in a data networking context.
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