Designing for Event Management

Risks

Critical Success Factors

Challenges

Challenges, Critical Success Factors and risks

There are a number of challenges that might be encountered:

• An initial challenge may be to obtain funding for the necessary tools and effort needed to install and exploit the benefits of the tools.
• One of the greatest challenges is setting the correct level of filtering. Setting the level of filtering incorrectly can result in either being flooded with relatively insignificant event s, or not being able to detect relatively important events until it is too late.
• Rolling out of the necessary monitoring agents across the entire IT infrastructure may be a difficult and time-consuming activity requiring an ongoing commitment over quite a long period of time – there is a danger that other activities may arise that could divert resource s and delay the rollout.
• Acquiring the necessary skills can be time consuming and costly.

In order to obtain the necessary funding a compelling Business Case should be prepared showing how the benefits of effective Event Management can far outweigh the cost s – giving a positive return on investment.

One of the most important CSFs is achieving the correct level of filtering. This is complicated by the fact that the significance of events changes. For example, a user logging into a system today is normal, but if that user leaves the organization and tries to log in it is a security breach.

There are three keys to the correct level of filtering, as follows:

• Integrate Event Management into all Service Management processes where feasible. This will ensure that only the events significant to these processes are reported.
• Design new services with Event Management in mind (this is discussed in detail in paragraph 4.1.10).
• Trial and error. No matter how thoroughly Event Management is prepared, there will be classes of events that are not properly filtered. Event Management must therefore include a formal process to evaluate the effectiveness of filtering.

Proper planning is needed for the rollout of the monitoring agent software across the entire IT Infrastructure. This should be regarded as a project with realistic timescales and adequate resources being allocated and protected throughout the duration of the project.

The key risk s are really those already mentioned above: failure to obtain adequate funding; ensuring the correct level of filtering; and failure to maintain momentum in rolling out the necessary monitoring agents across the IT Infrastructure. If any of these risks is not addressed it could adversely impact on the success of Event Management.

Effective Event Management is not designed once a service has been deployed into Operations. Since Event Management is the basis for monitoring the performance and availability of a service, the exact targets and mechanisms for monitoring should be specified and agreed during the Availability and Capacity Management processes (see Service Design publication).

However, this does not mean that Event Management is designed by a group of remote system developers and then released to Operations Management together with the system that has to be managed. Nor does it mean that, once designed and agreed, Event Management becomes static – day-to-day operation s will define additional event s, priorities, alert s and other improvements that will feed through the Continual Improvement process back into Service Strategy, Service Design etc.

Service Operation function s will be expected to participate in the design of the service and how it is measured (see section 3.4).

For Event Management, the specific design areas include the following.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23