Andy Reitz (blog)

 

 

RUG: ATR521: Integrating your IT Management tools with BMC Atrium

BSM: aligning business with IT
  • requires business awareness and context across IT silos
  • tools need service centric view instead of infrastructure centric
  • ability to manage business services across entire IT infrastructure
Design around architectural linchpins
  • CMDB
  • Shared service model
  • Dashboards
BMC Atrium
  • Open foundation for information sharing and process collaboration across BMC products and 3rd party solutions
  • shared data repository, common user interface
Components
  • CMDB (Core BSM Data)
  • Service model (business relevance) (Core BSM Data)
  • web services and data access (common data abstraction layer)
  • reporting -- aggregates (presentation layer)
  • view -- management dashboards (presentation layer)
BMC Atrium Service Model
  • Provide Service Model Editor (operates on CMDB -- where model is stored?), API for accessing Service Model
  • Examples: SLAs, Change Management (determine which components affected are part of business service), asset management from service perspective
Notes:
  • In order to get Service Model Editor, have to buy SIM (today)
  • SIM maps incoming events to service model, and correlates to CI
My summary: It sounds like IT is evolving to think of services instead of just raw infrastructure components. I think that this has been happening for awhile now, and it is good thing, but it looks like the vendors are finally catching up. This presentation was pretty high level, so I don't have a concrete view of how good/bad BMC Atrium is. But, at least now I know what it is.