ITIL

ITIL

* Companies want to concentrate on their core business. so non-core businesses are outsourced

to other vendors (service providers) to avoid those disturbances.
example, ICICI bank's core business is financial banking, ICICI does not want to have head ache

in managing their datacenter and the application which supports their core banking work.
so ICICI decides to outsource the backend infrastructure to other companies (service providers

like IBM, HP, TCS, Infosys, Unisys,...)

for example, now ICICI choose TCS to give support. what next?
The process and procedures should be in place.
both ICICI and TCS would sit and define the SLA (Service Level Agreement) which covers all the

topics like what are all to be supported by TCS. i.e, what OS and what applications?

at the same time, ICICI wants the every work done by TCS to be recorded like,
    what is the work?
    what is the date and time executed?
    who performed?
    and its result (success/failure)?
so this way, ICICI will have good history about the changes in their servers or applications.

This history can be used if required.

So here it comes ITIL.
*  The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a set of best practices that may

be used to deliver high quality IT services.
ITIL is best practice guidance and the only best practice framework for effectively managing

service management in IT, ITSM.

ITIL Benefits:
1. To align IT with the business
2. Reduce cost of operations
3. Improves quality of service
4. Delivers consistent IT services
5. Provides guidance for all types of organisation

There are 12 modules in ITSM. Important are,
1. Incident Management
2. Problem Management
3. Change Management

* An Incident is a system failure or error in the system. This may be a full disk (file system

full), a broken server (server down), or any application crash, etc. These are isolated one-time

events that have procedures for handling and fixing. These are managed under Incident Management.

*  If the same type of incidents for a same application or for a same server are geneated, this

is to be considered as a Problem. every problem would have a reason what it caused and the

solution. i.e., root cause and the solution.
These are managed under Problem Management which helps to avoid further future same typr of

incidents.

* Managing an Incident means fixing the broken system to get it working as soon as possible.

While managing a Problem means finding the underlying root causes so that the Incidents do not

happen again or as often.


*  Once we found the reason (root cause) of a problem and solution, the solution has to be

implemented. so there is a change in server configuration or application or OS.
These changes can not be done straight away. because the implementer of the change may not know

the impact of the change. Impact means application outage, future issues for other teams, etc.
So all the relevant teams would join together, discuss about the change and finally approve the

change. so Change would be implemented after the approval on a given date and time.
These processes are managed through change module.


*  ITIL is not a tool, it is a set of rules and the best practices.
By considering these rules, some companies designed software to use these incident, problem,

change management best practices. Those softwares are,
1. BMC Remedy
2. Peregrine
3. osticket
4. Altris

* BMC Remedy Versions:
Remedy 6
Remedy 7.1
Remedy 7.6