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Gain value from existing IT tools through shared technologies
1. Enterprises have invested significant amounts of money
and time in ensuring that their IT tools can meet the
level of demand required to support business services,
and therefore, it is unrealistic for them to simply replace
their existing tools to gain the advantages of tight
integration. So how can your IT organization gain value
within this type of IT environment? The answer lies
in your ability to leverage shared technologies that,
when used with both new and existing management
solutions deployed in your IT environment, can create
a comprehensive and integrated approach to managing
IT. By implementing a shared set of technologies based
on industry standards and best practices, you benefit
from a more cohesive and manageable foundation
to support business needs and optimize your existing
IT investments — without the need for a “rip and
replace” IT strategy.
BMC provides such capabilities with BMC®
AtriumTM
,
an open-architected set of enabling technologies that
provide information sharing and process collaboration
across BMC and third-party solutions. BMC Atrium
provides an award-winning configuration management
database (CMDB), unified service model, and common
reporting interfaces to accelerate attainment of BSM.
This shared set of loosely-coupled, enabling technolo-
gies provides tighter integration across the tools that
make up your IT environment, saving your IT organization
time and money.
Enabling Collaboration among IT Processes
To achieve a unified approach to managing your IT
environment, you first must focus on gaining control of
the data that makes IT run, and then must understand
how that data supports business service availability.
When your IT organization is forced to rely on siloed
views of IT infrastructure components, the result is
a fragmented approach to IT management that does
not provide a comprehensive, complete, and accurate
view of the IT environment and its relation to the
business services IT supports.
On the other hand, if all IT management processes
have this information at their disposal — and can both
access and use it, as well as update and contribute
to it — then the processes can be unified in their
approach and objectives. To enable this, BMC Atrium
provides two components that are architectural
linchpins in linking IT processes through information
sharing: the BMC®
AtriumTM
Configuration Management
Database (CMDB) and its associated Service Model.
The BMC Atrium CMDB —
Enabling the Core of Your Infrastructure
The BMC Atrium CMDB is an intelligent data repository
that provides a working model of your enterprise IT
infrastructure. With the BMC Atrium CMDB, you are
able to define and store information on all configuration
items (CIs) and relationships within the IT environment,
including those that reside on third-party technologies.
SOLUTION DATASHEET
BMC Atrium
Accelerate the attainment of Business Service Management
BMC ATRIUM
Enterprise IT organizations rely on a large array of tools to support the needs of their businesses.
These tools often come from multiple vendors, and as a result, IT is faced with a variety of interfaces,
datasets, and consoles. In most cases, these disparate tools do not integrate effectively, leading
to gaps in information and control, and ultimately, to infrastructure fragmentation. To provide
the tight integration of IT management processes and realize the benefits of Business Service
Management (BSM), it is necessary to link this collection of tools and technologies in a cohesive
and controlled manner.
BMC®
AtriumTM
enables a unified approach
to IT management by addressing the following
two key requirements:
> Linking IT processes together through a common
repository with graphical, business-relevant views
> Improving business views into IT management
and performance metrics
2. By consolidating disparate datasets within an organi-
zation, the BMC Atrium CMDB provides a “single
source of truth” for your IT management tools. This
ensures a consistent approach to maintaining IT
processes, such as incident, problem, change, con-
figuration, asset, and service impact management.
These types of applications — combined with
a centralized CMDB — provide the best-practice
process structure and control specified by key industry
standards, such as the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL®
).
Implementing an IT management strategy supported
by the BMC Atrium CMDB will allow you to gain the
IT control needed to support your organization’s
business goals.
The BMC Atrium CMDB provides a Common Data
Model (CDM) based on industry the standards, such as
Distributed ManagementTask Force (DMTF) Common
Information Model (CIM) and Managed Object Format
(MOF). This means that your IT configuration data
will not only be managed within a single environ-
ment, but that you will be conforming to a set of best
practices that will support future growth across IT.
The BMC Atrium CMDB includes a patent-pending
Reconciliation Engine to ensure you have a single
consolidated view across your environment. Finally,
rather than requiring the migration of large amounts
of data — and imposing the requirements of maintain-
ing a monolithic data repository — the BMC Atrium
CMDB provides a single, logical data store that can
reside on multiple data sources throughout your IT
organization. Combined with open interfaces that
integrate your existing IT tools, the BMC Atrium CMDB
is the core enabling technology that provides your
organization with a complete and comprehensive view
of all the elements and configurations that make up
the IT infrastructure.
Service Model — Linking IT and the Business
While the BMC Atrium CMDB maintains a single view
into your IT environment, the Service Model allows
the CMDB to maintain mappings between CIs and
the business services they support. Without this type
of service model, your IT resources — both personnel
and tools — remain disconnected from the business
goals and requirements that IT is there to support.
How does a server going down affect your manufactur-
ing process? How will this hardware upgrade impact
resources that rely on its availability?The BMC Atrium
CMDB Service Model answers these types of ques-
tions, and helps you create an IT infrastructure where
the links between business services and their IT
underpinnings are clear and well defined.
Enabling a Single, Graphical View into the
IT Infrastructure
In order for the BMC Atrium CMDB and its Service
Model to be valuable to your organization, IT process
users who require access to CMDB data need to be
able to view CI and relationship data in a meaningful
and reliable way. The BMC Atrium CMDB provides
a CI Browser and graphical CI Relationship Viewer that
There is a key set of information about the IT
environment that all IT processes must share
and use as a basis for the activities they perform
to achieve the objectives of BSM. This shared
information must provide the following:
> Complete and accurate inventory of all elements
that make up the IT environment
> Mapping of all configuration relationships in
the IT infrastructure
> Model of the dependencies between business
services and the IT environment
BMC ATRIUM
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3. allow any IT process users to launch a view into the
BMC Atrium CMDB to quickly see CI and relationship
data relevant to their needs.The CI Browser provides
a search interface for any IT process user to search for
CI data stored within the BMC Atrium CMDB, while
the CI Relationship Viewer allows IT process users
to view the CI, as well as the relationships and depen-
dencies that CI has with other CIs stored within the
BMC Atrium CMDB.
In addition, the CI Relationship Viewer provides “Launch
in Context” workflow capabilities, providing IT process
users with a “right click” interface that allows the
launching of federated data related to any CI stored with
the BMC Atrium CMDB. This means that no matter
where the data resides in an IT environment, the BMC
Atrium CMDB provides the central access point to
manage and maintain a federated CMDB environment.
Improving IT Management Control
Establishing a common data repository and a way to
relate your IT configuration items to business services
provides the foundation for creating a more manage-
able IT environment. However, in addition to these
core enabling technologies, it’s also imperative to
provide your IT staff and managers with a consistent
and informed way to interact with your IT tools, app-
lications, and related data.This ensures high productivity
and calculated decision-making amongst employees
involved in supporting your IT processes — and gives
them the means to maintain business service availability
across the organization.
With these key capabilities at your disposal, you are
empowered to manage across the IT environment.
To enable this improved IT management control, BMC
Software provides BMC®
AtriumTM
View.
BMC Atrium View —
Powering Informed Decision-Making
To ensure your IT staff is able to respond to business
needs that affect multiple IT process areas, you must
provide them with a consistent interaction model for
the tools that support these processes. By providing
a common set of dashboards and views for the different
groups that make up IT, you enable your IT staff to
better manage and support your IT infrastructure.
For example, it will be easier for your staff to under-
stand where to go to perform tasks; new staff can
get quickly up-to-speed on IT interfaces; and newly
implemented IT solutions can be linked into your
existing environment.
BMC Atrium View ensures that your BSM solutions
provide a common way for IT staff and management
to interface with your IT environment. Today, BMC
solutions provide common dashboard views and
interfaces across closely related IT disciplines. For
example, BMC solutions for service support utilize
shared navigation and interaction paradigms to provide
a consolidated set of dashboards, while BMC solutions
for service delivery also provide a common view into IT
operations and business services through an integrated
management portal. By delivering out of-the-box
interfaces for a variety of BMC products, BMC Atrium
View provides a standards-based approach for creating
consolidated IT management views.
In addition, BMC Atrium View technologies aggregate
information across process areas by linking multiple
IT data sources and applications to create a consoli-
dated set of data to drive IT reporting. By working to
create a unified view into data from BMC tools and
applications, as well as from third-party data sources,
BMC Atrium View provides a comprehensive way to
manage, monitor, and understand how IT is performing.
To enable IT staff to manage across process
areas and make decisions that take multiple
data points into account, the following capa-
bilities are necessary:
> Collation of information into centralized manage-
ment dashboards to provide managers with
access to overview snapshots of the status
of the IT environment
> In-depth and context-rich information about
the IT environment to support informed
decision-making
