Automated service level management system

Patent metadata

Field	Value
Publication number	US-9311611-B2
Application number	US-45473306-A
Country	US
Kind code	B2
Filing date	Jun 16, 2006
Priority date	Jun 16, 2006
Publication date	Apr 12, 2016
Grant date	Apr 12, 2016

Abstract

A method for service level management comprises identifying connected enterprise application components and, under control of an automated system, relating historical performance for the connected enterprise application components and electronically creating a service level agreement based on the historical performance relation.

First claim

What is claimed is:

1. A service level management method comprising:
identifying connected enterprise application components;
under control of an automated system:
relating historical performance for the connected enterprise application components; and
electronically creating a service level agreement based on the historical performance relation obtained from analysis of the connected enterprise application components that are identified, wherein the relating and the electronically creating are performed by one or more computers.

2. The method according to claim 1 further comprising:
creating a service catalog designating enterprise application components.

3. The method according to claim 1 further comprising:
storing historical performance level data in a storage;
interrelating business service object components with the stored historical performance level data; and
electronically deriving business service component performance from the interrelated business service object components and the historical performance level data.

4. The method according to claim 3 further comprising:
integrating the derived business service component performance into a historically-based service baseline; and
combining the historically-based service baseline into the historical performance level data.

5. The method according to claim 4 further comprising:
collecting data from business customers regarding service impact and opportunity cost for a changed component performance condition;
analyzing a series of historically-based service baselines and opportunity cost data; and
deriving an optimum service level agreement baseline from the analysis.

6. The method according to claim 4 further comprising:
collecting data from business customers regarding historical component outage and changed component performance condition; and
relating historical component outage and system performance variation to component performance.

7. The method according to claim 1 further comprising:
storing historical performance level data in a storage;
interrelating business service object components with the stored historical performance level data;
assigning business impact to services;
associating the business impact with a plurality of different elements of an information technology (IT) environment including business services, departments, operators, and work groups;
creating a unified metric for cost that is directly translatable to revenue from the assigned business impact;
specifying a unified cost function as a business impact that describes value of delivery of a portfolio of services by information technology to a business;
electronically balancing business impact aspects including service level, resources, service maintenance schedules, cost, and quality of service; and
creating virtual service level agreements based on the balancing.

8. The method according to claim 1 further comprising:
collecting information on information technology (IT) organizations that supply services to business services;
collecting information on the business services that receive services from the IT organizations;
establishing relationships between the IT organizations and business services; and
establishing business impact rules at the IT organization level for downtime and/or degraded performance.

9. The method according to claim 8 further comprising:
analyzing the established IT organization-business services relationships and the established business impact rules in combination with the historical performance; and
determining a historical performance impact based on the analysis.

10. The method according to claim 8 further comprising:
establishing an information technology (IT) environment model whereby entities including departments, business services, configuration items, work groups, and/or operators respond to a system input signal that can be used to simulate collective IT behavior;
activating a simulation based on an event selected from among a plurality of predetermined incidents and/or predetermined system modifications;
simulating performance to an incident and/or system modification affecting a business service according to the established business impact rules producing a response according to the established IT environmental model;
simulating changes to the IT environmental model to validate expected changes to performance to the changes in an actual IT environment;
displaying rules that trigger the simulated incident; and
auditing the rules.

11. The method according to claim 10 further comprising:
establishing a profile of a preselected operator that estimates the operator's capability to process events in terms of success, quality, and time in context of the established IT environment model; and
reassigning the operator based on the profiled capabilities.

12. The method according to claim 10 further comprising:
predicting changes to intensity and type of incident to determine expected incident response time and proactively modify the IT environment in response to the changes.

13. The method according to claim 10 further comprising:
classifying incidents according to skills-based resolutions behavior; and
determining behavior according to the classification for expected paths-to-resolution and expected processing time.

14. The method according to claim 10 further comprising;
estimating cost and business impact for adding a new business service to the established IT environment; and
selecting business services according to similarity and scaling the selected business services to estimate impact of adding the new business service.

15. The method according to claim 1 further comprising:
collecting performance information for a service portfolio;
modeling historical performance of the service portfolio based on the collected information; and
simulating a selected outage incident and/or a selected modification in service level decisions for performance impact across business services.

16. The method according to claim 1 further comprising:
identifying a collection of operators as a work group;
assigning incidents to work groups based on work group traffic and work group efficacy for dynamically accommodating changes in loading;
modeling behavior of individual operators in the work group and behavior of the collective work group, the modeled behavior further comprising modeling of processing elasticity of the individual operators and/or work group with increasing demand of event processing;
estimating effective work time of resources for a work group whereby staff loading can be expressed as a full-time equivalent;
estimating the staff loading using historic data; and
processing events assigned to the work group according to the modeling.

17. The method according to claim 1 further comprising:
identifying impact of downtime and/or degraded performance at a work around level; and
creating an audible impact trail based on the identified impact.

18. The method according to claim 1 further comprising:
assigning business impact to services;
specifying a unified cost function as a business impact that describes value of delivery of a portfolio of services by information technology to a business;
optimizing configuration of information technology (IT) components using the unified cost function whereby business impact within defined constraints is minimized;
determining assignment of operators to work groups according to the optimization;
determining staffing level across the IT components

Assignees

• Suer Myles
• Newton Barbara
• Baron David
• Lazarus Michael
• Hewlett Packard Entpr Dev Lp

Inventors

• Suer Myles
• Newton Barbara
• Baron David
• Lazarus Michael

Classifications

• G06Q10/06 Primary

  Resources, workflows, human or project management; Enterprise or organisation planning; Enterprise or organisation modelling · CPC title

• Y02P90/80

  Management or planning · CPC title