Technologies to support ITIL

Technologies to support ITIL David Borsos and Adam Demjen

Agenda •

What is ITIL?

•

Knowing the infrastructure

•

Software assets

•

Impact analysis

•

How much does it cost?

•

Change management

•

Contact management

•

Access management

•

Q&A

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What is ITIL? • Information Technology Infrastructure Library • A set of practices for IT Service Management −

“Service approach” focuses on the customers’ perspective

−

How to “run” an IT plant in a “good” way?

−

Holistic view: not just technology and implementation

• Concepts, processes vs. tools to support them • Publications 1.

Service Strategy

2.

Service Design

3.

Service Transition

4.

Service Operations

5.

Continual Service Improvement

3

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Knowing your infrastructure ITIL CMDB

• Size of an Enterprise IT Plant (e.g. Morgan Stanley) −

Tens of thousands of hosts

−

5700 database servers

−

Dedicated teams to support the various infrastructure elements

−

Impossible to “know it all”

• Solution: Configuration Management Database (CMDB) −

Collect all infrastructure data into a single, federated database

−

Fundamental structural unit: CI (Configuration Item) + Properties + Relationships

−

Example CI types: server, database, software asset, mailgroup, person, building…

• Source data can be −

Defined manually

−

Discovered

−

Loaded from a different management system 4

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Knowing your infrastructure ITIL CMDB Software asset catalog Infrastructure provisioning

Costs & billing Impact analysis

Automatic discovery

CMDB Data Warehouse

Change management Contact management

External systems

Access Management Organizational data 5

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Knowing your infrastructure Inside the data warehouse

Property

… CI

System: Trading App 3000

Property

CI

Property

Lifecycle Phase: Production

Dev Email Group: [email protected] Owns

… Relationship

(Logical) Database: PROD_TRADING_DB

Relationship Property CI

Data_Space_Allocated_MB: 20000 Runs On DB_Server_Version: Sybase 12.5.4.0.10

Property …

Relationship

Cluster Service: nycluster28

IP_Address: 123.456.789.101 Cluster Type: coyote

…

• Highly normalized uniform data 6

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Knowing your infrastructure ETL: Extract, Transform, Load

• Extract −

Do not change the contents, only make it “manageable” (CRLF?)

−

Lots of different data sources • Use simple structures (database table, CSV file) • Generalize the connectivity (2-3 types)

• Transform −

Change the data here to make sense (e.g. convert to lowercase, combine data)

−

Cleanup

−

Mostly can be done via SQL (“INSERT INTO transform SELECT * FROM extract”)

• Load −

Create the normalized data

−

Insert it into the database

• Highly scalable, highly parallel, lots of challenges 7

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Knowing your infrastructure ETL: Extract, Transform, Load

Transformed Data

Raw Data

Normalized CI Data

Customers

Normalized CI Data

Business Processes

Normalized CI Data

Reports

Normalized CI Data

Data Sources

Analysis

Extract

Transform

Load

• Scheduled operation • Isolated steps – parallel loading / synchronization challenge −

Extract from A and Extract from B can run at the same time…

−

… but the Transform combining then needs to wait for both Extract A and B 8

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Knowing your infrastructure Some metrics…

• 6 million CIs • 30 million relationships • 800 000 records moved one day • 85 data sources • Hundreds of customers • Checking new data every 10 minutes

9

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Software assets From the infrastructure’s perspective

• A catalog of software products available (vendor products or proprietary systems) • Software: special CI type • A product (system) −

Consists of source code (repository)

−

Provides business functionality

−

Owns / Uses infrastructure components (CIs)

−

Relates to people (e.g. developers, support personnel)

−

Owned by organizational entities

−

Uses other systems

• More than 10000 systems registered in Morgan Stanley

10

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Software assets Software metadata

• Does it store confidential or restricted data? • Is it in scope for certain regulations? (e.g. Sarbanes-Oxley Act aka. SOX) • Software lifecycle −

New product / active development

−

Maintain current state

−

On a decommission track

• Cost allocation (internal billing) • New products must be reviewed before deployment −

Risk

−

Security

• Changes of a system are typically in scope of Change Management

11

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Software assets Life of a software Reviews

Pre – production

Ready for production

Evaluation

Production

Proposal

To be decommissioned

Decommissioned

Infrastructure decommission

Change management Idea or business need 12

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Impact analysis • Question: what happens if I shut down a host? −

What is the impact on the business?

−

What if a whole datacenter goes down?

• CMDB contains all infrastructure (CI) data and their relationships • Everything is mapped to Software Assets • Software Assets are related to business functionality and people • Solution: search the dependency graph of the CIs • Know: −

What the impact is?

−

How serious it is?

−

Who needs to know about it? (and when)

13

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Impact analysis Traversing the dependency graph

Infrastructure

Software assets

Business information

Datacenter Commodities department

Contains Owned by

Owned by

Host System Running on Database server

Provides Trade completion

14

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How much does it cost? • CMDB: CIs and relationships • Software Assets: systems, CIs and business functionality • CI TCO/year – how much does an infrastructure component cost? −

One-time costs: buy a HDD

−

Power consumption

−

Support (manpower) costs

• System TCO/year – how much does a system cost? −

Sum of all infrastructure costs

−

Add the cost of people (developers, support)

• Split it up based on usage -> billing per organizational unit • Split it up based on business functionality -> cost efficiency • Predictions & strategic planning 15

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Change management ITIL Transition Management

• Change: result in a new status of one or more CIs • Minimize the impact / disruption of business activity −

Utilize the CMDB (CI relationships)

• Detailed documentation must be supplied −

When is the change executed?

−

What are the execution steps?

−

How do you make sure the change was successful?

−

How do you undo the change if it wasn’t?

• Must be approved by management −

Who needs to approve? (organizational data)

• Multiple changes might happen in the same time (e.g. weekends)

16

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Change management ITIL Transition Management

• Tooling to support changes −

Distribution tools

−

Database migration tools

−

etc…

• Can’t make changes without the tools • Tools prevent unintended production changes −

Need a fully approved change ticket

−

Emergency changes -> review post-event

• DEV / QA environment are less or non-restricted • Code must reach appropriate (production) status before deploying −

Consequence: cannot deploy a brand new system that is not security-approved

17

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Contact management ITIL Service Operations

• Who to contact with if… −

…there is an infrastructure incident

−

…there is a planned work related to a CI

• Utilize the data from the CMDB −

Software asset owns infrastructure CIs

−

Software asset relates to people (who is responsible for support?)

• Set up contact instructions on a system level instead of CI level −

No need to individually set up on all infrastructure CIs

−

Resolve the rules on them

• Changes are handled automatically −

Change in the responsibilities of people

−

Infrastructure configuration changes 18

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Access management • Can a specific user access an infrastructure item? −

Can I read from that database?

−

Depends on the user and the database

• Examples: −

A developer needs to access a database for development purpose

−

A developer should not access a production database with live data

• Exceptions might be made (e.g. in emergency situations) • Use the People – System – CI relationships again • Grant CI level permissions automatically • Lots of changes each day −

Need to automate to avoid errors / over-entitlement

−

Need to automate because it’s better for the people

• Also possible to automate 19

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Access management

Roles

Software assets On

System Infrastructure

User

Has

Role

Owns

Resource

In

Environment

Actions / Permissions May

Action

In

Environment

20

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Access management

Roles

Software assets On

TradingApp Infrastructure

Joe

Has

Developer

Owns

nydb167

In

DEV

Actions / Permissions May

read-data

In

DEV

• Result: Joe will be able to connect and read data from nydb167 • No need to give entitlements on nydb167 specifically to Joe 21

Q&A