The Finance House, Triplex Finance House, TFH, was known
to have a highly qualified and large team of IT professionals (nearly 2000 with
about half involved in development, with up to another 1000 sub-contractors
called in on demand for major projects).
Service-server mapping and configuration changes
The service provided is so critical that downtime has to
be minimized and performance optimized.
Although there is a mix of domains, as applications
become more and more multi-tier, so it became felt that the capacity plan
needed to be enterprise wide. However, the degree of metrics and planning in
each is somewhat variable. Also, the aggregation of a number of separate plans
from different authors into a single document takes a lot of time and editorial
passes before it is acceptable to all. Such a large document tends to develop a
life of its own.
Although the capacity management processes were in place,
the coverage was not complete and a lot of reports were out-of-date. The Capacity Management Database(CMDB)
changes were not advised to the Capacity Management Team(CMT), so there were a significant number of
essentially defunct machines still being reported on by various hand-crafted reporting
regimes over the years.
The main areas needing enhancement lay in those of
communication with other teams such as development and testing.
Service Level Agreements(SLA) had some performance criteria, essentially on
throughput and often related to what were effectively batch jobs updating the
data warehouse.
The initial gap analysis found that:
Services had been effectively categorized but the service
catalogue was still emerging.
Resource/component capacity management processes were
well established but service capacity management was just being introduced for
some category 1 services.
Business capacity management is identified as the next
stage and will require more work
on business drivers, KPIs and QoS.
An initial dashboard for management on the capacity
management process itself was well
structured but was completed to show everything as “all
green”. This had the unsurprising but unanticipated effect that the next
request for expenditure was rejected as there were no current problems.
The reporting process was then designed to incorporate an
accurate reflection of some
key metrics like coverage of services, servers,
deliverables and underpinning metrics.
The main conclusions from the study were the need to
enhance:
Quality of info and data
flows between CMT and
- service management
- change management
- configuration management
- production monitoring
Measures of business
drivers and KPI’s
Reporting to track and
predict SLA violations
Service-server mapping and configuration changes
Ability to clone reports
with automatic trending etc
Ability to analyse
reports and identify bottlenecks
Workload
characterization and forecasting
Modeling scenario
handling
Essentially it revealed a need for more coverage, better
information flow and more automation.
On Wednesday I’ll be looking at a Retailer, don't forget to register for our next webinar in the meantime 'Demystifying z/OS Capacity Management for distributed planners' http://www.metron-athene.com/services/training/webinars/index.html
Adam Grummitt
Distinguished Engineer
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