Availability and performance are important topics in today’s IT environment. In addition, they are the basic requirements for any IT system in order to support the business operations smoothly. To meet the business requirements for availability and performance, IT administration must have related management processes to follow to ensure the availability and performance of the business systems. Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL® ) is a good approach. ITIL provides the best practice for IT service management, and the most relevant ITIL processes for availability and performance are the Availability Management and Capacity Management processes.

Many aspects of infrastructure management can be described through a management maturity model. This model can be used to illustrate the evolution phases that lead from a resource management-focused approach to a service management-centric approach. We also introduce the IBM® service management concept, its content, and the alignment with ITIL recommendations.

After understanding the logical structure of the systems management solution set, we also show how to position that systems management solution set to build a comprehensive blueprint.

In this IBM Redguide™ publication, we also provide a more detailed discussion of the Tivoli® solutions. This discussion provides a structured approach to the broad set of Tivoli solutions in the availability and performance management area. You can find descriptions of key offerings at these areas and summaries of product functionalities, as well as links to further information and publications on IBM Web pages. This product information can help you determine the proper solution components when designing availability and performance management environments.

Finally, we describe several scenarios that can help you to understand the monitoring solution for performance and availability. The scenarios are designed with varying complexity to show you various options on the management solutions. The sample scenarios illustrate the opportunity to choose a certain set of Tivoli solutions. There might be other ways of delivering a solution with a different set of products. We provide these scenarios only as examples of choosing the solution.

Executive overview

ITIL overview

Availability management

Capacity management

Maturity levels in the infrastructure management

Managing services with IBM service management blueprint

IBM Tivoli availability and performance management portfolio

Sample scenarios

Summary

Other resources for more information

The team that wrote this guide