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The "IT Services" found on the IT Service Manager page (Registry > IT Services > IT Services Manager > wrench icon > Schedule) and the IT Service Dashboards page (Registry > IT Services > IT Service Dashboards) in the Classic user interface of SL1 are not connected to the "IT Services" that are part of the new Business Services on the Business Services page of the new user interface. For more information, see Monitoring Business Services
What is an IT Service?
An IT Service in the Classic user interface for SL1 is a technical service that is provided to internal or external customers. Some examples of IT Services include Internet access, website hosting, server co-location, remote backups, and remote storage. Usually an IT Service includes an associated Service Level Agreement (SLA) that specifies the terms of the service.
An IT Service policy allows you to define an IT Service, specify the devices that are included in the IT Service, and monitor the state, availability, and risk of the IT Service. SL1 evaluates the current state, availability, and risk of an IT Service based on user-defined metrics that trigger user-defined events about the IT Service. You can define how often SL1 evaluates the state, availability, and risk of each IT Service. When SL1 evaluates the state of an IT Service, SL1 generates a default event that specifies the state of the IT Service.
You can define metrics based on any performance data collected by SL1, including device availability, device latency, CPU usage, memory usage, swap usage, interface utilization, data collected by a Dynamic Application, and data about network interfaces, TCP/IP ports, system processes, Windows services, email round-trip time, web-content, SOAP/XML transactions, and DNS availability. You can specify that SL1 should evaluate the metric against all devices in the IT service or against one or more subsets in the IT service.
When SL1 evaluates a metric, it performs an aggregation, that is, SL1 evaluates the data for all devices specified in the definition of the metric, over a specified time period (the Aggregation Frequency). Depending on the definition of the metric, SL1 can calculate the average, maximum, minimum, sum, or standard deviation.
You can also create dashboards for IT Services that display information about the state, availability, risk, events, metrics, and other information about an IT Service.
To define an IT Service policy in SL1, you must perform the following tasks:
- Define a service name and basic settings. For example, we could define an IT Service policy that monitors Email service. We could call this IT Service "Email". The basic settings for an IT Service include how often SL1 will evaluate the state, availability, and risk of the IT Service and the data retention settings for the metrics associated with the IT Service.
- Define a list of devices (the model) for the IT Service that includes all the devices associated with the IT Service. For example, if you want to monitor Email service, you could create a device group that includes Exchange servers, DNS servers, and devices that run Email round-trip policies. You can manually assign devices to the IT Service, or you can use membership rules, like you would for a dynamic device group.
- Optionally, define device subsets. You can manually assign devices to a subset, or you can use membership rules, like you would for a dynamic device group. For example, you could define two subsets: Exchange Servers, defined by device class, and DNS servers, defined by the ports that are open on each device.
- Define metrics. A metric is based on your business processes and examines all devices or one or more subsets to evaluate the state of the IT Service. For each IT Service, SL1 provides a default metric called Average Device Availability , based on the availability of all devices in the IT Service. You can define additional metrics, based on any performance data collected by SL1, including availability, latency, CPU usage, memory usage, swap usage, interface utilization, data collected by a Dynamic Application, and data about network interfaces, TCP/IP ports, system processes, Windows services, Email round-trip time, web content, SOAP/XML transactions, and DNS availability. You can specify that SL1 should evaluate the metric against all devices in the IT Service or against one or more subsets in the IT Service.
- Define Key Metrics. Key Metrics are the standard method for describing the status of an IT Service. Key metrics allow you to quickly gauge the status of multiple IT Services, even if those IT Services require very different metrics that aggregate very different performance data.The Key Metrics are Health, Availability, and Risk. When you define a Key Metric, you are specifying how the value for a metric you created in step 4 translates to one of the standard Key Metric values. By default, all three Key Metrics are based on the default Average Device Availability metric.
- Define alerts and associated events. Each alert and its associated event is triggered by a metric. Although not all metrics must trigger an alert, all alerts and events for an IT Service are triggered by a metric.
Who Should Read this Section ?
The following sections are intended for users who define policies and users who monitor IT Services.
The following sections explain how to define a policy to monitor an IT Service, how to view information about an IT Service in SL1, and how to create IT Service Dashboards.