IT Service Management: A Guide for ITIL® Foundation Exam Candidates, Second Edition

by Ernest Brewster, Richard Griffiths, Aidan Lawes and John Sansbury BCS. (c) 2012. Copying Prohibited.

  

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Chapter 29: Event Management (SO 4.1)

INTRODUCTION AND SCOPE

Event management monitors all events throughout the organisation's IT infrastructure and applications to ensure normal operation. Event management handles normal messages as well as being there to detect, escalate and react to exceptions.

The event management process is responsible for managing events throughout their lifecycle.

EVENT MANAGEMENT

The process responsible for managing events throughout their lifecycle. Event management is one of the main activities of IT operations.

EVENT

An event is a change of state that has significance for the management of an IT service or other configuration item. The term is also used to mean an alert or notification created by any IT service, configuration item or monitoring tool. Events typically require IT operations personnel to take actions, and often lead to incidents being logged.

Events can be split into three types:

n Informational: Such as notification of a scheduled job finishing or a user accessing an application.

n Warning: Including indications that utilisation of a particular CI has reached a certain percentage of capacity.

n Exception: Such as unauthorised software detected or failure of a component.

Event management can be used by any part of service management where there is a requirement to monitor and control an activity, as long as the monitoring and control can be automated. Event management requires the ability to raise automated alerts. If alerts cannot be raised, then only monitoring is taking place. Event management is much more proactive than monitoring.

ALERT

An alert is defined as a notification that a threshold has been reached, something has changed or a failure has occurred.

PURPOSE AND OBJECTIVES

Event management is the service operation process responsible for ensuring that the infrastructure, applications and security that underpin IT services are proactively monitored with alerts being put in place and acted on.

KEY ACTIVITIES

Event management follows a process similar to incident management (see Figure 29.1).

The stages of the process should ideally be automated within the selected tool(s), but manual intervention may be required at times.

The sooner events are detected, the sooner they can be tackled. For example, for a service that is required to be available from 7.00 a.m., it is desirable to have a number of alerts in place to indicate if any of the components required to provide that service are not available at a time prior to 7.00 a.m‥

RELATIONSHIPS WITH OTHER SERVICE MANAGEMENT PROCESSES

IT Service Management: A Guide for ITIL® Foundation Exam Candidates, Second Edition

Reprinted for Q4OGY\302672, Capgemini US LLC BCS, British Informatics Society Limited (c) 2012, Copying Prohibited

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Incident management

There is a close relationship between event management and incident management. The processes are similar and some events will be triggers for the incident management process. Proactive event management will reduce the number of incidents because action can be taken from warning events to prevent an incident.

Other processes

Many areas of service management will identify areas that they want to control and monitor. Configuration management and capacity management will have a number of requirements for event management.

TEST QUESTIONS FOR CHAPTER 29

SO 01, SO 03, SO 11, SO 19, SO 23, SO 25

Figure 29.1: The event management process (Source: The Cabinet Office ITIL Service Operation ISBN 978-0-113313-07-5)

IT Service Management: A Guide for ITIL® Foundation Exam Candidates, Second Edition

Reprinted for Q4OGY\302672, Capgemini US LLC BCS, British Informatics Society Limited (c) 2012, Copying Prohibited

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