Event Management is the process that monitors all events that occur throughout the   IT   infrastructure. It provides the basis for normal operation (service assurance) and also detects, reports on and escalates exception conditions. An   event   can be defined as any detectable or discernible occurrence that has significance for the management of the IT Infrastructure or the delivery of IT service and evaluation of the impact a deviation might cause to the services. Events are typically notifications created by an IT service,   configuration item (CI)   or monitoring tool. It is unusual for an organization to appoint an “event manager” as most events tend to occur for many different reasons and will in most cases be managed by the technical or application management team whose technology or application is impacting the delivery of an associated service.  However, it is important that Event Management procedures are well defined documented a...

ITSM Best Practice will align five main process with the lifecycle of “Service Operation”. Incident Management Problem Management Event Management Request Fulfillment Access Management  It was not too long ago that the idea of some of these processes were new to service providers. Most will find them to be common in today’s market place.  An organization may not literally follow the best practices for the service operation processes but most likely have some close facsimile when executing Incident, Problem, Request Fulfilment, and Event management processes for provisioning IT services and support.  In order to ensure identity management and authorization for access, some form of “Access Management” will also be needed to support an overall security policy in Service Operation.  I would like to focus on some thoughts for “Event Management” and early engagement of operational staff in the service lifecycle. As organizations mature they begin t...

Event Management Activities Originally Published on November 9, 2010 In an earlier blog I was asked how to move from a reactive organization to a proactive one. My answer was through the use of Event Management, along with good design and proactive Problem Management. In this installment I would like to speak to the activities within Event Management and the impact they play in our ability to deliver a consistent level of services and a stable infrastructure to deliver them across. By definition an event is any detectable or discernible occurrence that has significance for the management of the IT infrastructure or the delivery of IT services. Event Management is the process that monitors all events that occur through the IT infrastructure to allow for normal operation and to detect and evaluate the impact any deviation might cause to the IT infrastructure or delivery of IT services. Event Management has several activities that we engage when implementing this process.  Even...

I was recently asked where an entity such as Enterprise Monitoring resides in an organization. Should it be equivalent to the Operations, Engineering and Security areas rather than reporting to one those areas? Yes in some ways it does make sense to have Enterprise Monitoring at the same level. However, we must remember that there is a clear distinction and separation between the functions as proposed in ITIL and the activities that they perform. “Monitoring” is an activity related to a process (including but not limited to Event Management, Availability, Capacity, Service Level, etc.) So this work gets performed across an enterprise and not by a single, particular group. Anyone who needs to “monitor” something should use the associated processes to do so. Someone doing “monitoring” does not need to be located in any specific part of an organization. Functions are organization, location and structure agnostic. A function is not a place or management structure rather an abstract groupin...

I have been asked by many students, how do you move from that role as the fire fighter resolving incidents to the role of being able to prevent them from occurring in the first place? Much of this has to do with good design and a strong proactive problem management process, but a solid event management process is an excellent offensive weapon in the prevention of impacting incidents in your environment. Event Management is the process that gives IT the ability to detect events, make sense of them and determine the appropriate control action. It is the basis for our operational monitoring and control. This gives us a way to compare actual performance against what was designed and written in SLAs. What is perfect about event management is that we can apply it to any aspect of our environment from delivery of a service, monitoring an individual CI, environmental conditions to software license usage. In conjunction with the other Service Management processes, along with both passive an...