Understanding BSM: Modeling
BSM includes the following modeling components:
Configuration Items (CIs)
A configuration item (CI) is a component stored in the RTSM that represents a physical, virtual, or logical entity in your IT environment. For example, CIs can represent lines of business, applications, provided services, network hardware, users, and so on. A CI can also be a logical container for a hierarchy of CIs.
Information about each CI is recorded in a configuration record within the RTSM, which is maintained throughout the CI's lifecycle. The RTSM also contains the Configuration Item Type (CIT) model, a repository for the CIT and relationship templates used to create the CIs, CI relationships, and associated attributes.
For more details, see "Configuration Items (CI)" in the RTSM Administration Guide.
The link between two CIs is defined by the relationship between them. Relationships represent the dependencies and connections between the entities in your IT environment. For details, see "CI Type Relationships" in the Modeling Guide.
The CIs and the relationships stored in the RTSM typically include:
- Business assets, business services, processes, and activities. These include services that a business provides to another business (or one organization provides to another within a business) and that an IT organization provides to support business services or IT operations. A business service typically has an associated end user or customer, a business application, and an SLA. Examples include payment processing, backup and recovery, and self-service help desk.
- Application, services, and their core components. These support a business activity, which is seen as a whole and is known by a specific name. This group also includes infrastructure services that support business services and processes. Examples include voice and network, database, backup and restore, desktop, and Windows administration services.
- Software. This includes individual installations of software elements. These are executables that are deployed on a logical system.
- Infrastructure. This includes logical systems such as virtualization and clustering, and physical systems such as storage devices, network devices, and servers.
- Facilities. This includes locations, sites, buildings, rooms, racks, and so on.
Content Packs
Content packs contain information that BSM uses to describe and enrich the CIs that represent what you are monitoring in your IT environment. A content pack can contain all, or part of, what you need to monitor and manage a specific domain. Content for a specific management area is typically contained in dedicated content packs consisting of, for example, CI types, mapping rules, correlation rules, ETIs and HIs, graph family definitions, and tool definitions.
You can also use content packs to exchange customized data between instances of BSM, for example in test and production environments.
Use the Content Packs Manager to create content packs, save them, install or update them, take content from one installed instance of BSM and upload it to another using the export and import features, and manage dependencies between content packs.
BSM provides out-of-the-box content packs definitions for Smart Plug-ins (SPIs) that you can either use in the default configuration or, if necessary, modify to suit the demands of your environment.
For more details on content packs, see "Content Packs" in the Platform Administration Guide.
For more details on content packs for Operations Management, see "Content Packs" in the BSM Application Administration Guide.
IT Universe Model
The RTSM houses a map of all the technology components associated with any service your business runs or utilizes. The components are represented by configuration items (CIs), mapped to each other by their interdependencies (called relationships), and together they form a service model of the IT universe in which your business functions. This model is referred to in BSM as the IT Universe model.
Having a defined IT Universe model of your organization enables you to see what applications are being monitored, and to determine which other CIs are impacted by problems—for example, whether a service suffered outages due to a problem with its database server.
The IT Universe model can be very large, containing millions of CIs. To facilitate their management, and focus on specific IT areas, you work with the CIs in "views." Views are a subset of the overall components in the IT Universe, and contain topologies of CIs that meet the requirements for a logical grouping, defined in the templates (based on TQL Queries, below) for the views.
In the BSM applications you select a specific view to focus on, enabling you to monitor the status of the KPIs and events attached to the CIs. This enables you to manage the specific area of your business that is represented by the CIs and relationships in the view.
BSM supplies out-of-the-box views for the IT Universe, or you can define your own views, to display specific information relevant for your organization's business needs. For more details, see "Modeling Studio Overview" in the Modeling Guide.
TQL Queries
Topology Query Language is a language and tool that extends the standard SQL language, discovering, organizing, and managing the IT infrastructure data, and enabling you to draw conceptual relationships between CIs to represent their actual interdependencies.
The TQL queries stored in the RTSM help structure the way that CIs are organized and managed in the RTSM, creating the IT Universe model. The TQL also constantly checks for changes that impact the IT Universe model structure.
A TQL query builds a business service model that acts as a template for view content. You can create your own TQL queries to retrieve the specific business service data that you need from the RTSM, and to display the data in views.
For information on TQL queries, see "Topology Query Language (TQL) Overview" in the Modeling Guide.