8.4.1 Event, Incident and Problem Management Process Definition and Component
the following must be in place for successful vCloud Event, Incident, and Problem Management:
Monitoring of the vCloud environment.
An Event Management system, such as a Manager of Manager (MoM), for applying rules to events that can launch workflows or route events to the appropriate support teams.
A ticketing system and methodology so that various support teams are allocated tickets in an efficient manner.
Defined incident priorities and severities.
Well understood roles and responsibilities.
The ability to view KPI status.
From a high level, the following figure shows the overall Event, Incident and Problem Management process and shows the interrelationship between the components. One of the reasons for including all three subject areas together is that they are intrinsically linked together in a perpetual cycle. Event Management feeds into Incident Management, which in turn feeds into Problem Management. Problem Management then feeds back into Event Management to complete the cycle. Due to the fact that IT is ever evolving and changing, Event, Incident, and Problem Management need to be continuously updated to keep pace.
Figure 22. High-Level Event, Incident and Problem Management Processes
One of the first steps in Event Management is to monitor components and services. Events can then be fed into an Event Management system, such as a MoM, and metrics can be fed into an analytics engine, such as vCenter Operations Manager for processing.
A key component of Event Management is event categorization. After it has been categorized, rules, documentation such as runbooks and workflows can be developed to handle the event the next time it occurs. This proactive approach leads to fewer actual incidents and reduces the duration and severity of outages and performance incidents that do occur.
Core process areas of Incident Management include managing support tickets by determining priority and impact, customer communications, facilitating technical and management communication including phone bridges, and closing out tickets.
When an incident is recurring or high priority, it is sent to Problem Management to try and identify the root cause of the problem. After a root cause has been identified, a solution is developed that either fixes the problem or develops monitoring or event handling that eliminates or reduces the severity the next time it happens.
