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Lokomo Servicenter features a
unique way to organize information about a service in order to
realize service-centricity in management. The information is
divided into three main categories: service, environment, and
process information.
Service
information
The Service Description is a unique
XML-based description that encapsulates expert knowledge about a
service. The Service Description contains all service-specific
information necessary during deployment, operation, optimization
and withdrawal of the service, which for instance includes the
following:
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A description of the
service’s components
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The dependencies between the
components
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Monitoring metrics and events
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Service Level Agreement targets
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Operational tasks, like
installation, start, stop, patch rollout
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Test tasks for e.g. security,
performance, capacity and availability
The Service Description is
specified during development and is used during operation. As most
expert knowledge is present in the Service Description, no expert
is required for day-to-day service operation!
Service developers and architects
create the Service Description. The amount of work required is
comparable with what is spent on creating traditional paper
manuals, but the usefulness of the Service Description is superior
as it is machine-readable. It forces service developers and
architects to take a service perspective, i.e. to take
scalability, availability, performance, etc into account.
Developers get support to incorporate and test operational
aspects.
The Service Description ensures
that a service will perform as intended in the production
environment. It also increases quality and decreases lead-time.
Lokomo Servicenter provides a tool, the Service Constructor, to
help produce and test Service Descriptions.
Environment information
This
information relates to the environment the service is deployed in.
It contains information about what type of equipment is used,
environment architecture, software versions, various cost
parameters, equipment specific scripts, etc. This information is
either extracted from existing Configuration Management Systems
and Inventory Systems or collected by Lokomo Servicenter.
Process information
Process
information is unique to each IT department and data center. It
relates to how each organization structures work processes (work
flow, responsibilities, privileges, specific manuals, etc.).
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