A cribsheet of ITIL Service Operation

Service operation is responsible for the activities, technology and processes to deliver and manage service at agreed levels to business users and customers.  Service Operation includes 5 processes and 5 functions:

Processes:

1- Incidente Managment- ensures that service is restored as quickly as possible and that business impact is kept to a minimum level. An incident is an unplanned interruption or reductrion of quality of an IT service.

2- Problem management - seeks to proactively prevent incidents form happening and minimise impact from incidents which cannot be prevented. In ITIL a problem is the unknown cause of one or more incidents. It's usually described as unkown because at the time it happens the root cause of said problem isn't visible so further inquiring is needed to find out about teh issue.  A known error is an error to which a workaround is known with a documented root cause. Known errors are recorded in the KEDB - Known Error Database-. KEDB is created by Problem Management and is accessible for Problem and Incident management. A workaround reduces or eliminates the impact of an incident or problem for which no ultimate solution has been provided. Workarounds for problems go in the KEDB. Workarounds for incidents without related problem record go in the incident record.

3- Event Management - main activity of IT OPerations. The goal of EM is to monitor all Configuration Items and generate identification numbers for any alerts, warnings and information based on their performance. If the performance of a specific CI drops below the level agreed in the SLA (service level agreement), event management is supposed to send the notification to the right team responsible for fixing the malfunctioning CI.

Differences between event and alert

Sometimes staff members conflate the two things.ITIL has it that an alert is a notofication that a threshold has been reached. It can also be sued to signal a change or failure. It's best to use system management tools to generate these notifcations as they need to be under constant surveillance to ensure ongoing availability of the IT infrastructure, a common goal of implementing IT Governance in an organisation.

AN event is any significant change in the management of an IT service. The term can also mean an alert created by the suspicious IT service, configuration item or monitoring tool. Events often require IT personnel to take action, leading to the logging of incidents. In short, an alert is a sort of event. Or more succintly, every alert is an event but not all events are alerts.


4- Request fulfillment - process responsible for managing the life cycle of all requests. A requests consists of low-impact but frequent activities in the IT environment and often include hardware replacement and software application updates. Impact is the effect of a change, incident or problem on business processes based on how service levels are affected. Impact and urgency are used to determine the priority of an event.

5- Access management - responsible for the Confidentiality , INtegrity and Availability of assets by ensuring that only the right personel have access and modifying rights to the right company resources. Access management is mainly responsible for implementing information security measures. A set of widely accepted standards for information security management can be found in ISO 27001.