This blog is a contribution of our Senior Solutions Consultant, Stu Curtis
Wikipedia defines "change" as "the process of becoming different." And, with change there comes a certain amount of disruption, which is certainly the case with IT infrastructure.
As a result, in IT operations there is a lot of attention paid to managing change and potential impacts on the users depending on the IT infrastructure. Given the above, let's discuss IT change management from the perspective of change impact and how ServiceWatch can help..
In our example below, we'll apply a patch to an SQL Server because there is a known issue with the patch level. First, we use ServiceWatch to look at services and find there are actually 15 relying on this SQL Server for their operation (left side of illustration). Of course, we'll have to notify all those impacted users about downtime when the change is actually made. We'll use this information to help us decide the best time for the patch, which is least disruptive to our users.
Anyone who has ever been involved with this sort of thing knows that things can get complicated in a hurry. And, that is when problems crop up. In our scenario, we learn that any SQL Server that is connected with an IIS Server requires an upgrade to version 7.5. (Disclaimer: Please don't hold us to the technical specs here; this is only intended as an example.) So, now we've got a cascading change where one modification causes a related modification to another. That requires a look at which services depend on this web server and ServiceWatch tells us that all E-Payment services are impacted when the update is applied (illustration below). Now that's a problem as those are critical business services. This will definitely not be a lunchtime patch, but an off-peak upgrade.
To summarize, by using ServiceWatch in planning our change we are able to determine dependent business services and users. For more information, please view the ServiceWatch product page.
