Change records and CIs

Service Manager Change Management provides the ability to link Configuration Items (CIs) to Change records. Change Tasks can be created based on the list of CIs in the Change record.

The Change record will also include a list of Affected Services that are based on the topology information for the linked CIs.

Change Management Integration: Release Management

Service Manager Change Management includes a Release Management category that provides the ability to schedule and authorize coordinated release activities that span multiple RFCs. The Release record can contain links to one or more Change records. This allows several RFCs to be assessed, scheduled, approved, and deployed as a group. The execution of the changes happens in the individual Change and Change Task records that are linked to the Release. The execution of the individual Changes can be supported by the integration to Micro Focus Operations Orchestration (a run a run book automation workflow tool) that automates steps of software deployment through Micro Focus Server Automation and Micro Focus Client Automation depending on the target being deployed to.

Change Management Integration: Incident Management

Service Manager allows the creation of links from a Change record to an Incident record. RFCs can be created from an Incident or an Incident can be related to an existing RFC. The Incident can also be indirectly related to a Change record through the Problem Management module.

Change Management Integration: Problem Management

Service Manager provides the ability to create Changes from Known Errors and to link Changes to existing Known Errors as recommended in the best practice documentation. Service Manager can also associate Problems and Changes through configuration of the system.

The related records tab shows established relationships between Problems and Known Errors, which are stored as separate records in Service Manager, and Changes.

Change Management Integration: Service Desk

Email can be generated when an RFC is created, updated or closed and sent via standard email delivery tools to individuals or groups. Emails can be generated and sent automatically or manually.

Service Desk agents can be given access to the forward schedule of changes and their security roles used to control their access rights. You may want to assign them read-only access to the forward schedule of changes to avoid the entire Service Desk team from consuming change licenses.

If an Incident record has one or more related Change records, the Service Desk agent can click on the link to see the related RFC(s).

Additionally, Service Desk agents (or anyone using Service Manager) can use charts and views to get visibility into Change Management information, such as a list of Changes scheduled for the next week.

Users can easily create these charts and lists on the fly, and save them to their favorites, or they can be used to create dashboards for groups of users.

Authorized users can drill down into the details of records that are behind the charts and see individual records and their details.

Change Management Integration: uCMDB

Service Manager has an out-of-box integration with the Micro Focus CMS solution (UCMDB).

The CMS strategy is to leverage web services and use contributing CMDB and other data repositories through a common view of business services provided by the UCMDB. As such, the integration between Micro Focus UCMDB and Service Manager is using web services.

UCMDB and the discovery tools provide detailed CI and relationship information built using an innovative discovery capability. Essentially, by listening on the network and identifying applications and hardware “talking” through standard protocols, CMS uses a spiral discovery approach, interrogating applications to gain information about levels 2 through 7. This discovery capability understands how applications and hardware are related and shows this in graphical form.

The information presented in the CMS is representative of the actual state and can be viewed within Service Manager in the “Actual State” tab in a CI record.

This is an alternative view of the same data. Service Manager also provides a deliberately simpler visualization of the CIs and their relationships designed to provide the Service Desk user a summary of the information held in the CMS.

Indicators are used on the CI icons to visually show the user there are open records for the CI.

Change Management assessment capabilities are integrated with Micro Focus UCMDB to provide impact analysis information based on the topological view of the CI data.

Also, UCMDB provides the ability to model the potential impact of changes on the fly without physically making the change.