Technical White PaperSERVICE LEVEL MANAGEMENT WITH NOVELL OPERATIONS CENTER

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Novell® Cloud Managerwith Service Level Management from Novell Operations Center

Novell Logo1 The registered trademark, ®,

appears to the right and on thesame baseline as the Logo.

Minimum Size RequirementsThe Novell Logo should NOT beprinted smaller than 3 picas(0.5 inches or 12.5 mm) in width.

Clear-space Requirements2 Allow a clean visual separation

of the Logo from all other elements.The height of the "N" is themeasurement for the minimumclear-space requirements aroundthe Logo. This space is flat andunpatterned, free of other designelements and clear from the edgeof the page.

3 picas(0.5 in)

(12.5 mm)

21 3

3

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Novell Cloud Manager

Table of Contents: 2 . . . . . Requirements, Nomenclature and Guidelines for Managing SLAs

2 . . . . . Product Integration Goals

2. . . . . . Product Integration Implementation Overview

4 . . . . . Integration with Monitoring Services and the Helpdesk

5. . . . . . Working with Service Level Agreements

7. . . . . . Creating Role-based Dashboards

9. . . . . . Conclusion

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This document states requirements, defines nomenclature and provides implementation guidelines for managing service level agree-ments (SLAs) using Novell® Operations Center for clouds built using Novell Cloud Manager.

Product Integration Goals Novell Operations Center is the ideal com-panion to Novell Cloud Manager. Novell Cloud Manger creates and manages cloud environ-ments that deliver on the promise of utility computing by provisioning workloads on demand in a secure and compliant manner.

Novell Operations Center monitors, maps and measures IT service quality as well as compliance and control.

By integrating Novell Operations Center with Novell Cloud Manager, cloud administrators can dramatically increase corporate business agility and ROI by:

Improving visibility into service compliance Measuring and communicating service

quality Applying the appropriate business rules Providing cloud end users and business

owners with role-enabled, self-service web-based dashboards

Administrators can do this for all business services managed by Novell Cloud Manager, whether they run in single enterprise private clouds or service provider-built clouds.

Product Integration Implementation OverviewUsing Novell Operations Center, an admin-istrator configures graphical service models that join the physical and logical views in

the data center. A service model is a visual, hierarchical object structure consisting of individual service model elements in a parent-child relationship.

To be useful, each service model element must be mapped to a real-world counterpart. This counterpart can be a physical router, a cluster of virtual machine hosts, a virtual machine, or anything else that plays a role in the delivery process of the business service to the consumers of the business service.

Novell Operations Center provides many configurable and extensible integration mod-ules to link service model elements to their real-world counterparts. These are plug-in integration modules that link data between each element and its external counterpart in real time.

In the context of integration with Novell Cloud Manager, Novell Operations Center retrieves its initial information about cloud business services via the following two integration modules:

The PlateSpin® Orchestrate Integration Module. This module retrieves information from the Cloud Manager Orchestration Server

The Cloud Manager Integration Module. This module retrieves information from the Cloud Manager Application Server

The retrieved data typically contains the identity, state, configuration, quality, changes, incidents, service level rules, relationships, of the counterpart. The information about the state is important, because any quality-of-service degradation can lead to quality degradation for the entire business service.

Requirements, Nomenclature and Guidelines for Managing SLAs

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With the integration modules correctly installed and configured, the administrator can con-figure a cloud service model using the Novell Operations Center client. While configuring the service model, the administrator matches the service model elements with their coun-terparts that are detected in the Novell Cloud Manager services. These counterparts can be:

Business groups Business services per business group Workloads per business service

Information about Novell Cloud Manager business groups, business services and workloads is obtained via the Cloud Manager Integration Module. Information about virtual machines is gathered via the PlateSpin Orchestrate Integration Module.

Cloud Manager Basic Integration Architecture

Figure 1. Integration modules link data between elements and their external counterparts.

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Service Model

Figure 2. Novell Operations Center gathers information about the business groups, business services and workloads from the Cloud Manager Integration Module and the PlateSpin Orchestrate Integration Module.

Integration with Monitoring Services and the HelpdeskThe PlateSpin Orchestrate Integration Module in Novell Operations Center retrieves informa-tion about the state of virtual machines from the Cloud Manager Orchestration Service. This information then propagates into the Novell Operations Center service model. When the Cloud Manager Orchestration Service reports that a virtual machine is

down, Novell Operations Center automatically becomes aware of the down time and its impact on the overall service level for the related business service.

To further enhance the granularity of fault detection, the administrator can add other Novell Operations Center integration features to this process. Novell Operations Center ships with many integration modules and tools that connect to various industry-leading monitoring systems and data sources. These integration modules make it possible to:

Detect service outages unrelated to the state of virtual machines that play a role in the delivery of the service (e.g., application software crashes)

Detect virtual machine outages that are not discovered by the Cloud Manager Orchestration Service but that affect SLA compliance (e.g., virtual machine stalls)

Detect the performance of workloads in the cloud

Detect physical and logical relationships in the environment to auto-generate service models

Link performance and availability events Link incidents, problems, changes and

service definitions to the service model and its elements

Manage configurations in compliance with standards and change policies

Monitor and manage technology in conjunction with business transactions being processed

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Novell Cloud Manager www.novell.com

Working with Service Level AgreementsAs part of the day-to-day operations, Novell Cloud Manager allows administrators to define various service levels to cloud end users. Each service level can contain one service level guarantee for availability. Typical availability guarantees range from 99 to 99.95 percent. They can also define other non-availability-related service level objectives. A service level can be applied to any workload that is part of a business service.

As an example, the administrator might define four service levels: Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum, with corresponding increases in levels of availability guarantees. Novell Cloud Manager allows the administrator to publish these service levels in the catalog and to link them to a predefined cost.

Cloud end users can pick the desired service level from the catalog and apply it to one or more workloads when they create a new business service request from the Novell Cloud Manager self-service catalog. They immediately see all related costs, includ-ing the cost for the requested level of service.

Monitoring Integration Architecture

Figure 3. Novell Operations Center ships with many integration modules that are ready for installation.

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When retrieving business service data from the Novell Cloud Manager Application Server, Novell Operations Center automatically detects the availability service level guaran-tees that are applied to business service

workloads. These service level guarantees then roll up into SLAs and become part of the Novell Operations Center service model for the cloud.

Service Level Selection

Figure 4. Administrators can define service levels such as Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum.

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Creating Role-based DashboardsOnce the administrator retrieves and models the SLAs, he or she can use the Novell Operations Center Dashboards function to create role-based, self-service dashboards

for SLA compliance. Various business service clients can then directly access information that is relevant to them. This allows them to verify service degradation, find root causes rapidly and make more intelligent and agile business decisions.

SLA Selection

Figure 5. Service level objectives defined in Novell Cloud Manager automatically roll up into SLAs in Novell Operations Center.

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Figure 6. The cloud administrator can track SLA compliance for all services running in the cloud.

Figure 7. The business service owner can check SLA compliance for all the services he or she is running in the cloud.

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Novell Cloud Manager www.novell.com

Figure 8. Business process managers are notified of compliance breaches, immediately see impacted areas and can drill down to find root causes.

ConclusionWhen building a cloud using Novell Cloud Manager, cloud administrators define service level objectives, and Novell Operations Center uses easily installed, integrated modules to automatically discover and verify these objec-tives. With this integration, Novell Operations Center then uses powerful root-cause analysis to immediately detect and highlight any breaches in cloud service delivery so cloud

administrators can take quick action. Admin-istrators use live dashboards that provide role-based views to gather information about business services and operations for various roles inside and outside the organization. Novell Operations Center thus provides cloud administrators with a complete solution that gives them end-to-end visibility—as well as efficient and cost-effective service level and operational management—for all clouds built using Novell Cloud Manager.

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Contact your local Novell Solutions Provider, or call Novell at:

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Novell, Inc.404 Wyman Street Waltham, MA 02451 USA

462-002164-001 | 03/11 | © 2011 Novell, Inc. All rights reserved. Novell, the Novell logo, the N logo and PlateSpin are registered trademarks of Novell, Inc. in the United States and other countries.

*All third-party trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Novell Logo1 The registered trademark, ®,

appears to the right and on thesame baseline as the Logo.

Minimum Size RequirementsThe Novell Logo should NOT beprinted smaller than 3 picas(0.5 inches or 12.5 mm) in width.

Clear-space Requirements2 Allow a clean visual separation

of the Logo from all other elements.The height of the "N" is themeasurement for the minimumclear-space requirements aroundthe Logo. This space is flat andunpatterned, free of other designelements and clear from the edgeof the page.

3 picas(0.5 in)

(12.5 mm)

21 3

3