DCML – The Standard that Enables ITIL Compliance.

DCML – The Standard that DCML – The Standard that Enables ITIL ComplianceEnables ITIL Compliance

©2003-2005 DCML Member Section, All Rights Reserved

The state of today’s IT infrastructure

CIM SDM SNMP Proprietary

Different systems representing IT infrastructure data in a variety of

formats… creating management silos


The desired state for IT infrastructure

Enable management of services with best practices and policies



What’s required of IT to make the transformation

Manage services – not devices

Comprehensive view of infrastructure,

relationships and policies



What IT needs to do

• Facilitate integration of existing operational support systems

• Enable automation-based management of the environment

• Enable creation and enforcement of policies by implementing a framework such as ITIL


How to achieve the desired state

• Use proprietary tools– Costly to implement– Encourages vendor lock-in

• Wait for a single standard to prevail– Existing standards, such as CIM and SDM, scale

either vertically or horizontally but fail to provide a comprehensive view

– Lengthy process


Another alternative

• Adopt a meta-standard… DCML – Brings together disparate systems– Standards-based approach for information

exchange speeds implementation– Reduces costs for implementation because it

builds on top of existing systems

CIM SDM SNMP

Manage services – not devices

DCML

Proprietary


DCML

• The only open, XML-based standard designed to achieve interoperability by providing a systematic, vendor-neutral way to describe an IT Service environment

• Universal language that describes elemental, process, and service-oriented relationships between IT service entities and policies governing the management of such environments

• Handles heterogeneous and semantic information required to manage at the service level


DCML key milestones

• 2003– DCML launched – Early supporters included EDS, Opsware, BEA

Systems, Computer Associates International, Tibco, Mercury Interactive and Akamai Technologies

• 2004– Specification version 1.0 released– DCML accepted into OASIS standards body


DCML continues to gain momentum


DCML data format for information exchange

• DCML provides a uniform way for system management solutions to exchange information about the IT environment– Systematic

approach– Vendor-neutral


DCML enabling ITIL compliance

• DCML benefits– Enable IT organizations to comply with ITIL

guidelines using• A standards-based approach• At a low cost• With speed

• DCML capabilities– Enable data exchange between IT systems– Integrate existing IT systems to create a CMDB– Allow disparate IT systems to implement ITIL

Service Support process– Give IT a concrete step for implementing ITIL and

automating IT processes


CMDB use case

• Populate CMDB with DCML-compliant management systems– Federates multiple data bases into a central and

complete record of all CIs– Requires significantly lower learning curve to install,

integrate and operate

CMDB

Monitoring Monitoring

DCML

Ticketing Asset Mgmt Provisioning

DCML


Incident Management use case

• Capture server context and change information and feed it to the monitoring system, per ITIL recommendations

• When monitoring system sends an alert to the NOC, personnel can use the DCML-encoded context to deduce the root cause

• NOC personnel can populate a trouble ticket to track and resolve the ticket quickly

• Operations teams will get all context/change information and make the proper changes for remediation

Context Monitoring

System

Change

DCML

DCMLDCML

Ticketing System

Change Management

DCML


Service Desk use case

• Reduces the cost of implementation• Increases the effectiveness of root cause analysis

– Unified information repository– Efficient correlation of commonly occurring incidents

Service Desk

3rd party support

Application Support

DCML

Server Support

Network and Operations

Support

DCML


DCML data exchange format

• Decreases cost and time to implement ITIL• Provides a standards-based approach to

abstracting data from disparate systems• Enables global visibility of existing IT

infrastructure

DCML and ITIL together enable IT organizations to achieve best

practices IT management

DCML – The Standard that Enables ITIL Compliance.

Documents

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