Facing the unpredictable: Automated adaption of IT change plans for unpredictable management domains

Change Management, a core process of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), is concerned with the management of changes to IT infrastructure and services to satisfy business goals and to minimize costly disruptions on the business. As part of this process, IT changes are planned for, authorized, tested, scheduled, and executed. Unpredictable incidents, e.g., resource failures or unexpected changes in between planning and execution can render plans infeasible. The execution of unsound plans ultimately leads to service disruptions which threaten the continuity of the business. In order to tackle this problem, we propose a logically sound approach to adapt infeasible IT change plans to a changed management domain in order to render them feasible again. We apply our approach to a case study comprising Virtual Area Network (VLAN) configuration and the deployment of a 2-tier service. For the case study we show that the proposed solution can render IT change plans feasible within minimal time differences regarding unpredictable resource conflicts in 95% of all cases if resource utilization remains below 85%.

[1]  Paul King,et al.  Groovy in Action , 2007 .

[2]  Michael H. Kalantar,et al.  Model Driven Provisioning: Bridging the Gap Between Declarative Object Models and Procedural Provisioning Tools , 2006, Middleware.

[3]  Lisandro Zambenedetti Granville,et al.  A template-based solution to support knowledge reuse in IT change design , 2008, NOMS 2008 - 2008 IEEE Network Operations and Management Symposium.

[4]  Lisandro Zambenedetti Granville,et al.  ChangeAdvisor: A Solution to Support Alignment of IT Change Design with Business Objectives/Constraints , 2009, DSOM.

[5]  Lisandro Zambenedetti Granville,et al.  Enabling rollback support in IT change management systems , 2008, NOMS 2008 - 2008 IEEE Network Operations and Management Symposium.

[6]  Lisandro Zambenedetti Granville,et al.  ChangeLedge: Change design and planning in networked systems based on reuse of knowledge and automation , 2009, Comput. Networks.

[7]  Fen Liu,et al.  ChangeRefinery: Assisted Refinement of High-Level IT Change Requests , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Symposium on Policies for Distributed Systems and Networks.

[8]  Kun-Lung Wu,et al.  The CHAMPS system: change management with planning and scheduling , 2004, 2004 IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium (IEEE Cat. No.04CH37507).

[9]  Lisandro Zambenedetti Granville,et al.  A Runtime Constraint-Aware Solution for Automated Refinement of IT Change Plans , 2008, DSOM.

[10]  Lisandro Zambenedetti Granville,et al.  Improving IT Change Management Processes with Automated Risk Assessment , 2009, DSOM.

[11]  Jerome A. Rolia,et al.  One Is Not Enough: A Hybrid Approach for IT Change Planning , 2009, DSOM.

[12]  Michael H. Kalantar,et al.  An architecture for virtual solution composition and deployment in infrastructure clouds , 2009, VTDC '09.

[13]  Qingbo Wang,et al.  Simplifying Service Deployment with Virtual Appliances , 2008, 2008 IEEE International Conference on Services Computing.

[14]  Alexander Keller,et al.  Best practices for deploying a CMDB in large-scale environments , 2009, 2009 IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management.

[15]  Lisandro Zambenedetti Granville,et al.  On strategies for planning the assignment of human resources to IT change activities , 2010, 2010 IEEE Network Operations and Management Symposium - NOMS 2010.

[16]  Alfons Kemper,et al.  Model-Based Planning for State-Related Changes to Infrastructure and Software as a Service Instances in Large Data Centers , 2010, 2010 IEEE 3rd International Conference on Cloud Computing.