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ITIL: Service Support

Change Management

The objective of the Change Management discipline is to coordinate and control all changes to IT services. The intention of change management is to minimize the negative impact of changes to business operations and to the quality of service to users of IT services.

Installing a PacketShaper in a test lab or at a pilot site allows you to precisely profile the network usage of a critical business application and see the impact of implementing a software upgrade. By specifiying different time periods, you can create two graphs to show the application's utilization patterns, pre- and post-upgrade. You can then compare the two graphs to get a before-and-after picture to see how the change affected the application's utilization. If necessary, you can adjust policies and partitions to improve application performance.

PacketShaper also lets you trial application performance levels by setting different bandwidth resource allocations and then viewing the resulting effects on the application (both objectively, using response-time measurements, and subjectively, through user observations). Using Packeteer's partition feature, you can guarantee an application a set amount of bandwidth and look at the application's RTM graphs to see average response times. To get a picture of the application's performance before and after changing the bandwidth allocation, you can specify different time periods for each RTM report. If necessary, you can tweek the partition size and generate another set of RTM graphs to see the effect of the change.

PacketShaper can also detect and assess unexpected changes in application usage patterns, since application network demand can change even without action from IT staff. For example, if the sales team suddenly begins requiring the remote staff to file a new kind of report in the SalesLogix system, bandwidth demand could suddently change substantially, even though nothing about the physical network has changed. A utilization graph for the SalesLogix class would show a spike in usage and indicate when the increased utilization began. Armed with this knowledge, an IT staff member can query the sales team to find out the reason for this increased demand. IT might respond to this change by increasing the partition size of the SalesLogix class.

Adaptive response is useful for alerting support staff to significant changes that occur on the network. With an appropriate set of adaptive response agents in place, IT can monitor overall network health, hosts, and specific business-critical applications. Changes will not come as a surprise to IT staff because the agents will notify them instantly when usage increases above normal levels or performance drops below acceptable thresholds. See Adaptive Response Agent Examples for ways that you can use adaptive response to help you monitor noteworthy changes on your network.

View the other disciplines in the ITIL Service Support area:

Incident Management  

Problem Management