Technical White Paper
SERVICE LEVEL MANAGEMENT WITH NOVELL OPERATIONS CENTER
www.novell.com
Novell Cloud Manager
®
with Service Level Management from Novell Operations Center
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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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Requirements, Nomenclature and
Guidelines for Managing SLAs
This document states requirements, defines
nomenclature and provides implementation
guidelines for managing service level agreements (SLAs) using Novell® Operations Center
for clouds built using Novell Cloud Manager.
Product Integration Goals
Novell Operations Center is the ideal companion to Novell Cloud Manager. Novell Cloud
Manger creates and manages cloud environments that deliver on the p
­ romise of utility
computing by provisioning workloads on
demand in a secure and c
­ ompliant 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 Overview
Using Novell Operations Center, an administrator configures graphical service models
that join the physical and logical views in
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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 modules 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 qualityof-service degradation can lead to quality
degradation for the entire business service.
Novell Cloud Manager
www.novell.com
Cloud Manager Basic Integration Architecture
Figure 1. Integration modules link data between elements and their external counterparts.
With the integration modules correctly installed
and configured, the administrator can configure a cloud service model using the Novell
Operations Center client. While configuring
the service model, the administrator matches
the service model elements with their counterparts 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.
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Service Model
down, Novell Operations Center automatically
­becomes aware of the down­time 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:
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 Helpdesk
The PlateSpin Orchestrate Integration Module
in Novell Operations Center retrieves information 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
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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
Novell Cloud Manager
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Monitoring Integration Architecture
Figure 3. Novell Operations Center ships with many integration modules that are ready for installation.
Working with Service Level
Agreements
As 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.
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Service Level Selection
Figure 4. Administrators can define service levels such as Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum.
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
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workloads. These service level guarantees
then roll up into SLAs and become part of
the Novell Operations Center service model
for the cloud.
Novell Cloud Manager
www.novell.com
SLA Selection
Figure 5. Service level objectives defined in Novell Cloud Manager automatically roll up into SLAs in Novell
Operations Center.
Creating Role-based
­Dashboards
Once 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.
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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.
Conclusion
When 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. Administrators 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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www.novell.com
Contact your local Novell
Solutions Provider, or call
Novell at:
1 800 714 3400 U.S./Canada
1 801 861 1349 Worldwide
1 801 861 8473 Facsimile
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 r­ egistered trademarks
of Novell, Inc. in the United States and other countries.
*All third-party trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
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