Glossary
The
assignee is an IT technician who is responsible for the resolution of a
specific incident or request for change. The assignee can be a level 1 or a
level 2 technician.
The goal of
the ITIL-based practice of change management aims to ensure that standardized
methods and procedures are used for efficient and prompt handling of all
Changes, in order to minimize the impact of Change-related Incidents upon
service quality, and consequently to improve the day-to-day operations of the
organisation.
A
configuration item is any physical component (hardware of software) of an IT
infrastructure that needs to be monitored in order to ensure the convened level
of service. See Configuration Management.
The
ITIL-based practice of configuration management involves the identification,
monitoring, maintenance, and verification of all physical components (CIs) forming part of an IT infrastructure. In addition to
keeping an inventory, all relationships between CIs are recorded. For example,
the relationship “is installed on” makes it possible to obtain the list of
computers upon which a given piece of software is installed. The CIs are
recorded in a configuration management database (CMDB).
Configuration management database
The configuration management database contains data
regarding the physical components (hardware and software) of an IT
infrastructure, as well as the relationships between them. This database is
commonly referred to as the CMDB. See Configuration
Management.
An
incident is an event that is not part of the normal course of activities and
which causes or is likely to cause a service breach or a reduction in the
quality of services provided. For example, a user is unable to print or a given
piece of software does not function.
Incident management
The
ITIL-based practice of incident management aims to restore service as promptly
as possible while generating a minimal level of impact upon current operations.
ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library)
ITIL is a
reference in terms of best practices for IT Service Management (ITSM). Octopus
supports the practices of incident management, configuration
management, problem management, change management and service
request management. Click here
to learn more about ITIL.
Condition
identified by successful diagnosis of the root cause of a Problem, and the
subsequent development of a work-around.
Level 1 assignee
The
level 1 assignee provides the first level of user support. The level 1 technician
forms part of the Technical support center. The
level 1 assignee remains responsible at all times for the incidents to which he
or she is assigned.
The level 2
assignee forms part of a group of specialists. The Technical
support center requests his or her services when an incident has failed to
be resolved at the first level of intervention.
An incident
which is neither resolved nor closed.
Condition
often identified as a result of multiple Incidents that exhibit common
symptoms. Problems can also be identified from a single significant Incident,
indicative of a single error, for which the cause is unknown, but for which the
impact is significant.
For
instance, multiple incidents related to a specific printer happened in a short
period of time. We create a problem because the cause is unknown. When we
identify the root cause, our Problem becomes a Known Error. From now, we could
decide to open a RFC to correct the issue or to live with a work-around.
Problem management
The goal of
ITIL-based practice of problem management aims to minimize the impact of
Incidents and Problems on the business that are caused by errors within the IT
infrastructure, and to prevent recurrence of Incidents related to these errors.
Problem management seeks to get to the root cause of Incidents and then
initiate actions to improve or correct the situation.
Reference data consists in data used to support
managed elements such as incidents, CIs and employees. The application’s
various drop-down lists (comboboxes) are generally “lookups”, that is,
reference data. For instance, the list of categories and subcategories of an
incident constitute reference data.
Requests
for Change (RFCs) are triggered for a wide variety of reasons, from a wide
variety of sources; for instance, required resolution of an Incident or Problem
report, user dissatisfaction via the helpdesk, etc.
Request
that can be concerned with a change in any part of the infrastructure or with
any service or activity : hardware, software, documentation,
telecommunication, procedures, plans, etc. For instance, an OS change for the
whole network, a major software upgrade for all computers.
Service breach
See incident.
SLAs
represent the maximal delays for the resolution of incidents and for the
processing of RFCs. The data derived
from SLAs (represented in the form of graphs, statistics, etc.) serves to
measure the service level provided to clients by the technical support center.
Request made
by a user for service delivery, of which the associated tasks, costs and risks
are known and convened. The service desk offers many standard services of that
type such as: installation of a new workstation, creation of a user account,
etc. A non-standard request that
requires a controlled managed process is called a Request for Change
(RFC).
The
technical support center is the user contact point for any problem,
request, or comment concerning IT services. ITIL proposes the
implementation of a support center in order, among other things, to improve
service to users.
The term
“user” is employed in several contexts:
Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI)
This component forms part of
the Windows operating system and is used to obtain information regarding a
computer’s configuration. Click
here to learn more about WMI.