1. Cloud Control Administrator's Guide
  2. Administering Cloud Control
  3. Configuring and Using Services
  4. Introduction to Services

Introduction to Services

The critical and complex nature of today's business applications has made it very important for IT organizations to monitor and manage application service levels at high standards of availability. Problems faced in an enterprise include service failures and performance degradation. Since these services form an important type of business delivery, monitoring these services and quickly correcting problems before they can impact business operations is crucial in any enterprise.

Enterprise Manager provides a comprehensive monitoring solution that helps you to effectively manage services from the overview level to the individual component level. When a service fails or performs poorly, Enterprise Manager provides diagnostics tools that help to resolve problems quickly and efficiently, significantly reducing administrative costs spent on problem identification and resolution. Finally, customized reports offer a valuable mechanism to analyze the behavior of the applications over time.Enterprise Manager monitors not only individual components in the IT infrastructure, but also the applications hosted by those components, allowing you to model and monitor business functions using a top-down approach, or from an end-user perspective. If modeled correctly, services can provide an accurate measure of the availability, performance, and usage of the function or application they are modeling.

Defining Services in Enterprise Manager

A service is defined as an entity that provides a useful function to its users. Some examples of services include CRM applications, online banking, and e-mail services. Some simpler forms of services are business functions that are supported by protocols such as DNS, LDAP, POP, FTP or SMTP.

Enterprise Manager allows you to define one or more services that represent the business functions or applications that run in your enterprise. You can define these services by creating one or more tests that simulate common end-user functionality. You can also define services based on system targets, or on both system and service tests.

You can create service tests to proactively monitor your services. Using these tests, you can measure the performance and availability of critical business functions, receive notifications when there is a problem, identify common issues, and diagnose causes of failures.

You can define different types of service models based on your requirement. Some of the types of service models that you can create are:

  • Generic Service: A Generic Service is the simple service model you can create in Enterprise Manager. You can define one or more service models by associating service tests and/or associating relevant system targets that represent a critical business function.

  • Aggregate Service: A number of services can be combined together to form an Aggregate Service. Within the context of an Aggregate Service, the individual services are referred to as sub-services. An Aggregate Service can also be used as a sub-service to create other Aggregate Services.

    An aggregate service must contain at least one of the following: member service, system, or test. The metrics can be promoted from a member service, or a system, or a test.

    You can define other service models based on your requirement.