IBM 51 manual Introduction to troubleshooting, Product and system overview

Chapter 1. Introduction to troubleshooting

Problem determination, or troubleshooting, is a process of determining why a product is not functioning in the expected manner. This guide provides information to help you identify and resolve problems that you encounter when using Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator.

Product and system overview

Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator is an automated resource management solution for corporate and Internet data centers. Through orchestrated provisioning, it provides the ability to manage the IT environment in real time, according to defined business policies, to achieve desired business goals.

Many organizations face challenges in managing their existing IT resources, evaluating their effectiveness in supporting business needs, and determining how to meet future needs with existing or new resources. To effectively respond to change, financial pressures, and competition, businesses need to maintain an environment that is flexible, responsive, and makes optimal use of available resources. There are two aspects to creating such an environment:

Creating a flexible business model

Many organizations have difficulty responding to change because business processes. In some organizations, processes might be too rigid and difficult to adapt to different situations. Conversely, other organizations struggle with processes that are unclear, inconsistent, or duplicated by participants in the processes. To effectively respond to change, businesses must clearly define their end-to-end business processes and subprocesses. For maximum flexibility and consistent implementation, subprocesses are designed as components that can be customized or reused in larger processes.

Creating a flexible IT environment

To support changing business needs and priorities, the IT infrastructure that supports the operations and applications in a business must be optimized for allocation based on demand and re-purposing in different business contexts.

Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator helps you to develop an optimized IT environment by:

Modeling your business processes

You can capture your business processes in workflows. Workflows automatically and consistently perform the configuration tasks that you currently perform manually. Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator provides workflows that you can customize, or you can create new ones to support your existing tools and processes. Workflows can automate processes from configuring and allocating servers, to installing, configuring, and patching software, and can be either large and complex or can consist of a single command. The automation of configuration tasks is called automated provisioning.

Modeling your data center assets

Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator manages a virtual representation of your data center in a data center model. Virtualization exists on several levels to provide flexible configuration in different contexts:

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