HP OpenView is one of the four major system management framework tools and in common with the others, it provides support for many of the processes defined by the UK Office of Government Computing Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL®).

No framework covers all areas in full, and a number of specialist tools are available from third party vendors to provide additional functionality to enhance the core functions supported by the frameworks. This summary looks at the applicability of HP OpenView as a tool to provide capacity management in accordance with ITIL® best practice guidelines.

A key element of ITIL® is concerned with Service Delivery – the ability of an IT operation to be run and supported to match user requirements. Capacity management, in turn, is a critical activity within Service Delivery. Uniquely amongst all the ITIL® processes, it is concentrated on looking at the future rather than just the past: capacity management is about ensuring adequate performance to meet service level targets as demands change, and thus a number of other management processes, such as those covering problems, service levels, change and financial, are all dependent on sound capacity management.

HP has been an active supporter of ITIL® since 1995: the company’s commitment involves a combination of consulting, training and OpenView software products to assist in capacity management activities. However, a core component of the ITIL® capacity management good practice definition is modeling – which enables the process to become proactive rather than purely reactive. Although alternative approaches are available for modeling (including benchmarking, simulation, trending and rule of thumb), all of them have limitations.

To overcome these limitations and to provide HP OpenView users with a powerful, flexible modeling capability, the OVPA (OpenView performance agent data) can now be integrated with Metron’s Athene ITIL® Capacity Management software to provide an analytical modeling plug-in. This enables organizations to maximize their investment in HP OpenView by providing a more comprehensive capacity management solution for their business in accordance with ITIL® best practice guidelines. The new plug-in runs an OVPA extract to generate a model of an existing HP system. This extract is then automatically converted into an Athene planning model and passed into the Planner module of Athene. Many models representing alternative scenarios are then quickly generated by Athene without the need to place any processing burden on the HP systems.

hp Openview Factsheet available here