Every service change or incident may cause disruptions in organizations, and understanding the ripple effects of these possibilities is crucial for maintaining stability, efficiency, and continuity.
Impact analysis emerges as a pivotal process, enabling organizations to foresee and mitigate potential interferences. A comprehensive ITSM tool with the possibility to visualize and manage effectively the impact analysis is key for a compliance team.
Understanding Impact Analysis
Impact analysis is a critical ITSM process aimed at identifying the potential consequences of proposed changes or unforeseen incidents on business operations and IT services. It involves assessing the severity, extent, and repercussions of these changes or incidents, helping organizations prioritize actions and allocate resources efficiently. By conducting thorough impact analysis, businesses can ensure that their IT infrastructure remains resilient, responsive, and aligned with their strategic objectives.
GLPI as an open-source software tool designed for inventory management, issue tracking, and comprehensive Information Technology Service Management, provides a robust platform to manage assets from small to huge companies, including hardware, software, networking equipment, and devices of all kinds, facilitating the correlation between incidents, problems and change management processes.
This visibility is important and crucial, not just to understand how far an incident can go, but also to assess how a service change, or problem can affect the whole company and services, for example.
Using GLPI, companies are able to:
Collect, comprehend maintain the asset inventory;
Map out their interdependency and;
Keep historical data on asset performance and incidents.
The incident management capabilities of GLPI enable organizations to log, track, and manage incidents efficiently. After the inventory collecting and data updating, analysts may create the dependencies between the assets and make sure everyone knows which assets may be affected when an incident occurs to one of these assets.
Furthermore, when discussing incident management and its impact on environments, IT teams should never forget about changes that usually need to be made in networking and servers. Every system that needs a new feature, workflow or upgrade, for example, can bring positive or negative impact for the running state of a company, so impact analysis is not just useful for incidents. But also for change management.
Change management is also a crucial process for planning and implementing changes systematically. Any company that aims to ensure that changes are being made with a clear understanding of risks and advantages must have documentation of proposed changes, scopes, potential impacts, checklists, and roll-back plans.
GLPI Asset management and Change Management modules, alongside Impact Analysis feature may deliver tools for small or big teams to create committees and discuss actions with clear information about expected positive and negative impacts
Imagine a scenario where the Rack 1 is down due to any reason — let’s say the uplink from Switch A3 and Rack 1 is down.
Any technical analyst knowing the team is working to make sure this uplink is reestablished as soon as possible may have the information that any user reporting incidents directed to any of the services hosted on SRV-GLPI will have the same ‘root cause’ — Rack 1 and Switch A3 uplink down.
The red arrow, by the perspective of the Rack 1, tells the team that any issue or change — yes, changes too — may impact SRV-GLPI;
By the perspective of the Rack 1, tells the team that any issue or change on any of the assets connected to it through a blue arrow may impact Rack 1 and the services that depends on the Rack 1;
The black arrows mean that, by the perspective of the Rack 1, none of those assets should suffer or cause impact for Rack 1 or its services.
And when I talk about perspectives, look at the image above:
When we look at the same topology from the perspective of the Router EDGE-51, any incident or change on any of the Routers will have impact at the whole network. But not just the network, but also on the Router EDGE-51 (slave). These two are dependent on each other. It does not mean that if one fails, the other will fail too.
The purple arrows mean that they are dependent on each other and that they would both be affected if one of them were to encounter a problem. They are therefore both dependent and impacted.
To maximize the benefits of GLPI for impact analysis, consider the following best practices:
Maintain an Up-to-Date Inventory: Ensure that all assets are accurately cataloged in GLPI, with up-to-date information on their configurations, dependencies, and historical performance.
Integrate ITSM Processes: Leverage GLPI’s ITSM capabilities to manage incidents, problems, and changes comprehensively. This integration provides a holistic view of the IT environment and its dynamics.
Customize According to Needs: Tailor GLPI’s settings and workflows to fit your organization’s specific requirements for impact analysis. Custom fields, severity levels, and reports can enhance the relevance and effectiveness of the tool.
Train Your Team: Ensure that your IT and business teams are well-versed in using GLPI for impact analysis. Regular training sessions can help maximize the tool’s utility and ensure effective adoption.
Impact analysis is essential for navigating the complexities of modern environments. By leveraging GLPI, organizations can gain a comprehensive understanding of the potential impacts of changes and incidents on their operations. This insight tool enables informed decision-making, efficient resource allocation, and enhanced service resilience. As GLPI continues to evolve, its role in facilitating it.
Thanks all users who has downloaded and tested release candidates, helped us to find bugs, fix issues. Together we are creating better software to manage IT infrastructure easily.
Let´s have a look at the main features of GLPI 9.4:
Search engine: nested criteria.
The search engine available in all lists of items now allows to construct much complex queries.
A new group button is available to separate a set of criteria from other ones. You can set a different operator for the entire group.
The resulting query will be surrounded by parenthesis.
We also added some minor changes to this part:
A new type of search: notcontains.
Changes can now be filtered with global rules.
Review of the interface to make different actions clearer.
Note that your old saved searches (bookmarks) are still compatible with the new engine.
UX : Knowbase and FAQ.
The Browse tab in the knowbase have been revamped.
A tree is now displayed for the categories and each shows a badge counting the number of articles associated to the category.
Timeline for Changes and Problems.
Thanks to Curtis Conard, you can add followups to ITIL changes and problems and these object now have a timeline tab to regroup their followups, tasks, documents and solutions.
Followups split and Tickets merge.
Thanks to Curtis Conard, tickets now have 2 new actions:
Split a followup: create a new ticket copying a followup (a link is kept in the old ticket)
Merge a ticket as a new followup in an existing ticket with massive actions option.
Assets rules engine.
In this release, we provide a new rules engine to automatically update some fields when an asset is created or updated.
For example, you can assign a specific technician when a computer become a part of an entity.
Centralized command line tool.
The scripts folder provided in GLPI archives had a lot of scattered files. With this release, we started a console (available by the php bin/console command, see documentation)
centralizing old scripts. Not all scripts have been migrated but we will do the work step by step in futures releases.
Misc.
Lock of user personalization tab.
New action in business rules for tickets targeting the completename field (before, you can only target the short name of categories).
New device type for assets: Modem.
CAS 3 authentication support.
Rich text option deleted (GLPI is now only in rich text in ITIL objects).
A new field in user form: responsible (you can sync it with ldap server).
Under the hood.
We are working hard to have GLPI more stable and reliable.
Here is list of topics we did in this release :
Code coverage for unit testing, since 9.2 with the addition of unit tests, we progress on the coverage of all source code.
SQL Iterator, an old topic, GLPI framework provides a class to abstract SQL query generation. We replaced a lot of raw MySQL queries recently. The final goal is to permit the usage of others SQL engines (like Postgres). It’s not here actually, but we are on the road to do it.
SCSS is now the official GLPI format for stylesheets. We have an automatic compiler for developers (use it, it’s css with superpowers) and also for plugins.
Session as cache, like we did on 9.3, we store more and more in cache to provide you a speedy ITSM tool.
IT assets management is one of the major problems every big company faces nowadays. How do they solve it?
First, let´s clarify the term “asset management”. IT assets are electronic devices (printers, mobile phones, computers, laptops, etc.) company using for work. For stable work flow all these devices have to be maintained in “ready-to-use” condition, so that means that IT manager has to check warranty, system status, connection, etc. of each of them.
For small companies with limited number of devices it is possible to check them manually, but when we talk about companies with large IT infrastructure which includes dozens of devices (sometimes in different cities or even countries), manual approach is impossible.
In this case big companies often use ITSM software, which helps them to track and maintain all assets regardless of their geographical location. GLPI ITSM softwareprovides numerous advanced features for inventory and asset management.
Main features of GLPI ITSM software which help you with asset management:
Asset inventory: computers, screens, printers, network equipments, devices and phones
Detailed view of assets with their connections and network ports
Complete history of modifications for each asset
Operating system management (name, version, edition, kernel, license, etc)
Inventory and management of installed software
Management of internal components
Asset lifecycle management (from stock to withdraw)
Virtualization (host to vm relation, operating system, software)
Network discovery and local inventory using FusionInventory or OCS Inventory plugins
So, who is managing more than 1.000 IT assets with GLPI?
Let’s have a look at GLPI Telemetry – resource we have created to collect the data on voluntary basis.
Proma is a multinational group in designing and manufacturing of metal body subassemblies, chassis systems, seat frames and operating modules of automotive vehicles.
“’We implemented the GLPI solution starting with the operation in Brazil and extending the other units of the Proma Group. With the solution’s fast location capabilities, the language barrier where we own industrial plants was not a problem. The tool assists us in an essential way in the decision making, control of the computational park and in meeting the requests of the corporation”.
International retail group and multinational corporation headquartered in Croix, France. It is one of the world’s principal distribution groups (337,900 employees) with a presence in France and 15 countries. Currently GLPI is used by Auchan in Poland. What do they think about GLPI? “Awesome!”.
Montmorency College is located in Canada and offers a wide range of pre-university and technical training programs.
Number of assets managed with GLPI: 3.000
As you can see, company above successfully using GLPI to manage more than thousand IT assets of their companies. If you want to join them, you can download the latest GLPI version here: https://glpi-project.org/download/
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