Event Management Process

Thousands (or millions) of events happen across your IT infrastructure every day. In large enterprises, the number could be billions. Why? Because an event is simply a change to the state of an IT service or configuration item (CI) that is significant to its management.

A server moving from online to idle could be an event or the completion of a regular server maintenance script: they’re worth knowing about, and there may even be an action you wish to take as a result.

The objective of Best Event Management Companies in the UAE  is to detect events, analyze them, and determine the right control action. By doing so, the event management process also provides a strong foundation for service assurance, reporting, and service improvement.

It’s important to know, though, that monitoring and event management are not the same thing. Monitoring is certainly a component of event management, in that it is a useful way to detect events as they occur.

The scope and benefits of event management

Event management can be applied to any aspect of service management that needs to be controlled and which can be automated — from networks, servers, and applications all the way to environmental conditions like fire and smoke detection and security and intrusion detection.

Since event management can be applied to just about every aspect of service management in your IT organization, the benefits are widespread. In general, effective event management practices can:

• Provide a strong foundation to automate key components of your IT operation
• Improve detection and response times to incidents, changes, exceptions, etc.
• Reduce downtime as a result of the above.
• In event management, success is being able to detect, communicate, and take the appropriate action for every event that is significant to managing your IT services and the CIs that support them.

The key activities of event management

During the design phase of your IT services, you should define which types of events need to be generated, and how they will be generated, for each type of configuration item (CI) involved in delivering the service. The typical event lifecycle is:

Event occurrence

Events occur 24 x 7 x 365. In ITIL Event Management, the key is defining the types of events that are significant to your operation and ensuring you have a system in place to detect them.

Event notification

Notifications are typically sent by monitoring tools or CIs (configuration items). At this stage, these are simply notifications that an event has happened — and have typically not yet been interpreted or correlated to understand the meaning or impact.

Event detection

In this step, a monitoring system, automated agent, or systems management solution receives the notification and determines the meaning of the event.

Event logged

A record of the event is made, along with any subsequent actions taken. This may be done by your systems management solution, or by the individual applications/services/ hardware that triggered the event.

Event filtering and correlation

Can the event be ignored, or does it need to be passed on to the events management system? Often, information events are ignored. Warnings and exceptions often require additional action, though. So the first step of this process — called first-level correlation and filtering — is simply filtering which events should be ignored versus passed on to the event management system.

In the second level of correlation, a correlation engine uses predefined business rules to determine the significance of warning and exception events, and decide the appropriate next steps.

Event response / further action

Remember, all events (and responses) should be logged. In addition, based on the event type and severity, the correlation engine may determine it is appropriate to escalate the event to a team or individual, or in the case of more severe warnings and exceptions, even automatically create an incident, problem, or change.

Closing the event

If an event results in an incident, problem, or change being created, event closure should be handled through those respective processes. They can be “closed” in the event management system by ensuring the event is properly logged as well as the subsequent action is taken, and including a link to the corresponding incident, problem, or change request.

An expert event management agency Dubai has years of experience combined with the right skills and knowledge to host events on a small or large scale.