Information Technology Services (ITS) is looking for an IT operations management tool for the ongoing management and delivery of IT services. The current in-house service operations tool, which has been used for recording and reporting of service functions, relationships and operational details, has reached end of life and a replacement is being sought.

Context

The UQ IT landscape consists of:
* 25,000+ desktop computers
* 4,000 network switches
* 5,000 wireless access points
* 180,000 network interfaces
* 2,000+ servers (physical and virtual) and related infrastructure
* 1000+ applications and platforms
* 1,500+ network printers

There is a business need to acquire data related to IT infrastructure that is isolated in specific technology areas and map the relationships between services and infrastructure in real time. This configuration data should be accessible for effective business decisions and day-to-day operational activities. It should provide a consolidated view of IT services and infrastructure, and reduce or eliminate the requirement for manual updates and resource-intensive processes to track changes to infrastructure.

The project is to provide a IT operations management tool that delivers a “single pane of glass” view of the

University’s IT ecosystem, delivering real-time configuration data and using monitoring and automation tools to maintain the inventory with minimal manual input.

It is anticipated that the core component of the IT operations management tool, a Configuration Management Database (CMDB), will be the data warehouse for IT infrastructure. This proposal is for a “federated” model, which enables more flexibility than a monolithic database by leveraging data feeds from specialist tools used in different technology areas and collating only the essential data required for the “single pane of glass” view of IT infrastructure.