Implementing Services › Resource Management Using Services

Resource Management Using Services

By monitoring services instead of the resources, you can tell directly whether the availability of a business function is being satisfied. During automated operation, the availability of the resources is determined by the services to which they belong. If a service needs to be active, it requires its resources to be active also.

Services enable you to define the operations policies for groups of resources used by your organization. By using service definitions, you can specify the following characteristics of a service:

• Over what periods of time the service must be available.
• The services and resources (the members) required for the provision of the service. Services can share members and can include resources from different systems.
• How a member status affects the provision of the service.

Active service definitions in the knowledge base determine the availability of services.

You define the availability of a service by specifying the desired state of the service at particular times. In a multisystem environment, you can specify a system as the service automation focal point system, and the scheduled times refer to the local times of that system.

The region uses the defined availability of the service, the defined relationships between the members, and the defined operations policies and methods of the members to maintain the availability of that service.

When a service starts, it requires that all its members be started too, irrespective of their desired states. When a service stops, it removes its availability requirements from its members.