IT Service Management: A Guide for ITILFoundation Exam

Candidates, Second Edition

by Ernest Brewster, Richard Griffiths, Aidan Lawes and John Sansbury
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ITServiceManagement:AGuideforITILFoundationExamCandidates,SecondEdition

Chapter 29: Event Management (SO 4.1)

INTRODUCTION AND SCOPE
Event management monitors all events throughout the organisation's IT infrastructure and applications to ensure normal
operation. Event management handles normal messages as well as being there to detect, escalate and react to
exceptions.
The event management process is responsible for managing events throughout their lifecycle.
EVENT MANAGEMENT
The process responsible for managing events throughout their lifecycle. Event management is one of the main activities
of IT operations.

EVENT
An event is a change of state that has significance for the management of an IT service or other configuration item. The
term is also used to mean an alert or notification created by any IT service, configuration item or monitoring tool. Events
typically require IT operations personnel to take actions, and often lead to incidents being logged.
Events can be split into three types:
n

Informational: Such as notification of a scheduled job finishing or a user accessing an application.

Warning: Including indications that utilisation of a particular CI has reached a certain percentage of capacity.

Exception: Such as unauthorised software detected or failure of a component.

Event management can be used by any part of service management where there is a requirement to monitor and control
an activity, as long as the monitoring and control can be automated. Event management requires the ability to raise
automated alerts. If alerts cannot be raised, then only monitoring is taking place. Event management is much more
proactive than monitoring.
ALERT
An alert is defined as a notification that a threshold has been reached, something has changed or a failure has
occurred.
PURPOSE AND OBJECTIVES
Event management is the service operation process responsible for ensuring that the infrastructure, applications and
security that underpin IT services are proactively monitored with alerts being put in place and acted on.
KEY ACTIVITIES
Event management follows a process similar to incident management (see Figure 29.1).
The stages of the process should ideally be automated within the selected tool(s), but manual intervention may be required
at times.
The sooner events are detected, the sooner they can be tackled. For example, for a service that is required to be available
from 7.00 a.m., it is desirable to have a number of alerts in place to indicate if any of the components required to provide
that service are not available at a time prior to 7.00 a.m
RELATIONSHIPS WITH OTHER SERVICE MANAGEMENT PROCESSES

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ITServiceManagement:AGuideforITILFoundationExamCandidates,SecondEdition

Incident management
There is a close relationship between event management and incident management. The processes are similar and some
events will be triggers for the incident management process. Proactive event management will reduce the number of
incidents because action can be taken from warning events to prevent an incident.
Other processes
Many areas of service management will identify areas that they want to control and monitor. Configuration management
and capacity management will have a number of requirements for event management.
TEST QUESTIONS FOR CHAPTER 29
SO 01, SO 03, SO 11, SO 19, SO 23, SO 25

Figure 29.1: The event management process (Source: The Cabinet Office ITIL Service Operation ISBN 978-0-11331307-5)

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