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OverviewAxibase Fabrica helps you visualize the availability and performance of datacenter and NOC assets using real-time service models. It provides a new way of monitoring distributed applications and infrastructure
services based on Microsoft Visio diagrams.
Addressing Complexity To keep pace with escalating service level objectives, IT operations managers need to resolve issues quickly and efficiently by understanding complex fault patterns and dependencies within distributed IT systems. As application and service architectures evolve over time, and new technologies such as virtualization become widely adopted, the complexity of the service delivery infrastructure will increase at an accelerated pace. At some point in time, when complexity is apt to become unmanageable, you will ask: When a physical server fails, which services are affected? Chances are that people in your IT organization already have the answers to these questions. The problem, however, is that this knowledge is typically fragmented across organizational silos. By standardizing on a service modeling and presentation platform, you can now break down the barriers to knowledge transfer by giving your operations team valuable insights into mission-critical business applications and services. By constructing service-centric rather than server-centric models, you can graphically represent in a "single pane of glass" a consolidated impact of IT on supported business processes.
Leveraging Your Investments Because Fabrica is pre-integrated with the leading enterprise systems and network management frameworks, customers can achieve fast results by creating logical models with minimal effort, simply by referencing resouce identifiers in Visio templates. The recently introduced CMDB Bridge capability allows customers to automate the mapping process by leveraging enterprise IT asset and configuration repositories. Existing resources are transparently
discovered and imported into Fabrica to provide an out-of-the-box
integration with the customers environment. Unlike other products built around event-based aggregation, Fabrica provides extensive drill-down capabilities and generates graphical representations by referencing existing resource models.
For instance, the Fabrica adapter for IBM Tivoli Monitoring discovers resources (agents and situations) managed by a particular TEMS server and makes these resources available for referencing in top-level service models.
Consequently, events generated by ITM are automatically mapped and propagated into the referenced resource models similar to what happens in ITM. This approach, by design, ensures consistency of operational status representation between Fabrica and ITM. In other words, the operational status (NORMAL, WARNING, or CRITICAL) of a particular resource viewed by an ITM user is similar to how it's displayed in Fabrica.
Modeling in Visio An estimated 80% of IT organizations rely on Microsoft Visio for infrastructure mapping and dependency modeling. Now these Visio diagrams can be easily converted into real-time visualizations. The relationships between diagram shapes and resources can be configured directly in Visio, thereby streamlining the service modeling process and making it easy to engage subject-matter experts outside of the core IT operations team. Fabrica does not require the installation of any additional client software (add-ons) for service modeling. Once the Visio diagram is completed, uploading it to a Fabrica server is all that is required. The diagram is then automatically converted into a scalable vector graphics format supported by most web browsers. The operational status of application components will be modified in real-time by manipulating shape properties such as colors, shadows, borders, and overlay icons.
Drill-down and Diagnostics Tools Fabrica provides an array of built-in diagnostic, automation, root cause and impact analysis tools to enable better decision support, faster triage and problem resolution within the context of distributed services. The tools are web-based and can be launched directly from the graphical view. In addition to a standard set of tools listed below, most Fabrica adapters provide 'launch-in-context' capabilities and extended features such as NNM.Query for Network Node Manager or Warehouse Designer for ITM. Topology Explorer For detailed information on standard tools, see Functionality Adapter-specific tools are described in datasheets for each respective framework:
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