History and Introduction

ITCM is a Remedy application designed to handle the requests from CERN/IT groups to External Service Providers and now providing an SLA-type application for the insourced system administration team. The application was designed in 1999 for the PDP/SERCo contract and was extended in Summer 2000 to support the CS/WMDATA contract. Based on a prototype by Frédéric Hemmer, the application has been designed by Vincent Doré and enhanced in 2000/01 by Darek Kuzara from ITCS group. From August 2001 to October 2007, Carlos Ungil was the main programmer for ITCM. Now the responsilbility is that of Maciek Stepniewski and William Tomlin.

Short Description

The application is split into Domains (currently CC-SYSADMIN and CS/WMDATA) which are fully separated. A user can only access and work on the requests in his or her domain(s) according to the privileges he/she has for each specific domain. Domain managers (i.e. managers in charge of the SLA) are responsible within their own domain for choosing and entering appropriate request categories, populating assignments and escalation groups, choosing and entering escalation time limits.

Requests from IT Submitters are automatically transferred by ITCM to the appropriate Assignee(s) working for the Service Providers. ITCM chooses the Assignee(s) according to the systems (cluster) selected by the Submitter and the time limits according to the category selected by the Submitter. In parallel with the requested intervention, the Assignee updates the Remedy request (entering progress report, requesting more information, changing status,...). Submitters and Assignees are notified by email of modifications done on the request. During the whole process, timers count the time spent on various states. Submitters and Assignees are notified by email of modifications done on the request (changes of status, new comments added,...). When a time limit is exceeded, notification is sent to the escalation group attached to the request category. ITCM works closely with the FIO and CS databases, both to display machine information and to restrict submission to the machines in their databases.

More information on ITCM is available in the ITCM Reference Manual (Word or HTML).

On-going developments and plans

On-going and planned developments for ITCM are available in the full list of developements for the entire Remedy service. The "Domain Affiliation" mechanism which is used to easily grant different permissions for the same user in different domains was introduced in production end-August 2001.

Meetings

Regular coordination meetings, involving user representatives, contract managers and Remedy developers, take place on a monthly basis. Changes affecting users are discussed and agreed during these meetings. See the minutes for more information.

Reports and Statistics

Reports are extracted from ITCM on a weekly basis for CC-SYSADMIN and on a monthly basis for CS/WMDATA. These reports are prepared with the Crystal Reports tool.

Main view of the ITCM form