J-22_-_DOT_Remedy_Environment_Overview_-_Final.pdf

REMEDY ENVIRONMENT OVERVIEW

REMEDY INTRODUCTION

The Department of Transportation (DOT) uses BMC Remedy as the current Service Management System

(SMS) for the Office of the Chief Information Officer OCIO) organization. The DOT Remedy environment includes multiple tiers and modules which have been implemented in Development, Quality

Assurance (QA) and Production. The current Remedy environment is on version 9.1, Service Pack 1.

DOT Remedy 9 architecture is modeled on BMC’s best practice environment recommendations & sizing guideline for a blended small/medium Remedy environment. The Remedy system is utilized by many technical teams across OCIO including the Service Desk, Desktop, Infrastructure, Asset, and Change

Management teams. The following information will provide an overview of the Remedy Modules and how they are used today in the DOT OCIO environment and an overview of the DOT OCIO Remedy architecture.

REMEDY MODULES & CURRENT USAGE

The OCIO Remedy environment uses a variety of modules to service the IT environment. Most modules are used extensively in support of daily operations by the technical teams, but a few modules are not fully utilized. A summary of the modules and their usage in the current OCIO IT environment is listed below.

• Incident Management is used heavily by all DOT OCIO teams including the Service Desk, Desktop, Infrastructure, Asset, and Change Management teams. Incidents are received by the

Service Desk through email and phone and can be automatically generated by emailing the

Service Desk email address. Ticket queues are maintained for each OCIO team and numerous templates are used for standard service requests and break fix incidents. Service Level

Agreements are applied to incidents according to the incident criticality via the Service Level

Management module in Remedy. Customer satisfaction surveys are provided by Kinetic software. Remedy automatically sends an email to the customer with a satisfactions survey when incidents are resolved.

• Change Management is also implemented in the DOT OCIO environment and is used by the weekly Change Control Board (CCB) which meets twice a week. A small group (under 15) change templates and task group templates have been developed and are used regularly. Changes are routed to first level approvers before being routed to the CCB. Changes are approved in

Remedy at the CCB by the Change Coordinator at the direction of the Change Control Chairman.

The Remedy change calendar and Standard / Normal changes are not currently in use in the DOT environment. The CCB maintains a separate change calendar outside of the Remedy environment. Expedited or Emergency changes are processed via email approvals and approved in Remedy after the fact.

• Release Management is not currently in use in the DOT OCIO environment. Change management maintains a Release calendar and schedule outside of the Remedy environment.

• Asset Management is used by some teams within DOT OCIO. The Remedy Asset Module is used to track all desktops, laptops, mobile devices, and some peripherals. Infrastructure assets are partially tracked in Remedy, and through other inventory systems like SCCM, Cisco Prime, etc.

• Service Request Management is used for a small group of Service Requests. These Service

Requests include the following:

Employee in / out Processing Workstation Relocation Employee Transfers

Employee Profile Update Help Desk Ticket Submission Privileged Accounts

Mobile Device Requests Telephone Service Requests Cabling Requests

Service Requests are submitted by designated submitters within each Mode and are routed through an approval workflow which includes Modal approvers and the Financial team.

• Knowledge Management has been newly implemented in the DOT OCIO environment but has been quickly adopted. Technicians submit Knowledge Articles in the Knowledge Management portal, which are then reviewed by the Knowledge Management board on a weekly basis. DOT

OCIO is still in the process of moving legacy knowledge documents to the Knowledge

Management portal. See screenshots below for the Knowledge Management fields.

• Smart Reporting is also available in the DOT OCIO environment, but has not been widely adopted. Report requests are generally routed to the Remedy team for processing. Legacy reports have not been fully migrated to the new Smart Reporting environment.

• Remedy Discovery is currently a pilot in the DOT OCIO environment. OCIO owns a very small group of Discovery licenses, which they will be using to pilot the Discovery module of the

Remedy. This pilot is in the beginning stages as of August 2018.

• Remedy SmartIT is not currently configured in the DOT OCIO environment. OCIO does own this module as part of the core Remedy licenses, but this has not been configured at this time.

• Service Level Management is available and in use in the DOT OCIO environment. This module is used to apply Service Levels to Remedy incidents according to criticality.

REMEDY ARCHITECTURE

Overview

The OCIO Remedy environment utilizes a three-tiered architecture model for the system. These tiers include:

Tier Role

Web Serves as a repository for web applications. Displays the appropriate page to an authorized user.

Application Processes data it receives from AR System clients, and passes the data to the database server to be stored.

Database Stores definitions and data for the AR System Server

The three tiers indicated on the architecture diagram correspond to a traditional application deployment stack. Web Tier being the presentation (user-facing) layer; supported by the Application Tier which in turn is supported by the Database Tier.

A database forms the underlying element of the BMC Remedy ITSM architecture. The BMC Remedy AR

System server stores all its data within the database. BMC Remedy AR System server processes all data entered by BMC Remedy ITSM applications

In addition, the BMC Remedy AR System server is the workflow engine between the BMC Remedy

ITSM applications and the database. It also verifies that a user has permission to perform each action and access to data, thereby enforcing any access control defined in the applications.

In this capacity, the BMC Remedy AR System server is the interface between the database and the BMC

Atrium Core, which includes the Product Catalog and BMC Atrium Configuration Management Database

(BMC Atrium CMDB). BMC Atrium CMDB stores information about the configuration items (CIs) in our IT environment and the relationships between them. BMC Atrium CMDB makes this information available to the BMC Remedy ITSM applications and their various shared application components, such as the Task Management System.

Load Balancing

DOT utilizes f5 pools to distribute traffic across and within the environment. These pools are integral to our implementation, and nearly all traffic flows them. There are two primary pools (web and application) represented logically using the f5 icons on the diagrams.

These pools are built to support multiple features: SSL offload, round-robin/load balancing, reverse-proxy, session management, etc.

Web Tier

BMC Remedy Mid-Tier serves as a client of the AR System server and as a server to the browser. The

Mid-Tier tier enables you to view BMC Remedy AR System applications on the web and access the AR

System server from a web server. It also provides instructions to the browser in the form of document markup and downloadable scripts. These instructions describe how to present application data and how to interact with the user.

The Web-Tier pool handles all http traffic destined for the Mid-Tiers and other web-based components.

By default, all traffic flows to port 80 on this layer where Tomcat then handles the requests. We also utilize a reverse-proxy configuration to dynamically route the /SmartReporting/ URI to our dedicated

SmartReporting cluster.

The goal was to simplify the URL scheme for users -- a single hostname, leverage the existing SSL certificate for remedy.dot.gov, and longer-term map multiple supporting application components within an easy to remember URL/hostname scheme.

Application Tier

The application tier hosts what we refer to as AR Servers, and other supporting technologies such as

BMC Remedy Smart Reporting, and Business Objects.

Traffic flows from the Web-Tier through another f5 pool and is distributed or routed to the appropriate set of servers. The primary user-facing pool consists of two server.

Diagram