The degradation or failure of important infrastructure elements can slow or stop vital business processes and business services, or dramatically reduce user productivity in needed business areas. VMware Smart Assurance Business Impact Manager ensures maximum availability of services.

VMware Smart Assurance Business Impact Manager (Business Impact Manager) extends the capabilities of Service Assurance to calculate the business impact of events, and to propagate the impacts to affected business entities as discrete notifications that are linked to elements in the infrastructure.

Users can create business entities, such as organizations, business units, lines of business, and departments, and relate them to corresponding infrastructure elements. Users can also create business processes.

In Business Impact Manager, users can assign different weights to any elements in the business or infrastructure topology. Business Impact Manager calculates the impact of root-cause problems by summing up the weights of the impacted elements.

The calculated impact enables operations management to prioritize notifications in accordance with business needs, and to effectively use their time and resources to resolve problems that degrade or threaten vital processes and services.

Business process tools are also provided for users to create, update, and delete events associated with their business processes. For example, a user might create an event that represents a telephone call from a supplier who is out of stock of a popular retail product, and then associate the event with the user’s Order Fulfillment Business Process.

The VMware Smart Assurance Business Impact Manager User Guide includes detailed information regarding Business Impact Manager.