Rolling Review: CA Service Catalog

Areas For Improvement
Service Catalog is supported on Windows only. Being a Java-based Web application, the product suffers from the disadvantages inherent in a Java platform that can include a deep stack of dependencies, less-than-agile performance; and some necessary fine-tuning.

We discovered a minor annoyance in that within a business unit, a service option must have a unique name, which sounds reasonable on the surface; however, when we wanted to include the same service option in multiple folders, we found we had to get creative with our naming.

From a usability standpoint, we found the default end-user view of the service catalog to be a bit unfocused. For a typical user, the interface is broken into five tabs: Dashboard, Messages, Reports, Documents, and Requests. In order to browse the Service Catalog, the user must first select the Requests tab. The majority of this page is dedicated to accessing recent requests and reviewing already open or closed requests. We would have preferred the initial screen to be more conducive to selecting a business solution and ordering it.

Workflow And More
The portfolio, which Service Catalog calls the catalog, is configured via a central Web-based interface. Services can be configured as actionable, in which case workflow automation starts and begins execution of the administrator-defined processing. Such workflow can be as simple as sending an e-mail to a service manager, or as complex as initiating a multitiered approval and provisioning process.

Hands on, the tool allows administrators to model services and service options through their life cycles using a Design-Test-Production-Retirement model. Wizards are provided to assist in defining services, service options, service request processes, and more. Support is provided for creating service names and descriptions, request forms, service-level options, and other aspects of each service. Services can inherit attributes of other services, thus providing some nice ease of use.

The product includes CA Workflow, which is a full-featured workflow processing engine, and provides all the usual data capture, routing, approval, monitoring, and management features that are familiar in current-generation service desk products.

On the back end of the business, Service Catalog provides good reporting -- including dashboards -- to enable the business to understand utilization of services offered, criticality of service options within services, and other summary data that allow the service organization to intelligently manage operations.

Installation of the server software went very smoothly; the procedure is well documented and clearly explained, and the product installer handles all the behind-the-scenes Apache Web Server and Tomcat component installation and configuration.

Michael Biddick is CTO at Windward IT Solutions, and Phil Murnane is a principal consultant at Windward.