Conducting an impact analysis

Impact analysis is the process of identifying and analyzing which systems, applications, or other configuration items (CIs) will be affected by a proposed Change. For example, if the Change is to add memory to an application server, the applications that use that server will have an outage when the server is offline. Many other CIs might also be impacted.

About this task

Impact analysis results help you determine how disruptive a Change implementation might be. You can take the impacts into account when setting up approvals for the authorization phase, and when scheduling implementation tasks.

  • Impact analysis overview
    An impact analysis is based on results identified by the impact analysis engine. The impact analysis engine traverses the configuration management database (CMDB) and locates the CIs that are expected to have outages as a result of target CI outages. Most commonly, it does so by using user-configured rules that are based on CI relationships. During the analysis, you can also instruct the engine to retrieve historically identified impact data.
  • Running the impact analysis engine
    The workflow that you use to direct a change automatically runs the impact analysis engine if the corresponding action is in the workflow. This occurs after all of the implementation tasks are created and targets have been specified for the tasks. The best practice PMCHGMAIN1 workflow, which is provided in this product for advanced changes, includes an action to run the impact analysis engine.
  • Analyzing identified impacts
    After the impact analysis engine calculates the impacts that will result from the implementation tasks, a Change Analyst analyzes these impacts. This analysis can help you determine whether a Change is too disruptive to complete at this time. It also gives you the information you need to make any needed modifications before the Change proceeds.
Parent topic: Managing changes
Related tasks:
Managing impact analysis settings

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