EVM continuously discovers, tracks, and analyzes the virtual infrastructure, monitoring management events and administrative or operational activities, and applying EVM policy-based controls as needed at key operations, configuration, change, and VM lifecycle control points. EVM Control automates compliance and proactive enforcement of configuration, resource, security, and operational standards and policies to improve reliability and availability and to reduce risk. EVM Control also enables highly configurable alerting for resource thresholds, performance, trending, changes, actions, tasks, and configuration activities.

EVM’s policy-based alerting can automatically open incidents. For example, an administrator may be trying to power on a virtual server in a production network that does not meet enterprise standards for security configuration settings and patches. EVM can prohibit that server from starting, invoke a patch process, and create an incident tied to the appropriate configuration item in the CMDB.

EVM’s automatic generation of the incident includes links to the configuration item (CI), as well as to the relevant configuration, change, policy, performance and event information tracked by EVM. Automated incident generation together with comprehensive, contextual information enables proactive service management, helps streamline service desk processes and dramatically reduces the mean-time-to-repair (MTTR).