As discussed in the initial chapters that introduced the concepts of business service management and the capabilities of OEM Grid Control, entities within the IT infrastructure can be modeled as targets. An integral part of business service management is the ability to model multiple, but related targets as a composite target such as group, system, or a service. The relationships between the member targets within a composite target can be based on a wide range of business needs. These targets can be related to each other based on location, functional operation, security, technology platform, organization structure, and so on. For example, two database targets that form part of a single CRM solution can be combined and modeled as a composite target. Similarly, a composite target may be modeled out of two database targets that have no functional relationships to each other, except for being managed by the same team of DBAs.

As discussed in the preceding section,...