Today was a packed day of sessions, roundtables, and demos in the solution center.
 

The highlight of the day was a breakfast meeting that Dennis Corning and I had with a customer. He works for a large services company, employing over 100,000 people. Their IT infrastructure is pretty typical: several silos of servers, each of them managed by a different enterprise console. One set of about 100 servers runs SAP and Oracle. Another set of 600 servers runs other business-critical applications. They also use parts of the BAC suite, including SiteScope and Business Process Monitoring.

The quick summary is that he is very unhappy with the current arrangement. He lacks visibility across the silos. His Operations Bridge runs 24x7 in a single room with large monitors on the wall. The operators perform event correlation manually, by looking at the screens and making their best guess on who is the right person to escalate to. The front-line operators generally lack the skills to diagnose and correct problems on their own.

But, there is hope. He is following the Consolidated Event and Performance Management prescription. They will be adding an OM console to monitor events from all the different domain managers. Once this monitoring infrastructure is in place, they will begin to replace the non-HP monitoring with HP agents. Next step is to remove the competing consoles. Along the way, they will start using the uCMDB to track all the infrastructure items to help with correlating infrastructure events to key business services.

Overall, a very strong meeting and another example of how companies are using OM to consolidate and correlate events across their enterprise to reduce the cost of monitoring their IT infrastructure while improving the quality of service.

There are a variety of Twitter accounts you can follow as well as the hashtag #HPSU09

HPITOps – Covers BSM, Operations, ITSM, ITFM and Network Management

HPSU09 – show logistics and other information

HPSoftwareCTO

informationCTO

HPSoftware

BTOCMO – HP BTO Chief Marketing Officer

For Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel