I often get asked questions about the differences between two of the products in our Business Service Management Portfolio; BAC Problem Isolation and OMi Topology Based Event Correlation. Folks seem to get a little confused by some of the high level messaging around these products and gain the impression that the two products "do the same thing".

I guess that, as part of HPs Marketing organization, I have to take some of the blame for this so I'm going to blog my conscience clear (or try to).

To aid brevity I'll use the acronyms PI for Problem Isolation and TBEC to refer to OMi Topology Based Event Correlation.

On the face of it, there are distinct similarities between what PI and TBEC do.

• Both products try to help operational support personnel to understand the likely CAUSE of an infrastructure or application incident.
• Both products use correlation technologies (often referred to as event correlation) to achieve their primary goal.

I'll try to summarize the differences in a few sentences.

• TBEC correlates events (based on discovered topology and dependencies) continuously to indicate the cause event in a group of related events. TBEC is "bottom up" correlation that works even when there is NO business impact - it is driven by IT infrastructure issues.
• PI correlates data from multiple sources to determine the cause (or causal configuration item) where a business service impacting incident has occurred (. PI performs correlation "on demand" and based on a much broader set of data than TBEC. PI might be considered "tops down" correlation because it starts from the perspective of a business service impacting issue.

In reality, the differences between the products are best explained by looking at how they are used and I'll use my next couple of blog posts to do exactly that for TBEC. If you want the detail on PI then visit this 

PI and OMi in the BAC blog

 post from my colleague, Michael Procopio.  

 Read part 2 in the series.
http://www.communities.hp.com/online/blogs/managementsoftware/archive/2009/09/25/event-correlation-omi-tbec-and-problem-isolation-what-s-the-difference-part-2-of-3.aspx

Read part 3 in the series.
http://www.communities.hp.com/online/blogs/managementsoftware/archive/2009/09/25/event-correlation-omi-tbec-and-problem-isolation-what-s-the-difference-part-3-of-3.aspx

For HP Operations Center, Jon Haworth.