Infrastructure Management Software Blog : HP Operations Center

Sonja Hickey has joined the HP Operations Center team

pspielvogel — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 01:23:00 GMT

My name is Sonja Hickey and I just joined the HP Operations Center team 3 days ago. I will be focusing on the data collection aspects of the Operations Center product line and working with Peter Spielvogel and Jon Haworth as a Product Marketing Manager.

I’m really excited to be working for Hewlett-Packard for several reasons. First, I like HP’s financial strength, which I think is due to its diversification in many different areas. It’s pretty obvious that HP doesn’t put all of its eggs in one basket and that has paid off. You’ll learn through my posts that I am very much into investing and as I read through my latest financial newsletters, I take note of comments like “HP has a pragmatic culture” and “HP was better positioned than most when the recession hit”. I think you can now see why I’m very happy to be part of the HP team.

I also truly believe in the products that I will be representing - products that help IT teams effectively monitor and manage their IT infrastructure and environment. In my opinion, these are not “nice-to-have” products, but rather “must-have” products for any company that want to be successful in today’s marketplace.

On a different note, I’d like take this opportunity to let you know a little about me. From a work/career perspective, I’ve primarily worked in the high-tech space in either product management or product marketing roles for the past 12 years. Outside of work, my free time is spent with my family (3 children and a wonderful husband) as well as reading historical fiction books and honing my investing skills (sorry, I don’t provide stock tips!).

I’d like to end this post with a request. Pease do not hesitate to post a comment should you have any questions, concerns, issues, etc. around the Operations Center products. This will help me understand the problems and issues you face and how our products can help solve them. I may not have an immediate answer or I may not be the right person to answer your question, but I will get back to you. That’s a promise.

Thanks so much for reading my blog and I look forward to hearing from you.

For HP Operations Center, Sonja Hickey.

Get the latest updates on our Twitter feed @HPITOps http://twitter.com/HPITOps

Join the HP OpenView & Operations Management group on LinkedIn.

Job Opening – Operations Center Product Marketing Manager

pspielvogel — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 16:16:00 GMT

12-October-2009 update
This position is now filled.
Thank you to everyone that applied for this position. I really appreciate your interest. Stay tuned for an announcement on this blog in early November when the new person joins the blogging roster.
- Peter

As a reader of this blog, you already know about the products we have launched, how they interact with other hardware and software products within HP, and most important, how Operations Center allows customers to save money and improve the performance of their IT infrastructure.

We are now expanding our product marketing team by hiring another product marketing manager. This person can be based anywhere in the United States. Here is the official job description:

Description

Based on a strong knowledge of trends in the industry affect the strategy/direction of the product line/line of services or solutions
Suggest strategy changes internally and with external partners
Lead projects that involve cross-functional coordination to provide integrated products/services/ solutions
Improve processes affecting their workgroup and interfaces; e.g., forecast system, obsolesces process with retailers
Seen by sales team as an expert in the products/services/solutions and regularly is called on to defend the benefits in front of customers or partners
Regularly recommend product/ service/solution strategic direction to senior management
Often create innovative solutions to enhance sales of the product lines or line of services/solutions
Seen by sales team as an expert in the products/services/solutions and regularly is called on to defend the benefits in front of customers or partners
Influences at the senior vice president and above level

Education and Experience Required

College degree in Marketing/Business/Technical
Up to 25% travel required
Domain expertise: experience with infrastructure management technologies and product or solution marketing.
Field experience: SW sales, technical sales, SW presales, network solution sales, channel sales or business development.

Knowledge and Skills Required

10 years in product marketing fundamentals
Strong leadership capabilities
Minimum 1 year work experience in a general marketing function beyond Product Marketing

To Apply

Visit: http://www.hp.com/go/jobs
Search for job number 308597

Please - save your time and ours – only apply if you meet the qualifications.

For HP Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel.

Get the latest updates on our Twitter feed @HPITOps http://twitter.com/HPITOps

Join the HP OpenView & Operations Management group onLinkedIn.

Innovation Week Part 5 - Managing IT: Mobile Edition

pspielvogel — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 17:54:00 GMT

In a meeting last week with our partner AlarmPoint, we were talking about how innovations in mobile computing are driving people to do more on their mobile devices, both professionally and personally. I asked Christel Mes, Director of Marketing at AlarmPoint, to share her thoughts about mobile management options for IT Operations Staff. Here is her post.
Peter Spielvogel, Product Marketing Manager, Operations Center

After a meeting I had with the HP Operations Center team today, I wanted to share some thoughts for customers looking to become more efficient through mobility. Especially in today's fast-paced dynamic enterprise, accelerating business initiatives and executing lean processes are a must to drive operational efficiency. HP Operations Manager users must leverage mobile staff, providing them with secure remote access to relevant systems required to manage complex and distributed IT environments. It is estimated that 41% of an IT organization is currently considered mobile or remote. Times have changed drastically since the days of watching a console or carrying a pager to be alerted of critical events.

With the latest version of HP Operation Manager on Unix, Version 9, which shipped in early June, AlarmPoint Systems Alert Management and Mobility software has been included in the bundled package. Recognizing the importance of mobility, AlarmPoint will allow HP OMU customers to view, edit, annotate, research, trouble shoot and take remote actions on all events coming from OMU, through one consistent, secure, authenticated and audited access point. Now IT is able to resolve events faster, away from their console on any web-enabled mobile device including, BlackBerry, iPhone, Android and others.

To learn more about how HP OM and AlarmPoint work together or to download the AlarmPoint Express product – visit https://express.alarmpoint.com/hp.

In addition, check out the AlarmPoint Blog: http://blogs.alarmpoint.com/tmcalpin/

Automated Infrastructure Discovery - Extreme Makeover

pspielvogel — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 01:03:00 GMT

Good Discovery Can Uncover Hidden Secrets
Infrastructure discovery has something of a bad reputation in some quarters. We've done some recent surveys of companies utilizing a variety of vendors’ IT operations products. What's interesting is that, in our survey results, automated infrastructure discovery fared pretty badly in terms of the support that it received within organizations - and also in terms of the success that they believed they had achieved.

There are a number of reasons underlying these survey results. Technology issues and organizational challenges were highlighted in our survey. But I believe that one of the main 'issues' that discovery has is that people have lost sight of its basic values and the benefits that they can bring. Organizations see 'wide reaching' discovery initiatives as complex to implement and maintain - and they do not see compelling short term benefits.

I got to thinking about discovery and the path that it has taken over the last 15 or 20 years. I remember the excitement when HP released its first cut of Network Node Manager. It included discovery that showed people things about their networks that they just did not know. There were always surprises when we took NNM into new sites to demonstrate it. Apart from showing folks what was actually connected to the network, NNM also showed how the network was structured, the topology.

Visualization --> Association --> Correlation
And once people can see and visualize those two sets of information they start to make associations about how events detected in the network relate to each other - they use the discovery information to optimize their ability to operate the network infrastructure.

So the next logical evolution for tools like NNM was to start building some of the analysis into the software as 'correlation'. For example the ability to determine that the 51 "node down" events you just received are actually just one "router down' event and 50 symptoms generated by the nodes that are 'behind' the router in the network topology. Network operators could ignore the 'noise' and focus on the events that were likely causes of outages. Pretty simple stuff (in principle) but very effective at optimizing operational activities.

Scroll forward 15 years. Discovery technologies now extend across most aspects of infrastructure and the use cases are much more varied. Certainly inventory maintenance is a key motivator for many organizations - both software and hardware discovery play important roles in supporting asset tracking and license compliance activities. Not hugely exciting for most Operational Management teams.

Moving Towards Service Impact Analysis
Service impact analysis is a more significant capability for Operations Management teams and is a goal that many organizations are chasing. Use discovery to find all my infrastructure components - network devices, servers, application and database instances - and tie them together so I can see how my Business Services are using the infrastructure. Then, when I detect an event on a network device or database I can understand which Business Services might be impacted and I can prioritize my operational resources and activities. Some organizations are doing this quite successfully and getting significant benefits in streamlining their operational management activities and aligning them with the priorities of the business.

But there is one benefit of discovery which seems to have been left by the side of the road. The network discovery example I started with provides a good reference. Once you know what is 'out there' and how it is connected together then you can use that topology information to understand how failures in one part of the infrastructure can cause 'ghost events' - symptom events' - to be generated by infrastructure components which rely in some way on the errant component. When you get 5 events from a variety of components - storage, database, email server, network devices - then if you know how those components are 'connected' you can relate the events together and determine which are symptoms and which is the likely cause.

Optimizing the Operations Bridge
Now, to be fair, many organizations understand that this is important in optimizing their operational management activities. In our survey, we found that many companies deploy skilled people with extensive knowledge of the infrastructure into the first level operations bridge to help make sense of the event stream - try to work out which events to work on and which are dead ends. But it's expensive to do this - and not entirely effective. Operations still end up wasting effort by chasing symptoms before they deal with the actual cause event. Inevitably this increases mean time to repair, increases operational costs and degrades the quality of service delivered to the business.

So where is the automation? We added correlation to network monitoring solutions years ago to help do exactly this stuff, why not do 'infrastructure wide' correlation'?

Well, it's a more complex problem to solve of course. And there is also the problem that many (most?) organizations just do not have comprehensive discovery across all of their infrastructure. Or if they do have good coverage it's from a variety of tools so it's not in one place where all of the inter-component relationships can be analyzed.

Topology Based Event Correlation - Automate Human Judgment
This is exactly the problem which we've been solving with our Topology Based Event Correlation (TBEC) technology. Back to basics - although the developers would not thank me for saying that, as it's a complex technology. Take events from a variety of sources, do some clever stuff to map them to the discovered components in the discovery database (discovered using a number of discrete tools) and then use the relationships between the discovered components to automatically do what human operators are trying to do manually - indicate the cause event.

Doing this stuff automatically for network events made sense 15 years ago, doing it across the complexity of an entire infrastructure makes even more sense today. It eliminates false starts and wasted effort.

This is a 'quick win' for Operational Management teams. Improved efficiency, reduced operational costs, free up senior staff to work on other activities… better value delivered to the business (and of course huge pay raises for the Operations Manager).

So what do you need to enable TBEC to help streamline your operations. Well, you need events from infrastructure monitoring tools - and most organizations have more than enough of those. But you also need infrastructure discovery information - the more the better.

Maybe infrastructure discovery needs a makeover.

For HP Operations Center, Jon Haworth

Does Virtualization Consolidate Your IT Operations Or Fragment Them?

pspielvogel — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 02:06:00 GMT

Customers tell me constantly they are consolidating their tools sets to drive efficiency and reduce operating costs. They tell me they do not want hundreds of point tools that they have to integrate themselves. They tell me they want to spend more time working on strategic projects and less on keeping the lights on. They tell me that they have Virtualization projects that are following the same path as previous innovation projects. When is it going to stop?

The average IT organization spends 70-80% of their budget “keep the lights on” and not innovating. As a result, most IT organizations are looking for ways to reduce their IT operations costs so they can free up resources to work on more strategic business demands.

Most customers are modifying their cost structure through consolidation projects (Data Center Transformation). The goal for these consolidation projects is to eliminate redundancy and more importantly increase efficiency to avoid and minimize downtime.

There are many types of IT consolidation that can occur but the most common are organizational, and datacenter consolidations. In both cases virtualization is often one of the key enabling technologies deployed. Each of these projects usually kicks off an IT management tools re-evaluation.

Unfortunately as IT organizations invest in these projects they are often very disruptive and counter productive to IT initiatives focused on reducing operating costs. I believe it is due to the lack of planning on how to best manage the new technologies once deployed.

Virtualization promises to deliver significant hardware and software license cost savings and thus very attractive to companies trying to reduce capital expenses. What is not understood by most companies is the fact that every new technology deployed can be very disruptive to IT Operations goal of keeping the lights on and potentially increase operating expenses.

Virtualization is not alone. Think back when your organization first deployed new technologies like, PCs, Client Server, Web, ERP, SOA, etc. How disruptive was it? How long did it take to get the management technologies embedded into your IT Operations processes correctly? For most companies it was too long, which drove the need to consolidate the number of management vendors because it was too costly and inefficient to maintain multiple home grown integrations, event management systems, dashboards, and IT processes.

Most of the disruptions were because IT organizations do not know where or how to integrate the data received by the multiple tools deployed or where different organizational boundaries should lie. This is where HP Software and Solutions has helped thousands of customers over the past 15 years drive the cost out of IT operations through tools consolidation projects.

What disruptions have you encountered during your data center consolidation project? Or, how did careful planning avoid the pitfalls that trip up most IT professionals.

For HP Operations Center, Dennis Corning

The Infrastructure Management Blogging Team

pspielvogel — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 15:59:00 GMT

Here are some short bios for the new HP Infrastructure Management Software team.

Dennis Corning

For the past year Dennis has led the product and solutions marketing efforts for HP Operations Center (formerly OpenView Operations). In this role he is responsible for positioning, messaging, strategy, enablement, and go-to-market programs. Previously, Dennis led product marketing for BAC. Prior to joining HP he held various marketing, sales, business development and alliances roles with Mercury Interactive (acquired by HP), Concord Communications (acquired by CA), Precise Software (acquired by Veritas Software) and BMC Software.

Jon Haworth

Jon is currently a Product Marketing Manager for the HP Software Operations Center portfolio of products. He has 25 years experience working for HP across a variety of roles including consulting, pre-sales and marketing. Jon has designed and implemented large-scale infrastructure management solutions for a number of Fortune 1000 enterprises. Jon is an early adopter and continued advocate for ITIL having gained his ITIL V2 Service Management certification in 1996.

Peter Spielvogel

Peter is a Product Marketing Manager for the HP Software Operations Center portfolio of products. He has helped companies in financial services, life sciences, manufacturing, and publishing improve their competitiveness, generate productivity improvements, and boost their bottom line. Over the past 20 years Peter has held marketing, sales, product management, and software development positions at Ipedo, Applied Materials, Solomon Brothers, Prudential Securities, and several startups.

For HP Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel.

Consolidated IT Operations: Return of the Prodigal Son

pspielvogel — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 11:44:00 GMT

Let's face it, the concept of bringing together all of your IT infrastructure monitoring into a single "NOC" or Operations Bridge has been around for years. Mainframe folks will tell you they were doing this stuff 30 years ago.

Unfortunately, in the distributed computer systems world, a lot of organizations have still not managed to successfully consolidate all of their IT infrastructure operations. I see a lot of companies who believe that they have made good progress, often they've managed to pull together most of the server and application operations activities, maybe minimized the number of monitoring tools that they use.

But when you dig below the surface, often there will be a separate network operations team, and maybe an application support team that owns a 'special' application. And of course the admins who are responsible for the roll out of the new virtualization technology - that just "cannot" be monitored by the normal operations tools and processes.

And that's the problem... Often there is resistance from a number of different angles to initiatives which try to pull end-to-end infrastructure monitoring into a single place. Legacy organizational resistance is probably the biggest challenge - silos have a tendency to be very difficult to 'flatten'.

Another common theme is that the technical influencers (architects, consultants, application specialists etc.) in the organization create FUD that the toolset used by the operations teams is not suitable for monitoring the new technology that they are rolling out. They need to use their own special monitoring solution or the project will fail. Because it's a new technology and everyone is scared of a failed rollout, management acquiesces and another little fragmented set of monitoring technology, organization and processes is born. Every new technology has potential for this - I've seen it happen with MS Windows, Linux, Active Directory, Citrix, VMware - the list is endless.

So what? I hear you say, what's your point? Well I'm seeing a lot of organizations revisiting the whole topic of consolidating their IT operations and establishing a single Operations Bridge - and making some significant changes.

Why now? Simple - to reduce the Operational Expenditures associated with keeping the lights on. In the current economic climate organizations are motivated 'top down' to drive cost out wherever they can. Initiatives that deliver cost reductions in the short term get executive sponsors. There is also a lot lower tolerance for the kinds of hurdles that used to be raised as objections - organizational silos get flattened, tool portfolios are rationalized.

It's not just about cutting cost of course. Simply reducing headcount would achieve that goal, but the chances are that the quality of IT service delivered to the business would suffer, and there would be direct impacts on the ability of the business to function.

Of course, the trick is to consolidate into an Operations Bridge, and be able to deliver the same or higher quality IT services to the business but with reduced cost. Often the economies of scale and streamlined, consistent processes that are enabled by an Operations Bridge will deliver significant benefits - and reduce OpEx.

This is where HP's Operation Center solutions have focussed for the last 12 or 15 years. In my next post I'll talk about where HP see the next significant gains being made - where are we focusing so we can help our customers to take their existing Operations Bridge and significantly increase efficiency and effectiveness.

In the meantime, if you want to read a little more about the case for consolidated operations, take a look at this white paper "Working Smart in IT Operations - the case for consolidated operations".

For HP Operations Center, Jon Haworth.

ROI for IT Infrastructure Monitoring - Measuring what Matters

pspielvogel — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 18:30:00 GMT

I read an interesting post and related ebook by David Meerman Scott on why traditional marketing ROI measures lead to failure. His premise is that measuring marketing metrics such as number of sales leads captured and press mentions lead to the wrong behaviors and in some ways undermine one of the primary goals of marketing, which is to increase sales and market share. So, why is everyone in both marketing and IT so focused on ROI?

The answer is that focusing on the return of your investments in different parts of the business allows you to allocate scare resources and drive the best returns for the shareholders. They key is tracking the metrics that matter. Here are two examples, one from marketing and one from IT.

In previous positions, I have created marketing dashboards that charted many the items that Mr. Scott slammed. Why would I or other seasoned marketing professionals do this? One reason is that some metrics are relatively easy to track (such as leads captured at a trade show or the number of responses to a marketing campaign). Correlating these to the real goal of increasing sales is much trickier and requires much heavier monitoring infrastructure including obtaining accurate input from sales and customers about the number of touches and how individual marketing campaigns or programs influenced each stage of the sales process. Few companies have the will or discipline to do this.

On the IT side, there are also easily-trackable metrics. Server utilization, power consumption, and application uptime appear on many IT dashboards. While these are certainly important, what really matters is how the IT infrastructure supports the business goals. Business owners care about:

Availability - can my users access the applications they need?
Performance - does the application deliver an acceptable response time?
Data accuracy - does the application maintain data integrity?

Again, tracking these business-focused metrics is harder than focusing on ones that are easy to gather from element managers that often accompany systems. But, the right management software and some automated processes make it straight forward to create IT dashboards with mean. This is what the field of business service management is all about. BSM links the underlying infrastructure and applications to business outcomes such as those listed above.

To learn more about BSM, please visit my colleague Mike Shaw’s BSM blog or download a white paper about HP’s approach to BSM.

In future posts, I and my fellow bloggers will address how robust IT infrastructure monitoring contributes to delivering availability, performance, and accurate data

For HP Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel.

Is Managing Virtual Servers Just Like Managing Physical Servers?

pspielvogel — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 23:30:00 GMT

As I travel and speak with customers, partners and analysts firms, I keep hearing that ownership for virtualization management is fragmented within the IT organization. Some companies have even created a new role called the Virtualization Administrator. Why?

If virtual servers are just like the legacy “physical” or dedicated servers why is there such a fragmentation in monitoring responsibilities, tools and processes today? Haven’t we learned from previous technology innovation that when it comes to IT Operations, the sooner the monitoring tools and process are streamlined into the standard operating procedure the better?

Take a look inside your organization today. Are you fragmenting the monitoring and management of your Virtual Servers? Are you deploying point products to manage your Virtual Server farms separate from your physical servers? You know from previous projects the sooner you streamline the management tools into the process the more efficiently IT can keep the lights on while freeing up resources to execute more strategic projects.

So what do you need to successfully manage Virtual Servers, the applications running on them and the underlying network? The same tools you already use to manage these entities prior to virtualization (HP Operations Center, formerly OpenView), with some enhancements to monitor the virtual layer.

The enhancement comes in the form of a new HP Smart Plug In (SPIs) for Virtualization. This new SPI for Virtualization plugs into HP Operations Manager and delivers the following:

Uses a common methodology to monitor both Physical (dedicated) and Virtual Servers.
Monitors both performance and availability of VM host and guests independent of each other to provide current status
Automates the creation of baselines and setting thresholds to reduces configuration overhead
Auto-discovery and visualization of the virtualized environment—including the dependency between the ESX host system and each guest system and updates service navigator views
Provides a single console to simplify operation tasks. When a metric exceeds a defined threshold it alerts Operators and provides instructions for fixing the problem and/or launch corrective actions automatically or manually
Delivers comprehensive reporting on the short- and long-time behavior for a virtualized system.

The alternative is to use a native tool that came with your virtualization platform or buy a niche point product. Both approaches can be effective for the Virtualization Administration team but does it enable you to drive the cost out of IT Operations? My recommendation is to extend your HP Operations Center deployment to ensure you continue to optimize your cost structure.

Let me know why or why not centralizing your physical and virtual operations into a single console is right for you.

For HP Operations Center, Dennis Corning