Infrastructure Management Software Blog : Operations Bridge

Network Management Customer Success Story (webinar)

pspielvogel — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 15:29:00 GMT

My colleague, Aruna Ravichandran, in Network Management Center Product Marketing, asked me to share information about a customer webinar in which they describe their success in upgrading to NNMi. Since many Operations Bridges also manage networks in addition to the server infrastructure, I agreed. As an aside, OMi and NNMi share the same underlying technology in their respective causal engines.

Listen to this on-demand webinar with a customer working for a leading $15 Billion consumer manufacturing company. You will get the complete story on their upgrade to NNMi. The speaker focuses on the ROI he was able to demonstrate to his management to justify spending the time and resources to go through the upgrade process.

In this webinar, you will learn how the customer was able to:

Increase network availability from 97.5% to 99.98%
Reduce capital and operating costs by consolidating 5 servers down to 1
Increase operator efficiency and productivity by decreasing the time spent on L2/L3 escalations from 8 hours to 2 hours/day through automation
Enhance its disaster recovery solution with automated application synchronization

Here is the link to the recorded ROI webinar.

For HP Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel.

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Event Correlation: OMi TBEC and Problem Isolation - What's the difference (part 3 of 3)

jonhaworth — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 15:53:00 GMT

If you have not done so already, you may want to start with part 1 in this 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-1-of-3.aspx

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

This is the final part in my 3 post discussion of the event correlation technologies within OMi Topology Based Event Correlation (TBEC) and Problem Isolation. I've been focusing on talking about how TBEC is used and how it helps IT Operations Management staff be more effective and efficient.

In my last post I started to mention why End User Monitoring (EUM) technologies are important - because they are able to monitor business applications from an end user perspective. EUM technologies can detect issues which Infrastructure monitoring might miss.

In the example we worked through in the last post I mentioned how EUM can detect a response time issue and alert staff that they need to expedite the investigation of an ongoing incident. This is also where Problem Isolation helps. PI provides the most effective means to gather all of the information that we have regarding possible causes of the response time issue and analyze the most likely cause.

For example: Our web based ordering system had eight load balanced web servers connected to the internet. These are where our customers connect. The web server farm communicates back to application, database and email servers on the intranet and the overall system allows customers to search and browse available products, place an order and receive email confirmations on order confirmation and shipping status.

The event monitoring system includes monitoring of all of the components. We also have EUM probes in place running test transactions and evaluating response time and availability. The systems are all busy but not overloaded - so we are not seeing any performance alerts from the event monitoring system.

A problem arises with two of our eight web servers, and they drop out of the load balanced farm. The operations bridge can see that the problem has happened as they receive events indicating the web server issues. TBEC shows that there are two separate issues, so this is not a cascading failure – and the operations staff can see that these web servers are part of the online ordering service.

However, they also know that the web servers are part of redundant infrastructure and there should be plenty of spare capacity in the six remaining load balanced web servers. As they have no other events relating to the online ordering service, they decide to leave the web server issues for a little while as they are busy dealing with some database problems for another business service.

The entire transaction load that would normally be spread across eight web servers is now focused on the remaining six. They were already busy but now are being pushed even harder, not enough to cause CPU utilization alerts but enough to increase the time that it takes them to process their component of the customer’s online ordering transactions. As a result, response time, as seen by customers, is terrible. The Operations Bridge are unaware as they see no performance alerts form the event management system.

EUM is our backstop here; it will detect the response time issue and raise an alert. This alert – indicating that the response time for the online ordering application is unacceptable – is sent to the Operations Bridge.

The Operations Bridge team now know that they need to re-prioritize resources to investigate an ongoing business service impacting issue. And they need to do this as quickly as possible. They need to gather all available information about the affected business service and try to understand why response time has suddenly become unacceptable. This is where Problem Isolation helps.

PI works to correlate more than just events. It will pull together data from multiple sources - performance history (resource utilizations), events, even help-desk incidents that have been logged and work to determine the likely issue.

So we've come full circle. I spent a lot of time talking about OMi, and events and how an Operations Bridge is assisted by TBEC. But it's not the one and only tool that you need in your bag. Technologies like EUM and PI help catch and diagnose all of the stuff that just cannot be detected by 'simply' )I use that term lightly) monitoring infrastructure.

Once again if you want to understand PI better I encourage you to take a look at the posts by Michael Procopio over on the BAC blog.

For HP Operations Center, Jon Haworth.

Event Correlation: OMi TBEC and Problem Isolation - What's the difference (part 2 of 3)

jonhaworth — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 15:49:00 GMT

This is part 2 of 3 of my discussion of the event correlation technologies within OMi Topology Based Event Correlation (TBEC) and Problem Isolation. I'm going to focus on talking about how TBEC is used and how it helps IT Operations Management staff be more effective and efficient. My colleague Michael Procopio has discussed PI in more detail over in the BAC blog here: PI and OMi TBEC blog post

If you think about an Operations Bridge (or "NOC"… but I've blogged my opinion of that term previously) then fundamentally its purpose is very simple.

The Ops Bridge is tasked with monitoring the IT Infrastructure (network, servers, applications, storage etc.) for events and resource exceptions which indicate a potential or actual threat to the delivery of the business services which rely on the IT infrastructure. The goal is to fix issues as quickly as possible in order to reduce the occurrence or duration of business service issues.

Event detection is an ongoing process – 24x7 – and the Ops Bridge will monitor the events during all production periods, often 24x7 using shift based teams.

Event monitoring is an inexact discipline. In many cases a single incident in the infrastructure will result in numerous events – only one of which actually relates to the cause of the incident, the other events are just symptoms.

The challenge for the Ops Bridge staff is to determine which events they need to investigate and to avoid chasing the symptom events. The operations team must prioritize their activities so that they invest their finite resources in dealing with causal events based on their potential business impact, and avoid wasting time in duplication of effort (chasing symptoms) or, even worse, in chasing symptoms down in a serial fashion before they finally investigate the actual causal event, as this will extend the potential for extended downtime of business services.

TBEC helps the Operations Bridge in addressing these challenges. TBEC works 24x7, examining the event stream, relating it to the monitored infrastructure and the automatically discovered dependencies between the monitored components. TBEC works to provide a clear indication that specific events are related to each other (related to a single incident) and to identify which event is the causal event and which are symptoms.

Consider a disk free space issue on a SAN, which is hosting an oracle database. With comprehensive event monitoring in place, this will result in three events:

a disk space resource utilization alert
quickly be followed by an Oracle database application error
and a further event which indicates that a Websphere server which uses the Oracle database is unhappy

Separately, all three events seem ‘important’ – so considerable time could be wasted in duplicate effort as the Ops Bridge tries to investigate all three events. Even worse, with limited resources, it is quite possible that the Operations staff will chase the events ‘top down’ (serially) – look at Websphere first, then Oracle, and finally the SAN – this extends the time to rectification and increases the duration (or potential) of a business outage.

TBEC will clearly show that the event indicating the disk space issue on the SAN is the causal event – and the other two events are symptoms.

In a perfect world the Ops Bridge can monitor everything, detect every possible event or compromised resource that might impact a business service and fix everything before a business service impact occurs.

The introduction of increasingly redundant and flexible infrastructure helps with this – redundant networks, clustered servers, RAID disk arrays, load balanced web servers etc. But, it also can add complications which I’ll illustrate later.

One of the challenges of event monitoring is that it simply can NOT detect everything that can impact business service delivery. For example, think about a complex business transaction, which traverses many components in the IT infrastructure. Monitoring of each of the components involved may indicate that they are heavily utilized – but not loaded to the point where an alert is generated.

However, the composite effect on the end to end response time of the business transaction may be such that response time is simply unacceptable. For a web based ordering system where customers connect to a company’s infrastructure and place orders for products this can mean the difference between getting orders or the customer heading over to a competitors web site.

This is why End User Monitoring technologies are important. I'll talk about EUM in the next, and final, edition of this blog serial.

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.

Analysis of HP announcement at VMworld (podcast)

pspielvogel — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 18:35:00 GMT

At VMworld, HP announced its virtualization smart plug-in (SPI) for Operations Center. For companies using Operations Manager as the consolidated event and performance management console, this allows them to see events from VMware Virtual Center in the Operations Manager console.

The implications of the “Virtualization SPI” for business operations are significant. This means operators can manage all events, from both the physical and virtual infrastructure, through a single Operations Bridge. The virtualization team can focus on planning and strategy, leaving the tier 1 operators to manage events.

Dennis Corning, product marketing manager for virtualization, comments on the announcement in this podcast, which I recorded at VMworld.

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.

Your success is my success (customer visit summary)

pspielvogel — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:40:00 GMT

Another guest post by Lillian Hull, product manager for Operations Manager on Unix.
- Peter Spielvogel

Earlier this month, my colleagues and I spent some time with one of our customers in the health insurance sector. They were interested in our plans around Operations Manager and in particular, Operations Manager i.

Their environment includes a variety of HP Software & Solutions products including Operations Manager on UNIX (OMU), Business Availability Center (BAC), Discovery and Dependency Mapping (DDM), Network Node Manager (NNM) and SiteScope (SiS).

The portfolio is well-integrated and users familiar with BAC should feel right at home with OMi. OMi can provide a single “operations bridge” to reduce operational costs. All events are sent to the operations bridge and monitored by staff well-versed in IT operations. This centralization makes it easier to distinguish between causes and symptoms to better isolate the cause of a set of events. This in turn leads to more rapid problem resolution.

As with many of our customers, another topic they wanted to talk more about was virtualization. They are using Linux and virtual machines. For many environments, the slight overhead of running OM in a virtual machine should not have significant impact on performance or scalability.

Finally, during the wrap-up, the customer told us how much they want to work with us and our host said that our success with Operations Manager is linked to his success as an infrastructure architect. His words were “your success is my success”. Our products are vital to keeping everything running smoothly in this organization. HP is very fortunate to have customers that share their insights with us as not just another vendor, but as a trusted adviser. And due to great customers like this one, I am confident we will both triumph.

For HP Operations Center, Lillian Hull.

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Enhancing SiteScope with Operations Manager - and Vice Versa

pspielvogel — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 22:22:00 GMT

Many SiteScope customers have been asking about the value of adding Operations Manager to their existing SiteScope implementation. Many Operations Manager customers have been asking about how the new SAM Admin helps them manage their SiteScope. The bottom line is that combining agent-based and agentless monitoring gives customers the ability to expand their monitoring coverage in a cost effective way.

I have listed a few excerpts from a new solution brief called “HP Operations Manager for HP SiteScope Customers”

Adding Operations Manager along with its agents extends SiteScope’s depth and breadth of coverage.

• Present an Operations Bridge or manager of managers that consolidates events from disparate consoles including multiple SiteScope servers, giving greater visibility into system health across the enterprise.
• Operate autonomously on managed nodes, ensuring continuous operation, even if the network connection between the management server and managed node fails.
• Allow monitoring of systems where administrators will not allow security credentials to be placed on the network but will allow an agent to be installed on the server.
• Collect data at very granular time intervals, allowing you to fine-tune the performance of mission-critical systems.
• Enrich events by providing context in the form of a service dependency map.

Operations Manager integrates out-of-the-box with SiteScope. It centralizes management of all SiteScope and other event consoles.

• Operations Manager automatically adds SiteScope targets to the Operations Manager Service Map.
• SiteScope alerts go directly to Operations Manager with full details.
• Operations Manager launches SiteScope tools directly from the Operations Manager console.
• Operations Manager manages multiple SiteScope servers and can transfer configuration information from one SiteScope instance to another and synchronize settings between multiple SiteScope servers.

For HP Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel.

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

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Q&A from EMA webinar on incident management and OMi

pspielvogel — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 18:07:00 GMT

Thank you to everyone who attended the EMA webinar on “What is New in the Not-so-New Area of Event Management: Five Tips to Reduce Incident Resolution Costs” (view the archived webinar by clicking on the link).

We had many great questions at the end, some of which we did not have time to answer. Here is a complete list of all the questions that were asked, along with the answers. If you have additional questions, please post them in the comment field on the blog.

What effect will cloud computing have on the management strategies you discussed?

In many respects, Cloud computing – if it’s to be successful as a responsible answer to optimizing infrastructure for business applications – will accelerate the need for consolidated event management and its associated technologies. Cloud computing places many new complexities and a stress and real-time awareness in front of IT managers, including how to manage performance, change, and costs effectively across virtualized environments and potentially across a mix of external service providers wedded together in a dynamic ecosystem. These requirements will force service providers to become more transparent in support of SLAs, performance management, infrastructure discovery, CMDB Systems and CMS involvements, and shared cost analysis, along with compliance, security and risk management issues. In other words, Cloud computing cannot succeed except as a niche opportunity without embracing the best practices and process-centric programs within IT to optimize its own internal effectiveness.

As you all know, security event management is a domain in its own right, and there is as much interest in cross-domain integration of security processes & tools as in other areas, if not more so in some cases. How can unified event management help security and IT ops team achieve their common goals?

Security event integration with an overall consolidated event management system is one of the more challenging and also more valuable areas of consideration. This is partly because rather than being a “component-defined” part of the infrastructure or SW environment, security is pervasively associated with all domains and all disciplines. It is something like the “phantom” in event management-a more logical than tangible entity. But as such, defining polices for integration and reconciliation are more complex and overall less evolved. Of course security has its own well established history in event management, in particular with SIEM—but once again this evolved as a way of consolidating security-related event issues, rather than being a more holistic approach to integrating security events with performance and change related events. And so to a large degree this challenge still remains unanswered by the industry as a whole.

Is OMi a replacement for OM?

No. OMi is a separate product that adds on to Operations Manager. OMi introduces advanced functionality such as system health indicators and topology-based event correlation using Operations Manager as the event consolidation platform. We designed the products in this way to allow our customers to gain significant new capabilities without disrupting their current Operations Manager deployment. There is no rip and replace, just adding a new component on top of the existing monitoring solution.

OMI looks alot like BAC, are they tightly coupled? Do I need both?

So is BAC and OMi the same product now?

Great observation. OMi is built on the BAC foundation so they do share a common look and feel. OMi performs advanced event management. BAC handles application management, transaction monitoring, and problem isolation. You can mix and match to components from the two product sets to meet the needs of your organization and you only need to purchase the components that fit your needs. So, OMi and BAC are separate products, just tightly integrated.

Sounds great, but what is the cost? Is there some way to justify the big cash outlay for IT organizations in SMBs?

The return on investment should be apparent. As we covered in the presentation, if you assume the cost per manually handling an event is $75 and OMi will eliminate processing of around 10% of events (conservative estimate), just determine how many events your Operations Bridge team handles per day/week/month/year and do the math.
And, of course, that ignores the benefits associated with a more rapid fix-time for incidents which will enhance business service availability.

For pricing on OMi, please contact your local HP sales representative.

Can OMi run on the same server as Operations Manager?

No. You need to run the two products on different servers. OMi will run on its own Windows based platform and will be connected bi-directionally to a nominated OM server.

Do I need OMi to use the runbook automation capabilities of Operations Orchestration?

No. Operations Orchestration can use the events from Operations Manager as the trigger to launch flows. You do not need OMi too. Like OMi, OO leverages the power of OM and its agents. I strongly recommend you contact your HP sales rep to schedule a demo of Operations Manager and Operations Orchestration working together.

If everyone uses the same console, how will domain experts perform advanced troubleshooting?

The OMi console is designed for Operations Bridge personnel to view events, identify the causal event, and resolve the incident. Likely users will be Tier 1 operators and subject matter experts (SME) starting to troubleshoot problems and determine what to fix. The SMEs will then use their specialized tools to investigate the problems in more detail within their domain. For example, someone on the server team might see that a server is down and then use HP SIM (System Insight Manager) to identify that a fan has stopped working.
OMi includes the concept of “user roles” so that specific users can be provided with access to the events, infrastructure views and tools that are appropriate for their role. Domain experts could have user roles defined which include direct access to tools utilized for advanced troubleshooting.

Is there any special configuration I need to run OMi?

You need Operations Manager to consolidate events before feeding them to OMi. You can feed events from other tools (such as SiteScope for agentless monitoring) into Operations Manager to get better visibility of your enterprise by expanding the number of managed nodes. Operations Manager can also consolidate events from other domain managers such as Microsoft SCOM or IBM Tivoli.
You do need a recent version of Operations Manager – either OMW 8.10 with some specific patches or OMU 9.0. Existing Smart Plug-Ins will work with OMi but we’ve also been making some enhancements to provide tighter integration and to enable the Smart PlugIns for OMU to populate the topology maps automatically. So in general you need a recent OM version and later SPI versions are ‘better’.
Other than that, there is no special configuration.

Does OMi require ECS (event correlation services) to be built out?

No. As a general rule it’s a good idea to ‘refine’ the event stream that is processed by the OM server and passed to OMi. There is absolutely no point in passing lots of noise to OMi – stuff that we know is noise – so we would recommend making good use of all of the traditional event consolidation and filtering technologies in OM. Time and count based correlation on agents, de-duplication etc.
ECS – Event Correlation Services – can also be used to further refine the event stream as it arrives at an OMU server but it is not a requirement for OMi.

Any issues or challenges to be utilize OMi in duplicated IP addresses environment for company like MSP (managed service providers)?

OMi should work in duplicate IP address environments providing that appropriate DNS resolution and IP routing OR HTTP PROXY CHAINING is in place to enable outbound connections from the existing OM server to the managed nodes (agents) to work correctly. The support for dup-IP is something we included in the HTTP communications protocol which can be used with OM agents after version 8.x of the OM servers. There are a number of different ways that the network 'resolution' can be set up - including http proxies and NAT - and we cannot commit to testing every possible configuration. However, with an appropriate configuration OMi will work in these environments. In general, if you have a dup-IP environment working with your existing OM server then OMi should also work.

Does OMi take into consideration HA (high availability) configurations such that it can identify business degradation as opposed to an outage?

Yes. This is one advantage of having health calculation and event correlation which is dynamically driven by the discovery of the infrastructure. Consider a cluster running some Microsoft Exchange Resource Groups, or a number of VMware hosts with some virtual machines which participate in delivering a business service. In either case, if we have a hardware issue then we may move the ‘application’ (resource group or VM) to another host. This may happen automatically.
The Operations Manager Smart Plug-In (SPI) which is monitoring these resources – so the Exchange SPI (which is cluster aware) or the Virtualization Infrastructure SPI – will detect the movement of resources typically within 1 to 2 minutes. The SPI will update the discovery information in OM and this will be synchronized into OMi a short time later. OMi’s perspective of the topology of the infrastructure will change and the health and event correlation rules will adapt.
OMi will now ‘understand’ that the hardware events which arrived from the cluster or VM host do not impact the business service which is supported by the specific Exchange Resource Group or virtual machine.

For HP Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel.

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

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Consolidated IT event management: five requirements for greater efficiency (free white paper)

pspielvogel — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 20:47:00 GMT

We just released a new white paper called “Consolidated IT event management: five requirements for greater efficiency.” It talks about the challenges of managing IT with severely constrained budgets and how to make better use of your existing resources.

The main premise is to create a centralized Operations Bridge to consolidate and correlate events from across your entire enterprise. The paper provides five key requirements for using the Operations Bridge to drive cost-effective IT operations.

You can download the paper now using the "Attachment" link below.

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.

Tell us about your Operations Bridge and be a “NOC Star” (NNMi)

pspielvogel — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 21:47:00 GMT

In this case, when we say NOC, we are focusing on the narrower Network Operations Center definition and not the broader Operations Bridge concept that consolidates events from servers, storage, networks, and applications into a single console.

Here is a great promotion from my colleagues in the Network Management Center.

Are you currently using HP Network Node Manager i (NNMi 8.x) software? If so, you may be the next “NOC Star” we are looking for!

Share your NNMi experience with us – along with any benefits you have received to date -- and you will get a free NOC Star t-shirt for just submitting your entry. You can submit videos, podcasts, or just text through the online form.

Entries are being accepted through August 15th, 2009. Users can then vote on their favorite entry for a chance to win a $500 HP gift certificate.

Start submitting your entry at www.hp.com/go/NOCstar and you could be our next HP NOC star !

Winning entries, along with a photo of the NOC star will be showcased on HP’s portal.

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 on LinkedIn.

Innovation Week Part 2 - Operations Manager i 8.1

pspielvogel — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 21:01:00 GMT

While OMU 9.0 represents evolutionary innovation, Operations Manager i 8.1 (OMi) is truly revolutionary. Operations Manager i is a set of add-on products which extends existing HP Operations Manager to provide advanced event correlation and system health capabilities.

It uses the proven causal engine from NNMi with a completely new set of rules designed for server infrastructure rather than network components. This topology-based event correlation reduces duplication of effort in the Operations Bridge by automatically determining which events are symptoms and which are the cause of a problem. If you don’t have TBEC, you have to write and maintain a ton of rules to eliminate events that are symptoms and not causes. This is time consuming (eight full-time people for a medium-sized European bank) and error prone.

Conservative estimates indicate that OMi can save over $3 million annually in event processing per year for a company the size of HP. If I can get the real numbers next year, I will post them here.

To learn more about OMi, you can attend a Vivit webinar on July 21, 2009 or EMA webinar on July 28, 2009.

For Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel.

Innovation Week Part 1 - Operations Manager on UNIX 9.0

pspielvogel — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 20:45:00 GMT

Over the past few weeks, I have been involved in many conversations with both customers and colleagues about innovation. So, I wanted to highlight several new products that demonstrate how managing IT operations continues to evolve (contrary to some opinions).

First, I’ll start with the foundation - a consolidated event console that is the main tool for the operations bridge staff. HP released OMU 9.0 last month. As with all our event management consoles, this does not force our customers to rip and replace. OMU gives companies the ability to reduce the cost of managing their increasingly complex IT environments by consolidating events into a central console.

Some of the enhancements include:

A new Web-based Administration UI that allows multiple administrators to perform tasks in parallel, boosting productivity.
Enhanced agentless monitoring by incorporating SiteScope events into the Operations Manager console and service map, giving organizations alternate ways to broaden infrastructure coverage and reduce the cost of monitoring.
More flexibility in managing network events using NNMi.

Next week, I will post a podcast with 10 reasons to upgrade to OMU 9.0.

For Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel.

Free Webinar: HP Operations Manager i Software Deep Dive Presentation

pspielvogel — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 23:34:00 GMT

My colleague and consolidated event management expert Jon Haworth is the guest speaker at an upcoming Vivit webinar on Tuesday July 21 . Vivit is the independent HP Software users community.

Jon will talk about using an operations bridge effectively and how the latest advanced correlation and visualization technology can help you reduce downtime. His presentation will address:
• What are the major differences between HP Operations Manager and HP Operations Manager i software?
• How does Topology Based Event Correlation (TBEC) work?
• How does HP OMi fit into my existing Operations Manager environment?

There will be plenty of time for Jon to answer your questions at the end of the session.

For Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel.

Free Webinar: 5 Tips to Reduce Incident Resolution Costs

pspielvogel — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 18:22:00 GMT

On Tuesday July 28, I will be participating in an EMA webinar with researcher and Vice President Dennis Drogseth. The official title “What is New in the Not-so-New Area of Event Management: Five Tips to Reduce Incident Resolution Costs” is very telling. Many people believe that there is nothing new in managing IT infrastructure. The reality is that some of HP’s biggest R&D investments have been in this area.

Displaying disparate events may not be rocket science, but correlating events from different IT domains to determine which is the cause and which are the symptoms certainly is. This is exactly the premise of OMi, which uses topology-based event correlation (TBEC) to consolidate event storms into actionable information.

Here’s the webinar abstract:

Event management may not be the next new thing but it is quietly making dramatic advances that can save your company both time and money. These new approaches rely on understanding up-to-date service dependencies to accelerate problem resolution.

During the 45 minute webinar, we will answer the following questions.

Why should you reconsider your event and performance management strategy?
What is the impact of ITIL v3 and the concept of an operations bridge on your people, processes, and tools?
What innovations can help you more cost-effectively manage events?

We will also leave time at the end to address your questions.

For Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel.

OMi Webinar and Demo Now Available

pspielvogel — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 17:21:00 GMT

Every time I speak to customers about consolidated event and performance management, they want to know HP’s vision. What does the end-state look like? How do all the pieces fit together to save my company money? How does an Operation Bridge drive efficiencies? How does OMi extend my existing monitoring infrastructure? Now, we have a recorded webinar that answers these questions.

In 25 minutes, Jon Haworth, one of the Product Marketing Managers for Operations Center will explain how to:

increase the efficiency of managing IT Operations
cut costs while improving quality of business services
speed the time to problem resolution

In addition, Dave Trout shows a short demo of topology-based event correlation in action, including how to:

filter events and identify root causes
use system health indicators and KPIs to summarize availability and performance
visualize configuration items in the context of business services

See the OMi webinar now.

For Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel.

Controlling SiteScope from Operations Manager

pspielvogel — Thu, 28 May 2009 01:04:00 GMT

I have been getting many questions from both customers and colleagues about how Operations Manager and SiteScope work together. This is a very timely topic as we have some new capabilities connecting SiteScope and Operations Manager.

Since many readers will not be attending my talk about this topic at Software Universe, I’ll preview the information here. (Alex Ryals and I will be focusing on customer success stories in our presentation, so it is still very much worth attending, even if you already know the product integration part.)

The main role of Operations Manger is to serve as an enterprise event console or operations bridge, consolidating events from various domain managers for servers, storage, and networks, from both HP and other vendors. It accomplishes this using agents that run on each managed node, monitoring availability and performance. These agents send information to the Operations Manager server based on user-defined policies. The agents can also act autonomously, performing corrective actions without communicating with the server. This is very useful for minimizing network traffic, or even assuring operation if a connection between the server and managed node gets interrupted.

SiteScope complements this mission by monitoring servers and the applications running on them using agent-less technologies. SiteScope too monitors both HP and other hardware. In some cases, enterprises have some servers on which administrators either cannot or will not install agents. In other cases, customers will monitor servers using a combination of both agent-based and agent-less technology. One common example is for monitoring email environments running Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory and all the supporting infrastructure.

So, how do Operations Manager and SiteScope fit together?

SiteScope forwards its events into Operations Manager with the full details.
SiteScope targets also appear in the Operations Manger Service Map.
Operations Manager lets you control multiple SiteScope servers, including transferring configuration information from one SiteScope instance to another and synchronize settings between multiple SiteScope servers.

The ability to monitor your IT infrastructure using a combination of both agent-based and agent-less technology lets you simultaneously improve the quality of service and reduce IT management costs.

For HP Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel