Application Management : Application Management

RUM the Real User Experience Manager

Michael_Procopio — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 02:20:00 GMT

by Michael Procopio

RUM or Real User Monitor is a tool to monitor actual user traffic running over your network.

Its part of our EUM or end user management suite. In the area of EUM there are two primary ways to monitor 1/ synthetic, which is covered by BPM or Business Process Monitor and 2/ real user monitoring.

Each has its place in a monitoring strategy. BPM is good for making sure things are up 24x7, even when no users are using your applications. Real user monitoring can give you information down to the specific user.

When I first moved over to BAC group and heard about RUM, I was impressed. One of the things it can do is replicate a users web session click by click. This allows someone troubleshooting a problem to see exactly what happened and what the error message was the user saw – no guessing. (sensitive data like passwords and credit cards are filtered out in memory before writing to a disk). Further, if you do find a problem it can turn the session into a script that can be passed to the QA team to replicate the problem, if they are using LoadRunner.

How does it work? It starts by capturing packets as they go over the network. This is done by a RUM Probe, which is software that runs on a dedicated piece of x86 hardware (typically). The Probe passes the relevant data to the RUM engine.

The RUM engine stores the data and key performance metrics are aggregated before being sent up to BAC for reporting and alerting. For example, an alert might be round trip time for the Savings Deposit transaction is taking too long. Here are some of the reports RUM provides:

Global Statistics
Page Summary
Transaction Summary
End User Summary
End User Over Time
Server Over Time
Session Analyzer
TCP Application Summary
TCP Application Over Time
Event Summary
Business Process Distribution

Figure: Example RUM deployment configuration

Originally RUM strictly focused on HTTP/S traffic. But a while back support was expanded to due general tracking of TCP traffic, both streaming and non-streaming. In more recent releases additional upper level protocol analysis has been added. Beyond HTTP/S current support includes:

XML/SOAP
Siebel
WebSphere
MPLS

Related Items:

RUM webinar
HP Real User Monitor product page

For Business Availability Center, Michael Procopio

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Fighting or friendly, Problem Isolation and OMi

Michael_Procopio — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 20:27:00 GMT

by Michael Procopio

In the post Event Correlation OMi TBEC and Problem Isolation What's the Difference, my fellow blogger, Jon Haworth, discussed the differences between TBEC and Problem Isolation. To be consistent, I'll use the acronyms PI for Problem Isolation and TBEC to refer to OMi (Operations Manager i series) Topology Based Event Correlation.

Briefly, he mentioned that TBEC works “bottom up”, that is starting from the infrastructure, with events. PI works “top down”, that is, starting from an end user experience problem, primarily with metric (time series) data.

Jon did an excellent job describing TBEC; I’ll do my best on PI because like Jon I have a conscience to settle.

Problem Isolation is a tool to:

1. automate the steps a troubleshooter would go through

2. run additional tests that might uncover the problem

3. look at all metric/performance data from the end user experience monitoring and all the infrastructure it depends

4. find the infrastructure metric the most closely matches the end user problem using behavior learning and regression analysis techniques (developed by HP Labs)

5. bring additional data such as events, help/service desk tickets and changes to the troubleshooter

6. allow the troubleshooter to execute Run books to potentially solve the problem

Potentially the biggest difference in the underlying technology is that Problem Isolation does not require any correlation rules or thresholds to be set for it to do the regression analysis to point to the problem. Like TBEC, it does require that an application be modeled in a CMDB.

An example: Presume a situation with a typical composite application - web server, application server and database. No infrastructure thresholds were violated; therefore, there are no infrastructure alerts. Again, as mentioned in the previous post, end user monitoring (EUM) is the back stop. EUM alerts on slow end user performance, now what?

Here is what Problem Isolation does:

1. determines which infrastructure elements (ITIL configurations items or CIs) support the transaction

2. reruns the test(s) that caused the alert – this validates it is not transient problem

3. runs any additional tests defined for the CIs

4. collects Service Level Agreement information

5. collects all available infrastructure performance metrics (web server, application server, database server and operating systems for each) and compares them to the EUM data using behavior and regression analysis

Problem Isolation screen show performance correlation between end user response and SQL Server database locks

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6. determines and displays the most probable suspect CI and alternates

7. displays run books available for all infrastructure CIs for the PI user to run directly from the tool

8. allows the PI user to attach all the information to a service ticket, either existing or create a new one

Another key differentiator of OMi/TBEC and PI is the target user. There is such a wide variance in how organizations work that it is hard to name the role but let me do a brief description and I think will be able to determine the title in your organization.

There are some folks in the organization whose job is to take a quick look (typically < 10 minutes, in one organization I interviewed < 1 minute) at a situation and determine if they have explicit instructions on what to do via scripts or run books. When they have no instructions for a situation they pass it on to someone who has a bit more experience and does some free form triage.

This person might be able to fix the problem or may have to pass it on to a subject matter expert, for example if they believe it is an MS Exchange problem to an Exchange admin. It is this second person that Problem Isolation is targeted at. This is helping automate her job, reducing what might take tens of minutes to hours and performing it in seconds. If it ends up she can’t solve the problem it automatically provides full documentation of all information collected. That alone might take someone five minutes to write-up.

OMi’s target is the operations bridge console user. Ops Bridge operators tend to be lower skilled and face hundreds if not thousands of events per hour. Jon described how OMi helps them work smarter.

TBEC and Problem Isolation both work to find the root cause of an incident but in different ways. Much like a doctor might use an MRI or CAT scan to diagnose a patient based on what the situation is, TBEC and Problem Isolation are complementary tools each with unique capabilities.

Problem Isolation will not find problems in redundant infrastructure that OMi will. Conversely, OMi can’t help with EUM problems when no events are triggered, where Problem Isolation will.

We know this can be a confusing area. We welcome your questions to help us do a better job of describing the difference. But these two are definitely friendly.

For Business Availability Center, Michael Procopio

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Related Items

Law School Admission Council (LSAC): customer case study

Sanjay,Anne — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 21:06:00 GMT

LSAC is a nonprofit organization founded in 1947 to facilitate the law school admission process. Today, however, LSAC has evolved into a cutting-edge technology services provider: its newly updated software application, ACES2, provides data-hosting services and online, real-time admission processing to LSAC members, which number more than 200 law schools in the United States, Canada, and Australia.

Challenges:
A key turning point in LSAC’s thinking about business technology management was Hurricane Katrina, recalls Jerry Goldman, Director of Technical Services, LSAC. “The hurricane didn’t affect our business, but we saw how it did affect some of the law schools we serve,” Goldman says. “It opened our eyes to the importance of having a business continuity solution in place.” They stared on a journey to enable business continuity and IT Service Management (ITSM) best practices for Storage Area Network (SAN) management.

Approach:
In view of achieving their objective - LSAC began implementing HP Real User Monitor (RUM) software, part of the HP Business Availability Center solution. “RUM lets us better analyze our ACES2 services,” Jerry Goldman, Director of Technical Services, LSAC says “We can look at transaction volume, network performance, and application-response times, and analyze whether performance issues are related to application or network issues.” With this set of comprehensive and accurate data, LSAC can work constructively with its member law schools to optimize ACES2 performance. “We’ve committed to delivering platinum service levels to our clients,” Goldman says. “HP RUM software is a critical enabler in achieving that goal.”

Results:
Goldman says “HP Real User Monitor (RUM) lets us better analyze our ACES2 services”. This solution has helped in improving the ability to deliver platinum-level services to clients, reduced risk of data loss, and reduced risk that outage will impact on operations.

For the full story please visit: LSAC boosts service with technology

Do composite applications really need to be managed?

Sanjay,Anne — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 21:04:00 GMT

YES - large-scale applications such as SAP and Oracle Siebel support core business functions. Many build and implement integrations between SAP systems and non-SAP applications such as Seibel using SAP NetWeaver, SOA and/or other middleware components to support complex business processes. If they fail, business goals are in jeopardy. These complex applications are woven into heterogeneous networks, and every change or fix ripples through multiple systems and applications.

The focus of IT has been on managing systems, efficiently and at low cost. In today’s environment, this systems orientation results in disconnected monitoring data that does nothing to indicate the health of overall business services, making end-user complaints the first indication that service levels aren’t being met. It also makes it extremely difficult to assign problems to the team that can fix them most quickly.

HP Business Availability Center for SAP applications is a comprehensive solution to proactively manage SAP & non-SAP environments in a production environment, so that IT is able to best leverage its resources and respond faster to SAP incidents, thus increasing the value its SAP applications deliver to the business.

We have a very exciting flash demo (total run time 3:34) highlighting our approach to helping our customers better manage their business services and complex IT landscapes.

Check it out:

https://h30406.www3.hp.com/campaigns/2009/demo/bsm_sap/index.html

You can read more details on the solution here: http://h20229.www2.hp.com/partner/protected/assets/pdf/4AA1-9302ENW.pdf

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Webinar - "The Cloud and Your Applications: What is the Impact on Application Management"

Michael_Procopio — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 22:10:00 GMT

Date: Thursday, July 30, 2009

Time: 11 am Pacific / 2 pm Eastern / 7:00 pm GMT Daylight Time

Are your applications doing what they are supposed to be doing? Cloud computing, tiered applications, Software as a Service (SaaS) – all add complexity and make that question more difficult to answer.

Customers are finding more business service problems. The result: customer satisfaction and retention is at risk. The good news is that despite declining budgets, you can reduce downtime, increase service levels, and improve user experience quality.

Hear EMA Research Director Julie Craig share the early results of a recent market research survey. You’ll also hear from HP Product Marketing Manager Amy Feldman, who will share customer best practices and success stories.

HP Business Availability Center 8.02 What's New

Michael_Procopio — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 01:17:00 GMT

by Michael Procopio

BAC 8.02 is now generally available. Here are the highlights of what's new. There are also a number of defect fixes in this release.

Netuitive integration:
Enables integrating Netuitive alarms into Dashboard
System Availability Management (SAM) enhancement:
SAM administration now displays SAM points in use, enabling more effective management of SiteScope license points by increasing visibility into point consumption
Apache Web server upgrade:
Upgrade of Apache Web server to version 2.2.11 keeps Business Availability Center current with the latest industry release and compliant with security requirements
End User Management (EUM) enhancements, including:
Real User Monitor (RUM): Additional OS support for RUM probe (Windows 2003 and RHE5 64 bit); Improved SSL traffic handling for special environments; Seven protocol decoder packs for slow requests: MSSQL, LDAP, MySQL, IMAP, POP3, SMTP, FTP; Improved system health; Keystore management improvements
Business Process Monitor (BPM): Support for VuGen 9.5; BPM support for Windows Vista; New MSI installation replaces InstallShield on Windows platforms; New Solaris packaging (SPARC) installation replaces InstallShield on Solaris platforms
Business Process Insight enhancement:
Implemented a way to link sub-processes to parent processes.
Interactive integration documentation for Business Availability Center-Service Manager/Service Center integration:
New interactive document that enables selecting specific integration parameters and viewing only the documentation relevant for the integration specified

For the Business Availability Center, Michael Procopio

Business and IT closer but still not on the same page

Michael_Procopio — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 20:51:00 GMT

by Michael Procopio

Network World editor Denise Dubie assessed a report by the analyst firm Aberdeen Group in her recent article Application performance management: Keeping an eye on the end-user prize. Her comments mirrored many of those I have spoken with recently who have said their top priorities this are year are revenue and removing any distractions from making revenue.

What was pleasant to see was data showing the end user performance is still important. More frustrating to see was that business and IT managers still differ in their priority of what needs to be measured, according to the article. As you might guess, business folks are more concerned with business processes while IT folks are more concerned with the infrastructure. One-step down from that the article covers the specifics of how each group prioritized how to do application performance monitoring.

Both end user and infrastructure monitoring are critical. Recently, at HP Software Universe in a talk I gave with a customer he showed this picture.

This does a good job of making the point that end user monitoring is critical. Since there are multiple pieces to the IT part of the puzzle, cumulative effect is important.

This customer said when he took his job there was a Severity 1 (highest priority) problem meeting everyday with typically greater than 10 "Sev 1" items. Today he has no meetings and approximately one Sev 1 per week.

How did he get here, monitoring the infrastructure. He said when they tracked down the source of the problem they put in a new infrastructure monitor for the item that failed, so he got early warning. But even in his current state he commented that end user monitoring is important because things change, whether it is a new version of the application or a change in the infrastructure that create a situation where something can go wrong that isn't currently being monitored.

For the Business Availability Center, Michael Procopio

Not true, IBM

adsey007 — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 09:47:00 GMT

By Mike Shaw

IBM recently made some incorrect claims on their web site about HP's management products. The network side of those claims was handled on our network management blog. I wanted to handle the application management claims here.

J2EE Diagnostics Claims

IBM claimed that HP’s BAC solution (our solution for application management) cannot provide drill down into J2EE applications. This is not true:

HP Diagnostics software for J2EE provides a top-down, end-to-end lifecycle approach for seamlessly monitoring, triaging and diagnosing critical problems with J2EE and Java applications – in both pre-production and production environments.
HP Diagnostics for J2EE starts with the end-user (real and synthetic), then drills down into application components, systems layers and back-end tiers – helping you rapidly resolve the problems that have the greatest business impact
HP Diagnostics will monitor any java application, and will discover and monitor the relationship between applications (java and .net)

Application and infrastructure data integration claims

IBM further claimed that HP’s BAC does not have the capability to correlate application data to infrastructure data. This is not true. Our integration between the application and the infrastructure layers is two-way - from bottom-up and from top-down.

Bottom-up:
- You can see how an event impacts business services above by looking upwards thru the service topology held in HP's CMDB. The services you can look up to may be applications, they may be a user experience (e.g. the online checkin user experience) or they may be steps in a business process. And, you can see what SLAs are resting on the impacted services and those SLAs' closeness to jeopardy.
- This service topology information can be discovered using a number of different methods, all under the overall control of the dynamic discovery manager. For example, if you have OperationsCenter's Smart Plug-ins (SPI), many of these do discovery of their domains and this is now fed into the CMDB. Or, if you are doing agentless monitoring (less expensive to buy and manage, but not the same level of fidelity and action control as with agents - it's horses for courses), this will also discover the hierarchies under the items it's monitoring. And if you have NNMi, our network management product, it will put its end-point discovery into CMDB. If you want everything discovered from business service on down, you can use our advanced discovery technology. As I said earlier, ourdiscovery manager is the overall controller, orchestrating the other discovery methods like SPIs and NNMi should you choose to use them
- The new OMi "TBEC" (topology-based event correlation) technology is able to take an event stream, map the events to services, and then group events related by services in the service topology and thus infer which are causal events (events we need to take action on) and which are symptomatic events (events that are as a consequence of a causal event and thus don't need to be actioned). Included in the symptomatic events may well be an event from our user experience or business transaction monitoring technology. Imagine a DB is having a performance problem. This, in turn, causes a user application to slow. The real user monitor notices this an raises an event. The OMi TBEC will notice both events, realize they are related in the service topology, and infer that the DB problem is the cause and the real user monitor event is a symptom. Is this new? No - the technology was invented by Bell Labs and has been in our NNMi network management product for about 18 months now.
- Summary: bottom-up we have two links up to the application / business service layer. The first is for exntensive "service impact analysis" and the second is for TBEC - for analysis so you just get to see the actionable events you need to do something about.

Top-down
- Our performance triage technology takes performance and event information from dependent services (those services the business service having a performance problem rest on). It uses an HP Labs' patented algorithm to infer causal relationships between infrastructure service performance and fault and the business service's performance. So what? This allows you to know which area is causing the performance problem. Useful given that the average performance problem goes thru 6 to 8 groups before being solved! By the way, the event stream doesn't have to come from Operations Center. We can, should you still have it having not swallowed the rip'n'replace mega-pain yet, take events from Tivoli (or any other event management system).
- The performance triage module doesn't just look at performance and event streams. It looks at recent changes in the dependent services as determined by the discovery monitor (e.g. Server XYZ has had 4gig of memory ripped out). I'm sure you've heard the stat that if a change has a occurred, there's an 80% chance it's the cause of the problem.
- And, as of last November, the performance triage module also considers the compliance state of the dependent services. How does it do this? The ex-OpsWare Server Automation product now puts its discovered information into the CMDB too, and compliance state is one of the things it discovers. I'm sure there's a stat on how non-compliant systems screw up business services above :-)

And finally, something we are very proud of, and something that people really like - the 360 degree view. Take a service, any service. For that service, you can see the following.....
- The performance of the service versus its KPIs. Now and over time.
- What services are above it
- What user experiences are resting on it and what their state is
- The business processes resting on it and the throughput of those services (i.e. Are they slowing down because of this service?)
- The SLAs resting above this service their closeness to jeopardy
- The status of the services this service is resting on
- The change state of services at and below this service
- The compliance state of services at and below this service
- The planned changes for this service
- What the service desk knows about this service in terms of incidents - "do we get an incident on this every Monday at this time?"

OK. I've gone to town on this response a little bit. But to HP Software saying we can't correlation application data to infrastructure is like telling Eugene Bolt he can't run!

Rip out Operations Center and replace it with NetCool

Finally, in this piece of their web site, IBM was suggesting people move from Operations Manager to NetCool. As you probably know, the migration from Tivoli to NetCool is a rip'n'replace. Operations Manager has never done this to our customer base. As a recent and concrete example, the new OMi functionality with its ability to do topology-based (i.e. no writing of event correlation rules) event correlation to reduce event streams to actionable events is an ADD-ON to existing Operations Center installations. No rip, no replace.

If however, you have a predilection for rippin' and replacin', then please do consider the move from Operations Center to NetCool. Personally, I'd add OMi instead because I'd want the topology based event correlation and easy life - but maybe that's just me!

HP Software Universe - Mainstage Robin Purohit

Michael_Procopio — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 01:19:00 GMT

After a break Mainstage split into a Business Intelligence session and a Business Technology Optimization (BTO) session, I went to the later hosted by Robin Purohit, vice president and general manger, Software Products, HP Software & Solutions

Here are some bits I found interesting:

There are 15M virtual servers now and it is expected to double in 2 years.
Three key areas of change IT will see are: virtualization, SaaS and Web 2.0.
Web 2.0 screws up a lot in management, HP is building Web 2.0 compatibility into BTO tools.
Dataprotector, monitoring tools and mapping tools are including or working to include virtualization capability.
Service Manager and Asset Manager are now available as SaaS.
35% of flash apps violate Adobe best practices. HP released a testing tool which you can download for free called SWFScan. The same technology is built into some of HP’s BTO products. Customers can also do a free trial of our scanning SaaS.
One customer cut $5M in costs just in automating incidents with HP Operations Orchestration.
HP Software recently announced a suite of software for operations of Blackberry implementations. See HP and RIM Announce Strategic Alliance to Mobilize Business on BlackBerry for more details.
HP Software is publishing configuration management best practices later this month.
Brian Byun VP Global Alliances from VMware came on stage and announced announced an expanded partnership with HP to jointly develop software to manage VMware hypervisor technology. Denise Dubie at Network World wrote HP, VMware team to manage virtual servers.

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

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

HPSU09 – show logistics and other information

HPSoftwareCTO

informationCTO

HPSoftware

BTOCMO – HP BTO Chief Marketing Officer

For HP BSM, Michael Procopio

HP Software Universe - day 1

Michael_Procopio — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 02:11:00 GMT

by Michael Procopio

Today was the first day of Software Universe. I had customer meetings all day today. Here are some interesting items from my conversations.

Most said budgets were down in 2009 and will be flat to down in 2010. But a few who were related to government stimulus said theirs will be up.
Co-sourcing and outsourcing continue as ways to reduce costs
A few were focusing on asset management with the express purpose of getting rid of things in the environment they don’t need anymore. They know they are out there but they need to find them first.
Most customers I spoke to said they keep aggregated performance data for 2 years the range was 18 months to 5 years.
There was an interesting discussion about the definition of a business service versus an IT service. The point being made was a business service by definition involves more than IT. While I agree this is a good point, I think the IT industry has focused on business service as a way to say - “I’m thinking about this IT service in the context the business thinks about it not just from my own IT based perspective”
A number of customers have or are about to implement NNMi. If this is something you are interested in check out the NNMi Portal
Many customers are moving to virtualized environment highest percentage I heard was 70%. Another customer forces all internal developers to deliver software as a virtual image.
Another topic was how to monitor out tasked items. For example, some part of what you offer is delivered by a third party - how do you make sure they are living up to your standards. Two methods I heard were 1/ use HP Business Process Monitor 2/ get the 3rd party to send you alerts from their monitoring system.
On the question does your manager of managers send back data to sync the original tools 1 did, 1 didn’t. For the one who did it was part of a closed loop process.
- Monitor tool finds problem send alert to MOM (Manager of managers).
- MOM send event ID to monitoring tool
- Subject matter expert uses monitoring tools to diagnose problem
- Once diagnosed updates monitoring tool which updates MOM

A very productive day for me. I hope some of this is useful information to you.

For additional coverage my blogger buddy Pete Spielvogel is also here and beat me to the first post. You can read his posts at the ITOps Blog.

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

HPITOps – Covers BSM, Operations and Network Management

HPSU09 – show logistics and other information

HPSoftwareCTO

informationCTO

HPSoftware

BTOCMO – HP BTO Chief Marketing Officer

For HP BSM, Michael Procopio

How long between the problem and the first phone call?

adsey007 — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 13:01:00 GMT

By Mike Shaw, BSM Product Marketing

Last year, we did a series of in depth interviews with customers (28 of them, actually). As part of these interviews, we asked if people did proactive user experience monitoring - either using synthetic scripting technology to pretend to be a user, or using a probe on the network to look at the data going to the users' screens and monitoring the response time.

About half the respondents said they did. This ties in with a recent Aberdeen study that found 57% of companies didn't do user experience monitoring.

So, we asked on IT manager who didn't do user experience monitoring, why had he not invested in this technology. "Because we respond very quickly when the first customer rings in", was his response.

And since that day, I've been on a quest to get a magic number. How many minutes, on average,elapses between a business service giving a poor user experience and the first customer calling in. I have only three data points, but no definitive study. The average seems to be about 30 to 45 minutes.

To get another angle, whenever I present to a friendly audience, I'll ask them how often they have called a company when they have had problems with a user interface (e.g. on an ordering web site). Of the 160 people I've asked, just two had actually picked up the phone, and in both situations, it's been something critical like sorting out a mobile/cell phone bill.

I have another data point. A study by Corporate Executive Board in 2004 found that the average cost to a company of down-time is $1.3m per hour. That's $27,000 per minute.

So, we have 30 to 45 minutes (very rough estimate). We have $27,000 per minute. Being conservative (and very rough), we have a cost of 30 minutes X $27,000 or $81,000 per poor user experience problem.

Do you have any data on the average time between a poor user experience situation starting and the first customer calling in? If you do, could you please post a comment with the data - it amazes me that such data is not readily available "out there".

BSM Evolution: Small Enterprise Example

Michael_Procopio — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 04:31:00 GMT

My previous BSM evolution postings focused on mega-corporations and large IT organizations with a myriad of personas. In this post, I will contrast the experience of a relatively small IT shop of roughly 30 full time IT operations personnel.

Back when the economy was cooking along, an up and coming commercial construction company grew right out of their business model. Historically, they utilized a decentralized model, setting up and staffing a stand-alone onsite operation for each new project. This model was excellent at delivering customized project support, but lacked scalability and leverage; with remote site spin-up slow and error prone.

From an IT perspective, the CIO realized they needed to, in his words, "Consolidate and professionalize the IT operations", with the following goals:

1. Improve quality of service and experience for worksite users & applications
2. Contain IT costs and efficiently scale current IT personnel to meet growth
3. Improve speed, accuracy, and agility of spinning up new project worksites

Key Personas:

CIO

Many years of commercial construction experience
Personally drove IT consolidation / professionalization strategy and roadmap
Directly engaged in evaluating and selecting the solution vendor/consultant

VP of IT

"Co-pilot" for CIO on strategy, drove project deployment and vendor engagement

Subject Matter Experts (SME)

One for performance and availability tools / architecture
One for service management process workflow and automation (helpdesk)

Two Key Parallel Evolution Paths:

Path A: Performance, availability, and quality of experience monitoring

Step 1: -Deployed synthetic end-user / application monitors, agentless remote site infrastructure monitoring, and general WAN/LAN management

-Basic service experience reporting, and per-site performance dashboards

Step 2: -Enterprise infrastructure fault/performance (agent based system, OS, DB)

-Central "IT Command Center" event console with trouble ticket integration

Step 3: -In-depth application management modules (exchange, SAP)

-Advanced network services (route analytics, performance)

Path B: Service management process workflow and automation

Step 1: -Single call/request center organization established

-Incident management (utilized pre-packed ITIL module)

Step 2: -Knowledge management process, analytics and automation modules

Step 3: -Configuration and change management process/automation

-Service Level Management definition and basic reporting

An Uncommon Sequence of Evolution Steps

Notice the interesting order of the steps. The CIO dictated that the performance monitoring path start with remote site end-user / application experience monitoring. The original roadmap proposed by the system integrator recommended starting with basic data center tools, advancing through central event console, then application and database management, and finally end user experience. This is a traditional evolution path, but the CIO was adamant that, "what happens at the remote work-sites IS the business". So, he wanted an immediate awareness of remote site experience to drive the design of every step in the roadmap.

There was a similar "cultural" direction from the CIO on the service management workflow path. Again, the CIO insisted that Knowledge management be moved up in the evolution before configuration, change, and service level management. Typically, significant knowledge management execution is viewed as "icing on the cake" by most organizations, and only implemented after all the other core ITIL processes.

This CIO believed that analyzing and formalizing knowledge learned from successes and failures of spinning-up remote sites and dealing with issues was the best early investment. This approach immediately became part of the standard IT culture, and played a significant role in guiding change and configuration management process definition.

The CIO's Project-Based perspective

This CIO is indeed very ITIL savvy, but I think living and breathing the commercial construction business had a significant impact on his choice of system integrators. During the bidding process for the ITSM/BSM contract, it came down to three competitors in a direct "shoot-out". System integrator number one and two brought product and ITIL experts to the shoot-out, concentrated very heavily on features and functions, and gave a fixed-price bid of 200 deployment days.

System integrator number three brought a project manager to the shoot-out, and changed 75% of the discussion to, "here is how we will navigate the project and be successful". Can you guess who won? It shouldn't be news to anyone that a CIO's background alters the decision criteria, or the roadmap vision.... But it is always interesting to observe it in action. Maybe I will write a post about that someday

Conclusion

This IT organization is relatively small, so the decision making process and personas are greatly simplified compared with the large corporations previously analyzed. Despite the CIO's unique influence on approach and deployment sequence, in the end, the same fundamental truths of BSM/ITM evolution apply.... Just on a different scale, agility and timeframe.

Bryan Dean - BSM Research

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BSM Evolution: The CIO/Ops Perception Gap

adsey007 — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 10:31:00 GMT

There are many potential culprits for why IT organizations struggle to make substantive progress in evolving their ITSM/BSM effectiveness. A customer research project we did a few years ago offered an interesting insight into one particular issue that I rarely see the industry address. The research showed that most CIO’s simply had a different perception – when compared to their IT operations managers- of their IT organization’s fundamental service delivery maturity and capability. This seemingly benign situation often proved to be a powerful success inhibitor.

The Gap:

A substantial sample size of international, Global 2000 enterprise IT executives participated in the study. When asked to prioritize investment priorities on a broad range of IT capabilities, we saw a definite gap. IT Operations managers consistently ranked, “Investing to improve general IT service support and production IT operations” in their top 1 or 2 priorities, where CIO’s ranked this same capability much lower as a priority 6 or 7.

The Perception:

When pressed further, CIO’s believed that the IT service management basics of process and technology were already successfully completed, and the CIO’s had mentally moved on to other priorities such as rolling out new applications, IT financial management, or project and portfolio management.

Most of the CIO’s in the study could clearly recall spending thousands of dollars sending IT personnel to ITIL education, and thousands more purchasing helpdesk, network, and system management software. Apparently, these CIO’s thought of their investment in service operations as a onetime project, rather than an ongoing journey that requires multiple years of investment, evolution, reevaluation, and continuous improvement.

IT operations managers –on the other hand- clearly had a different view of the world. They were generally pleased with the initial progress from the service operations investments, but realized they were far from the desired end state. The Ops managers could plainly see the need to get proactive, to execute advanced IT processes and more sophisticated management tools, but could not drain the proverbial swamp while fighting off the alligators.

The Trap:

We probed deeper in the research, diligently questioning the IT operations managers on why they didn’t dispel the CIO’s inaccurate perception. In order to secure the substantial budget, these Ops managers had fallen into the trap of over-promising the initial service management project’s end-state, ROI and time to value. (I wouldn’t be surprised if they had been helped along by the process consultants and software management vendors!)

These Ops managers saw it as “a personal failure” to re-approach the CIO and ask for additional budget to continue improving the IT fundamentals. Worse yet, they had to continually reinforce the benefits from the original investment so the CIO didn’t think they had wasted the money. So, the IT operations staff enjoyed the result of reactively working nights and weekends to meet business’ expectations, and make sure everyone kept their jobs. Meanwhile, the CIO’s slept well at night thinking, “Hey, we are doing a pretty darn good job”, but faced the next day asking, “Why are my people burnt out?” A vicious cycle.

Recommendation through Observation:

I’m not wild about making recommendations since I merely research this stuff… not actually perform hands-on implementation. Instead, I will offer some observations of best practices from companies who appear to be breaking through on BSM, lowering costs, raising efficiency and improving IT quality of service.

Focus on Fundamentals: It is boring and basic, but absolutely critical to continually look for ways to improve the foundational service management elements of event, incident, problem, change, and configuration management. Successful IT organizations naturally assume that if they implemented these core processes more than 3 years ago, they likely need to update both technology and process. If FIFA World Cup Football clubs and Major League Baseball teams revisit their fundamental skills each and every year, why wouldn’t IT?

Assume a Journey: IT leaders who develop a step-wise, modular path of realistic projects that deliver a defined ROI at each step have the best track record of securing ongoing funding from the business. The danger here is defining modular steps that are so disconnected and silo’d, that IT never progresses toward an integrated BSM/ITSM process and technology architecture. This balance continues to be one of the most difficult to manage.

Empowered VP of IT Operations: The advantages of a CIO empowering a VP of IT operations and holding them accountable for end-to-end business service has been discussed in previous posts. The practice of having a strong VP of operations who has executive focus on service operations and continual service improvement, while having end-to-end service performance responsibility does appear to be a growing trend and success factor.

Focus on the Applications: In the same research study that showed the perception gap on, “Investing to improve general IT service support and production IT operations”, there was consistent agreement on, “Investing to improve business critical application performance and availability”. The CIO’s, Ops Managers and Business Relationship managers all ranked this capability as a top 1 or 2 priority.

Successful BSM implementations focus on the fundamentals of process and infrastructure management, but do so from a business service, or an application perspective. This approach not only enables an advantageous budget discussion with the business, but it also hones the scope and execution of projects.

It is difficult to assess the relative impact of this CIO/IT Ops perception gap, considering the wide variety of challenges that IT faces. But hopefully, this post gives you something to consider when assessing your own IT organization’s situation and evolution.

Let us know where your organization fits – please take our two question survey (two demographics questions also). We’ll publish the results on the blog.

Describe the perception of your IT's fundamental service delivery process
How often does your IT organization significantly evaluate and invest to update your fundamental IT process

Click Here to take survey

Bryan Dean – BSM Research

Monitoring your cloud computing as easy as calling an airport shuttle

Michael_Procopio — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 05:15:00 GMT

HP made an announcement about new cloud computing management capabilities today: HP Unveils "Cloud Assure" to Drive Business Adoption.

HP currently offers Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) for individual management applications such as HP Business Availability Center (BAC) and HP Service Manager primarily for intranet and extranet applications.

HP Cloud Assure helps customers validate:

Security – by scanning networks, operating systems, middleware layers and web applications. It also performs automated penetration testing to identify potential vulnerabilities. This provides customers with an accurate security-risk picture of cloud services to ensure that provider and consumer data are safe from unauthorized access.
Performance – by making sure cloud services meet end-user bandwidth and connectivity requirements and provide insight into end-user experiences. This helps validate that service-level agreements are being met and can improve service quality, end-user satisfaction and loyalty with the cloud service.
Availability – by monitoring cloud-based applications to isolate potential problems and identify root causes with end-user environments and business processes and to analyze performance issues. This allows for increased visibility, service uptime and performance.

HP Cloud Assure provides control over the three types of cloud service environments:

For Infrastructure as a Service, it helps ensure sufficient bandwidth ability and validates appropriate levels of network, operating system and middleware security to prevent intrusion and denial-of-service attacks.
For Platform as a Service, it helps ensure customers who build applications using a cloud platform are able to test and verify that they have securely and effectively built applications that can scale and meet the business needs.
For Software as a Service, it monitors end-user service levels on the cloud applications, loads tests from a business process perspective and tests for security penetration.

A diagram showing the differences in the services is at Cloud Computing Basics.

In the end it doesn't matter where the service is; you need to be sure it is available and performing to expectations. Cloud Assure provides the capability in a way that is very agile. You say "I need this service monitored" and it is monitored. Its just like calling for an airport shuttle -- you call, they show up.

For Business Availability Center Michael Procopio, product manager HP Problem Isolation.

OpEx versus CapEx

adsey007 — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 08:06:00 GMT

Forrester just posted on how the recession is hitting capital budgets (CapEx) and that you should consider using operating expenses (OpEx) to purchase software (http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=lcUS21765009).

About 18 months ago, we introduced one year term licenses on the Business Availability Center (application and business transaction management) software so that it is more likely to fit within OpEx budgets.

Mike Shaw.