Application Management : IT operations

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

Announcing a New BSM Solution Offering for Virtualization

Michael_Procopio — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 18:02:00 GMT

by Michael Procopio

The new offerings include enhancements to HP Server Automation, HP Client Automation, HP Storage Essentials, HP Network Automation, and HP Operations Manager software.

According to a recent report from Gartner⁽¹⁾, "Virtualization’s impact on the overall IT industry has been dramatic, and virtualization will continue to be the leading catalyst for infrastructure and operations software change through 2013. Organizations are looking at ways to cut costs, better utilize assets, and reduce implementation and management time and complexity."

Although virtualization is often adopted to help reduce capital expenditures, it can trigger increased management expenses and lead to more pronounced organizational silos. The new HP offerings bridge all the physical and virtual data center silos through management and automation. This reduces complexity and ultimately management costs.

"HP business service automation software helps us eliminate manual, error-prone tasks by automating server lifecycle management, including provisioning multiple operating systems, software installation, deployment of patches, configuration management and audits," said Ron Cotten, senior manager IT OSS Engineering, Level 3 Communications, a leading international provider of voice, video, and data communications services. "With HP Server Automation, we are able to patch over 1800 servers in 24 hours, which helps us reduce scheduled downtime."

The updated HP business service offerings help you:

· Increase administrator effectiveness with HP Operations Manager for virtualization by monitoring the availability and performance of all virtual and physical assets through a common dashboard.

· Reduce the risk of downtime with HP Network Automation, which for the first time gives the network administrator control of the VMware vSwitch in addition to the physical network environments.

· Provision the right amount of storage to keep applications performing properly without overspending on excess storage with HP Server Automation, the first solution in the industry that gives server administrators this capability.

· Reduce problem resolution times with HP Storage Essentials Performance Edition by quickly identifying, troubleshooting and reporting performance metric related trends in physical and virtual environments.

“To make virtualization cost effective, customers must minimize operating expenses and have seamless management of infrastructure silos,” said Erik Frieberg, vice president of Product Marketing, Software & Solutions, HP. “Our newly enhanced HP business service offerings help customers manage all aspects of the physical and virtual application infrastructure to unlock the true promise of virtualization.”

HP Software Professional Services provides solution consulting services to accelerate the value of business service automation and business service management software investments.

HP Server Automation, HP Client Automation, HP Storage Essentials and HP Network Automation are available now. HP Operations Manager Virtualization Smart Plug-In will be available next month.

HP Software Universe – Mainstage Andy Isherwood

Michael_Procopio — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 03:57:00 GMT

Andy Isherwood VP, Support & Services kicked off Mainstage.

There are four key areas shown in the picture above. HP announced this week its IT Financial Management offering. Andy likened ITFM to an ERP system for IT. Information Management magazine wrote an article on HP ITFM.

HP has had offerings in IT Performance Analytics and IT Resource Optimization for awhile. HP Cloud Assure was announced was announced in May 2009, HP Unveils “Cloud Assure” to Drive Business Adoption of Cloud Services

Some key points from his opening remarks:

Prepare for coming out of the recession when cutting costs and innovating.
Best in class means being good at all four - aligning to the business, taking out costs, increasing efficiency and consolidation.
Jetblue, Altec and T-Mobile were the winners of the HP Software Award of Excellence.
As an example of the quick ROI companies can get, Altec produced 10% application downtime reduction, 20% faster response time, 15% increase in customer satisfaction and a 300% improve application transaction time in 6 months.
Last year we were HP Software, this year HP Software and Solutions. This was the combining HP Software with HP Consulting and Integration. The net result increased our delivery options. In addition to offering software for in-house use, HP now has EDS, SaaS and continues with it Partners
HP SaaS business is seven years old this year and has 650 customers.

You can read other coverage of HP Software Universe in the ITOpsBlog. There are a variety of Twitter accounts you can follow:

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

HPSU09 – show logistics and other information

HPSoftwareCTO

informationCTO

HPSoftware

BTOCMO – HP BTO Chief Marketing Officer

as well as the Twitter hashtag #HPSU09

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

BSM at HP Software Universe

Michael_Procopio — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 04:44:00 GMT

by Michael Procopio

HP Software Universe is next week, 16-18 June, in Las Vegas. Business Service Management (BSM) will be well represented.

In the Business Transaction Management area there are 13 sessions. Most of them are lead by customers. The sessions are listed below.

In the Network Management track Aruna Ravichandran is speaking in three sessions, you can see information on those at her post HPSoftware Universe/HP Technology Forum (HPTF) - Network Management sessions. The rest of the track is listed in the post Network Management at HP Software Universe.

Amy Feldman, Dennis Corning and Peter Spielvogel the ITOps bloggers has covered a number of the sessions in the Consolidated event and performance management. Here are a list of the posts:

Business Transaction Management Track

Session ID	Title	Presenting company
1114	Confessions of a product manager: get the real scoop on the latest HP Business Availability Center	HP
1165	The MITRE Corporation: higher operational effectiveness at lower cost through automated alert management	MITRE Corporation, AlarmPoint
1233	Key decisions and practical techniques in configuring business transaction management
1236	Real User Management: know how your TCP/IP applications perform for your users	HP
1267	Using HP Business Availability Center to analyze and triage application and infrastructure anomalies and problems	BCBS of Florida

1303	Sodexo: partnering with HP Software-as-a-Service to ensure critical e-business application performance and availability	Sodexo

1342	Wrigley: HP Business Availability Center deployed on Software-as-a-Service yields big improvements in IT monitoring without increasing staff	Wrigley


1360	Lockheed Martin: deploying HP Business Availability Center in a virtual environment and forwarding alerts through an iPhone Twitter-based application	Lockheed Martin


1363	DIRECTV: an HP Business Availability Center and HP operations implementation	DIRECTV
1401	Liberty Life: taking the fast track to implementing HP Business Availability Center and gaining business value in 6 months	Liberty Life
1425	Sentara Healthcare: improving the availability of critical business services and fixing IT problems before they impact customers	Sentara Healthcare
1436	Lockheed Martin: practical advice for configuring and operating HP End User Management solutions	Lockheed Martin
1452	Vale: deploying HP Business Availability Center solutions to monitor applications and systems and to help ensure availability and performance	Vale

You can get the details of all the BSM sessions at the HP Software Universe Track Session Catalog.

I hope to see you there, but if you can’t make it we will be doing follow-up posts. You can also follow on Twitter, the hashtag is #HPSU09. There are already a number of Tweets and the show hasn’t started yet. The Twitter account for the show is HPSU09, if you’d like to follow us. Or visit the HP Software Universe Facebook page.

For the Business Availability Center, Michael Procopio

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

BSM Evolution Paths: Auto Industry Sample

adsey007 — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 10:24:00 GMT

In the last post, Bryan Dean, our research expert in the BSM team, outlined the different ways in which customer evolve towards Business Service Management. In the next few posts, Bryan will give an example of each of the different types of evolution. Over to you Bryan ....
_______About three years ago, the business division managers of a multinational automobile manufacturing company planned a bold transformation of their distribution network to leapfrog the competition. They enthusiastically laid out a roadmap for business process innovation and aggressive customer/dealer satisfaction initiatives.

Only one real problem; the CIO knew that building, rolling-out, and operating the underlying IT for this future business vision exceeded their current capabilities. The CIO eventually had to raise the red flag and explain to the executive committee why IT was the bottleneck. Ouch, not a good day.

In the previous post BSM Evolution Paths: Samples and Observations, we talked about five common evolution paths, the organizational and persona dynamics of an Automated BSM/ITSM journey. In this post we will overview a specific example.

To be fair, the CIO spent years driving significant investment in process, tools and the organization. Let’s look at a subset of key personas and BSM/ITSM foundation:

Director of Infrastructure (reporting to the VP Global IT Ops):

Enterprise-class central event/performance platform and console
WAN/LAN network management platform
Basic, component level performance and availability reporting
Dozens of vendor-specific configuration and admin tools

Director of Service Management (reporting to the VP Global IT Ops):

Global, consolidated helpdesk/service desk
Well defined and automated incident process; basic level problem, configuration, and a manual change process

Director of Applications (development, test & level 3 support. Reports to business divisions):

Suite of pre-production stress-test quality and performance tools
End-user and application performance/diagnostic tools (test environment)

The Key Evolution Steps

Step 1: CIO empowers and holds the VP of Global IT Operations (VPITops) accountable for end-to-end business service responsibility. Imagine the panic on his face! VPITops launches key lieutenants on quick gap analysis.

Step 2: The VPITops needed a quick win. He believed that visually demonstrating and reporting performance and availability from a business service perspective -versus an infrastructure perspective- would be a catalyst for driving “aligned” IT behavior. The current network and infrastructure products didn’t have this capability, so VPITops leveraged the tools already proven by the application test and level 3 support team.

VPITops established a new team within Operations (parallel to infrastructure event management) to own and run the end-to-end business service visibility/accountability solution. Integration was established between the two teams and tools.

Step 3a: VPITops took his new business service visibility/accountability tool (in dashboard/report form) to key business division managers, and established a business relationship management function. This converted the conversation from anecdotal complaints, to measurable service levels. The CIO had tangible proof of progress.

Step 3b: While engineering step 2, the Tools and Process Architect realized they needed a better means of discovering and maintaining the IT/Business service models. Their infrastructure environment was shared, complex and dynamic enough that static service models were not effective, so they brought in an application dependency mapping technology. This success spawned a serendipitous benefit to another team in step 4a.

Step 4a: The application quality/test and release team realized the service model could be utilized in the service transition process. They previously had several very painful episodes of moving complex applications from test into production. With an accurate, up to date service model of the production environment they could better identify dependency issues before roll-out. Speed and accuracy... Happy CIO.

Step 4b: The Director of Service Management and the architect evaluated how to federate the data between the application dependency mapping service model and the CI configuration data in the helpdesk. The software vendor provided a federation / reconciliation adaptor, so the helpdesk was able to leverage the CI relationships and operate off a “single version of the truth” (sounds eerily like an ITIL V3 CMS!).

Near Term Roadmap

· Automate change/configuration workflow and provisioning

· Upgrade/replace enterprise event and performance console to leverage service model for root cause analysis and business impact assessment

· Apply business service relationship management to additional business divisions

· End-to-end visibility of composite MQ application business transactions

The Verdict of the Journey so far

The CIO still has a job, and has a funded roadmap. One might ask why they didn’t start with step 4b, and establish the CMDB and service model first? Well, the CIO was on the hot seat, and they were concerned about getting bogged down in an enterprise-wide CMDB architecture project.

This exemplifies the unpredictable and unique nature of evolution paths. More can be said about the delicate balance between tops-down guidance, and fostering organic innovation from within the ranks of IT. In future posts, I will discuss and analyze this further, as well as introduce other examples.

There are a number of ways of populating the service dependency map

adsey007 — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 13:13:00 GMT

In a post two weeks on this blog, I listed all the ways that we use service dependency maps (model-based event correlation, service impact analysis, top-down performance problem isolation, SLAs, etc). What can be used to discover service dependency information?

OperationsCenter Smart Plug-ins (SPIs) now discover to the CMDB

If you're using the agent-based side of OperationsCenter (OpC), then each managed node will have an agent on it. You can put a smart plug-in (SPI) onto that agent. SPIs have specialized knowledge of the domain they are managing. There are many SPIs for all kinds of things from infrastructure up to applications like SAP. Many of the SPIs discover (and continue to discover) the environment they are monitoring. This is agent-based discovery using all the credentials you've already configured into the OpC agent.

The OMi team are working on putting SPI-based discovery information into the HP CMDB (the Universal CMDB or uCMDB).

Agentless monitoring populates the uCMDB

If you have agentless monitoring (HP SiteScope) this will populate the uCMDB too (as of SiteScope version 10).

Whatever SiteScope monitors you have configured will send their configuration information to the uCMDB. So, if you're monitoring a server with a database on it, all the information about the server and its database will be sent to the uCDMB.

Network Node Manager populates the uCMDB

As of the latest version of Network Node Manager (NNMi 8.10), discovered network end-points are also put into the uCMDB. "Network end-points" are anything with a network terminator - network devices, servers, and printers. NNMi provides no service dependency information, but it does provide an inventory of what's out there.

This inventory discovery is useful for rouge device investigation - noticing an unknown device, creating a ticket to the group responsible for that type of device so they can look into it.

Standard Discovery

Our Standard Dependency Discovery Mapping product (DDM-Standard) will discover your hosts for you. This also discovers network artifacts (but, see NNM discovery above - if you have NNMi, this is a more detailed network discovery mechanism).

Advanced Discovery

Advanced Dependency Discovery Mapping will discover storage, mainframes, virtualized environments, LDAP, MS Active Directory, DNS, FTP, MQSeries buses, app servers, databases, Citrix, MS Exchange, SAP, Siebel, and Oracle Financials.

You can also create patterns for top -level business services and DDM-Advanced will discover those too.

Transaction Discovery

Our Business Transaction Management product, TransactionVision, deploys sensors to capture application events (not operational events) from the application and middleware tiers. These sensors feed the events to the TransactionVision Analyzer which automatically correlates these events into an instance of a transaction. TransactionVision also classifies the transactions by type - bond trade, transfer request, etc. Thus, TransactionVision is discovering transactions for you.

TransactionVision puts this transaction information into the CMDB. In other words, the CMDB doesn't just know about "single node" CI types like servers, it also knows about flow CI types - transactions.

Also, if the CMDB notices that the transaction flows over a J2EE application, it links the transaction to information in the CMDB about this J2EE application - the transaction step and the J2EE app are now linked in the model. .

__________

By the way, my colleague Jon Haworth has just posted on the value of discovery in the realm of Operations Management at ITOpsBlog (28th January, "Automated Infrastructure Discovery - Extreme Makeover").

Answers to questions on "what's new in Business Availablity Center 8.0?"

adsey007 — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 07:19:00 GMT

I recently mentioned about a whats new webinar conducted on BAC v 8.0. You can now access this on-demand webinar at

https://h30406.www3.hp.com/campaigns/2008/events/sw-01-20-09/index.php?rtc=3-2CDASIY

Here are some of the questions which came up during the live webinar.

Q: When will 8.0 be available?

A: The 8.0 release will be made available the first week of February

Q: How will the new modeling changes affect my current custom views?

A: There are no more instance views, it’s just views and custom perspectives that provide the content in the view, the upgrade for most customers should be straightforward, unless they have changed the model, created new CI types with custom links or are heavily using pattern views with impact analysis, correlation rules and alerts.

Q: How about integration with HP Operations Manager? Can we leverage our current HPOV infrastructure monitoring capabilities and marry data with BAC application monitoring?

A: Yes with HP problem Isolation we have support of OM (Operations Manager) through event correlation to application problem/ anomaly start time.

Q: Does v 8.0 support oracle 11g platform

A: Yes with v 8.0 is it supported.

Q: I was told that the DDM portion of the new 8.0 can discover WebLogic 10.x iis it true?

A: Yes with v 8.0 is it supported.

Can I get away without using discovery?

adsey007 — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 09:50:00 GMT

When I was at our European HP Software event before Christmas / The Holidays, I spent a good deal of time talking to people about our new product releases and the future of BSM. One customer looked a little worried and said, "wow - you seem to rely on discovery a lot".

I guess there are two things to say in answer to that observation. The first is "yes - because we rely on the service hierarchy model a lot". And the second is, "but there are a number of different types of discovery - and a number of them you already have".

So, in a two part post, I thought I'd answer that observation more comprehensively. So, let's first look at how we use inventory and service hierarchy information in the management of service health (and thanks Jon Haworth from the OperationsManager team for his significant help on this post):

It helps with administering the monitoring deployment of the managed environment. It tells us what is out there, what we need to manage, what has disappeared, and so on. This only requires discovery of the infrastructure inventory – "tell me what servers exist" (unless everything is virtualized, in which case it needs a lot more. The OperationsCenter team has posted on the new virtualization SPI recently at ITOpsBlog. This SPI discovers, and more importantly, continues to discover, virtualized environments).

It helps OMi to understanding the stream of events which are being detected in the infrastructure and applications. The hierarchy of the monitored items ("configuration items" or CI's) allows OMi to tell us which events are causal events and which are symptoms – what do we need to work on and what can we ignore. I talked about how OMi does this in a post last year.

It allows all parts of the BSM stack perform service impact analysis. This is where events are related to infrastructure and applications and their impact or potential impact on the services above in the hierarchy is established. We can then use this impact information to prioritize the events. Service impact analysis requires a model of the hierarchy of CI's and services. Maintaining the service hierarchy manually is untenable -- things just change too rapidly for humans to keep up.

When a disk has a set of read/write errors, is that catastrophic? If it's a single disk, then yes - the infrastructure element is in trouble. If it's part of a RAID array, then no - provided the rest of the array is OK. If we know the type of CI that we seeing events against, we can make better decisions about its true health.

This is also a new feature in OMi: when CI's are discovered we know their type. OMi ships with a database of health indicators for each CI type. For example, for single disks, it's a problem if the disk gets bad errors; if it's a RAID array, then provided a high percentage of the other disks are OK, this is not a serious problem; and so on.

This feature makes the calculation of the true health of CI much easier. You don't need to define a set of propagation rules. OMi uses the discovered CI type information and it's lookup table to figure out propagation itself.

This all ties into a new feature in OMi called "Health Indicators". Jon Haworth has promised to post on this on his team's blog at the OperationsCenter blog

Our top-down performance Problem Isolation software needs to understand the service hierarchy on which the end user application rests. For example, if I have a web user interface, I need to understand what services that user interface depends on. As I discussed in a post last year, problem isolation uses statistical correlation analysis to suggest the likely cause of such top-down performance problems.

We need the service hierarchy for defining SLAs. I may define a compound SLA that depends on a number of OLAs and a top-level measured SLA. The modeling user interface for this and the subsequent off-line SLA calculation is done based on the service hierarchy.

In the second part of the post, I'll talk about all the things that now populate the host inventory and service dependency map. Hint: if you have SPIs, you'll like what we have to say :-)

Mike Shaw

How do I learn more about BAC 8.0?

adsey007 — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 17:22:00 GMT

My last post was about the new BAC 8.0. I've had a couple of queries as a result of that post asking if there is more information on BAC 8.0.

A couple of my colleagues are going to be giving a webinar on BAC 8.0 on the 20th Jan. For more details and to register, please go to....

https://h30406.www3.hp.com/campaigns/2008/events/sw-01-20-09/index.php?rtc=3-2CDASIY

Mike Shaw.

Announcing Business Availability Center 8.0

adsey007 — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 09:51:00 GMT

In a post last year, I talked about how to move from user experience monitoring to user experience management, you need to be able to figure out what is the cause of a measured user experience problem, like slow on-line check-in times. I talked about a tool we have called Problem Isolation that helps do to this figuring out.

Up till now, Problem Isolation has used just performance data measured by our agentless probes (from a product called SiteScope) in order to correlate between a top-line performance metric (like online check-in times) and the health of services that top-line metric depends on (database, app server, integration bus, etc). But there is another source of data we haven't included until now -- the events collected by our operations product, HP Operations Manager. If you have HP Operations Manager, you have a massive source of information that can also be used to determine where top-down performance problems lie.

This is how Problem Isolation now uses HP Operations Manager data:

A business service problem is identified. For example, thru synthetic or real-user monitoring we determine that online check-ins are running too slowly
A “time buffer” around the problem start time is determined
The model for the business service in the CMDB is traversed, returning a list of all services supporting the business service
Events that occurred within the above-mentioned time-buffer relating to those supporting services are determined
The services with the best-correlating events (taking into account severity as well) are identified as likely suspects

This algorithm applies to any event, whether it’s from a third party enterprise management system (e.g. Tivoli), from HP Operations Manager, or, from HP Network Node Manager.

-------------

In our quest to move from service health monitoring to service health management, we're trying to provide as much information relating to a problem/incident as possible - all in one place in such a way that the information is easily visualizable.

In BAC 8.0, you can see the following regarding a problem service, all from one place:

The current performance of the service
The performance of the service over time
SLAs resting on the service and their closeness to jeopardy
Business processes using that service and the impact of the problem on those business processes. If you have our Business Transaction Management modules of BAC, you can see exactly which business process instances are affected or at risk. In industries like financial services this matters because the value of transactions can vary hugely, and business operations wants to know which important business instances are affected (e.g. A $10m inter-bank transfer) so that they can initiate manual work-arounds
Measured user experiences resting on this service. Imagine an app server is having a problem. You can "look upwards" and see that this app server is used to serve the online check-in business service. You can then see the measured impact of the app server problem on the online check-in user experience. This would be measured using either synthetic or real-user monitoring
Real changes that have occurred under the problem service. The real changes are inferred by the discovery technology that notices deltas between the state of CIs today versus yesterday
Planned changes against the problem service as taken from the change/release management system
Outstanding incidents against the problem service. You can "look across" to the details of the incidents to see if they provide the app support team with any insight into how to solve the problem
Non-compliancy state of servers under the problem service. Our server automation technology now updates server compliance state into the CMDB and this can be viewed in this 360 degree view of the problem service

------------

Mike Shaw.

The new Operations Manager i (OMi)

adsey007 — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 15:36:00 GMT

Fifteen years ago when HP Operations Manager (or OpenView Operations as it used to be called) was released, event management was really “infrastructure event management”. The concepts of middleware, of customer experience, of SOA, and of automated business process didn’t exist. But now they do, and we need a consolidated management solution that does full “consolidated business service management” rather than simply “consolidated infrastructure management” so that all events can come into one place where the operators are highly empowered to deal with quickly and accurately.

This is the aim of the Operations Manager i (OMi) product we announced at Vienna Universe on December 9th.

OMi and a shared service dependency model

OMi shares the same discovered service model as BAC. The service dependency model holds information on business transactions, customer experience, applications, middleware, infrastructure and now, network information discovered by our network management product, NNMi.

Using a common service dependency model means you can look upwards in the model (if the event comes below) and understand what services, user experiences and transactions are affected. The SLAs are in the model - so you can see how they are affected, and how close to jeopardy this problem brings you.

The model also tells you changes that have been made under a CI; what changes are planned; and what incidents are outstanding in Service Manager. Also the HP Server Automation product puts the compliance state of servers into the same model, so you can see if anything under a CI is out of compliance.

OMi and root event analysis using a discovered model
The perennial problem with any event management system, whether it be infrastructure or network management, is event noise. A problem with one object can cause a whole array of dependent objects to fire off events too. For example:

the SAN has a problem and fires off an event ...
the Active Directory using that SAN fires off an event...
the Exchange Server using that Active Directory has just lost its directory and fires off an event ...
and the proxy server that is driving the web UI to Exchange fires off an event too.

Four events - but one “root event” – one “actionable condition”.

Typically, event management systems have created “event correlation languages” so you can program up rules to eliminate these noise events, but such rules are simply not robust to change (and we all know how fast IT systems change). Also, the number of events that can be generated is so large that it’s impossible to write all the rules you need.

What we do with OMi is use the service dependency map to get to the root event when a series of events are generated. The actual technology used is the causal engine we released as part of NNMi, but it's using our discovered service dependency map rather than NNMi's discovered network topology.

OMi's health views

With OMi you can create health KPIs against the things (CIs) that you are managing. These can be combinations of attributes -- like CPU utilization and free memory on a server so that you can see at a glance the health of the Cis under your management, rather than having to achieve the same thing through wading thru a ton of events. In other words, OMi is mapping the events onto Cis and building up a health picture for you.

OMi and existing HP Operations Manager installations

OMi actually sits on top of existing HP Operations Manager installations. It acts like a manager of mangers for them. It can also take events from other event management systems like SCOM.

One brand new product and two major enhancements to the BSM stack - Vienna HP Software Universe 2008

adsey007 — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 12:04:00 GMT

Today is the first day of our software user conference here in sunny Vienna, Austria. We just announced a brand new product, and two major upgrades.

I'll start with the new product ...

HP Operations Manager i (Part of HP Operations Center) is our next-generation consolidated event and performance management product following on from HP Operations Manager. Internally, we call it OMi. Three keys about OMi...

You can take events from anywhere into OMi because it sits directly on top of our CMDB which holds business transaction, user experience, application, middleware, and infrastructure information.
OMi does root event analysis using the discovered service dependency map held in the CMDB. This means that only root events are shown in the console and subsequent events caused by the root event are hidden.
OMi gives you more than simply an "event stream" view of the world. It can also give you a service health view of the services you are responsible for. The exact make-up of a service's health is up to you - it will obviously include availability and performance, but it can also include the number of open incidents, for example.

I'll write more about OMi in a post at the end of this week.

HP Business Availability Center 8.0 (BAC 8.0) for application management uses HP Labs patented statistical analysis to cut through the volume of performance and operations event data in order to help customers predict and proactively resolve business service performance problems before they impact end users.

I did a post recently on the difference between user experience monitoring and user experience management noting how important performance problem isolation was. The latest version of BAC 8.0 does such analysis using both performance information and the rich source of events that HP Operations Manager, our operations management software, can give you.

I'll post on BAC 8.0 in more detail next week.

HP Network Node Manager i Advanced : we released a brand new network management product, NNMi, this time last year incorporating a clever root event analysis engine (now found in OM i) and new, much faster spiral network discovery engine. The new Advanced Edition of NNMi is targeted at large enterprises.

NNMi Advanced helps you predict the service impact of network degradation before business services are negatively effected through its integration with our CMDB.

And it natively uses our run-book automation technology, Operations Orchestration, to automatically collect data, fix problems and verify state once a fix has been actioned.