Application Management : User Experience Monitoring

BAC 8.03 release - what's new

Michael_Procopio — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 22:56:00 GMT

by Michael Procopio

Release Highlights

Service Level Management (SLM) enhancements:

SLM now enables customization of the First day of month setting which is used in calculating agreements.

A new business rule, EMS Events Availability, calculates status for the System Availability KPI assigned to an EMS Monitor CI. This enables you to include EMS events as part of the SLM calculation.

Platform enhancements:

Update of Java Runtime Environment running on Business Availability Center servers to JRE 1.5.0_18

Mutual authentication: Users can set up authentication for both the Discovery and Dependency Mapping (DDM) Probe and Business Availability Center running an embedded UCMDB, with certificates. The certificate for each side is sent and authenticated before the connection is established.

Real User Monitor Engine enhancements:

Support for Oracle Forms NCA version 10g

System Availability Management enhancement:

Added the ability to control the location of the ellipsis ("...") used in long labels in System Availability Management Reports. This enables you to move the ellipsis from the end to the middle of the label.

Dashboard enhancement:

Added the ability to drill down from Dashboard to the Event Log report from Windows and UNIX CIs.

TransactionVision enhancement:

Support for LW-SSO 2.2 has been added to the UI/Job Server.

Database Admin privileges are no longer required to set up a database for use with TransactionVision.

For Business Availability Center, Michael Procopio

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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

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

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

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 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

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.

BSM Evolution Paths: Financial Services Example

adsey007 — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 11:16:00 GMT

When two Fortune 500 companies merge the IT convergence can feel like two high speed trains on parallel tracks speeding toward a single-track tunnel. Not only is IT tasked with maintaining or increasing quality of service, but the CEO’s are quite impatient to quickly rationalize the IT operating expense equation of “1+1=1.25”. Maybe 1.50 if you have an extremely benevolent Board of Directors.

Unlike the Automotive Industry example posted earlier (BSM Evolution Paths: Auto Industry Sample), this Financial Services example has much less tops-down roadmap direction, and much more independent parallel paths. Let’s take a look at three of the key personas and evolutions within these parallel paths.

Data Center Operations Manager; Infrastructure Operations path:

The new Data Center Operations Manager (DCOM; reporting to VP of IT Ops) commissioned a tools architecture analysis. They inventoried their management tools and counted over 80 major “platforms” in the fault, performance and availability category alone!

The DCOM empowered a Global Software Management Architect to drive a “limited vendor” strategy to simplify and standardize the tool environment. Although there were many individual domain experts bent out of shape, this standardized environment limited the vendor touches, enabled renegotiated license/support contracts, concentrated tool expertise and resulted in improved quality of service.

The fault, performance and availability architecture was boiled down to three major vendors covering three broad categories (plus device specific element plug-ins):

System Infrastructure (Server, OS, Database, storage middleware, LAN feeds, etc.)
Network Services (WAN, LAN, advanced protocols, route analytics, etc.)
Enterprise Event (consolidated event console, correlation, filtering, root cause)

The DCOM could have pushed harder for a single vendor covering all three categories, but it was a matter of time-to-deploy pragmatism. A vendor could only be selected as category solution if the product was successfully deployed previously, and internal deployment expertise existed to lead the global implementation. This “survival of the fittest” approach did not necessarily drive the most elegant architecture, but it did speed deployment and limit risk.

Independent roadmaps and key integration capabilities were developed for each category to meet 6, 12, 18 and 24 month milestones.

CTO; Business Service Oversight path

Early on in the merger process, there was a power struggle to own the business service visibility and accountability solution. The VP of IT Operations wanted the tools, process and organizational power, but the Lines of Business insisted on a more independent group that would sit between IT Operations and the business-aligned Application Owners.

The Online Banking Group from one of the pre-merger divisions had successfully implemented a business service dashboard and Service Level Agreement reporting solution (based primarily on end-user experience monitoring). Using an “adopt and go” strategy, the CIO empowered the CTO to develop an end-to-end group and expand the solution to all six major business units.

This business unit expansion rolled out over 12-18 months and was successful, but limited to monitoring and reporting. Over the next 12 months, Application Owners, Line of Business CIO’s and VP of IT Operations all wanted to extend the business service monitoring to:

Problem isolation, application diagnostics, and incident resolution
In-depth transaction management of composite applications

Director Service Management; Enterprise CMDB path

The Director of Service Management, reporting to VP IT Ops, drove two major initiatives over the first 12 months of the merger.

Consolidate to a single, global, follow-the-sun service desk
Rationalize and standardize the request and incident management process

I could easily spend an entire blog post discussing the IT process convergence and standardization, but I refuse! Instead, I’ll focus on what happened in the 12 months following the service desk consolidation.

The Director of Service Management launched a CMDB RFP which was originally grounded in incident, problem and configuration management. The RFP touched off an enterprise-wide nerve, not to mention a flurry of vendor responses. The project quickly expanded, and changed focus to the “hotter” driver of change and (release) risk management, and how to drive all IT process from an enterprise service model.

Once the application owners got involved (from a change/release control perspective), and the infrastructure operations got involved (from a change and performance/availability perspective), and the CTO got involved (from a business service reporting and accountability rperspective) all of a sudden incident management took a back seat in the decision process.

In the end, a service discovery, dependency mapping and change/release management solution was selected that was a different vendor all together from the incumbent service desk solution.

An interesting journey… so far

The three paths described above are clearly a small subset of the overall work done for this corporate merger, but hopefully gives a glimpse into the BSM evolution dynamics. By all accounts, this company has been successful in their journey; you may be interested to know that this financial services company is not participating in the government bail-out program.

The lack of a tops-down “enterprise IT transformation” roadmap did not hinder their progress… in fact some will argue it enable their progress! You can observe, however, that at the end of each path there is a drive towards further integration and cross-IT dependence. It will be interesting to watch this company, and see how their approach evolves as they continue down the intersecting evolution paths.

Bryan Dean, BSM Research

Prediction BSM Evolution

adsey007 — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 12:32:00 GMT

I usually do not like making public predictions because I hate being wrong. But I was discussing my last blog post (Business Service Visibility & Accountability: Where is it Homed?) with a colleague and he pressed me for my prediction of where I thought this function will eventually live in the organization. Maybe more of you have the same question, so in this post I will lay out what I believe is the compelling evidence… and I might even make a prediction.

Let’s take a quick look some of the key evidence or clues:

CIO role continues to shift

This has been researched to death, but is still true. CIO’s are spending more time on business innovation and less time on production IT operations. The range of issues that CIO’s drive and influence is staggering. Does this mean they don’t care about production operations and business service accountability? No, they care greatly; it is just that most CIO’s have learned that having a top-notch, empowered VP of IT Operations is the only way to be a proactive CIO.

Application owners want to focus on development

My previous post looked historically at application owners and line of business CIO’s buying their own business service visibility and accountability tools because the pressure they felt from the business. This did happened and continues to happen in many organizations, but research shows that after a couple years of owning, architecting and maintaining these tools the application owners realize that production management tools takes valuable time away from their primary goals.

They are primarily goaled to get new functionality out the door that meets business requirements for function, quality, performance and security. It is still vitally important to the Application Owners to maintain visibility and accountability once their applications are in production. They will continue to be a catalyst in purchasing performance tools, and providing the intellectual property for rules, thresholds and reporting metrics. But ownership of the tools, configuration, vendor management and ongoing maintenance of the tools is clearly shifting to the production operations teams.

Line of Business CIO’s don’t own enough

Line of business CIO’s love to have business visibility and accountability tools in their hot hands, but they also recognize the issues of owning tools without owning the IT infrastructure. Security access and rights is a constant issue for them. Management process and tool architecture is also becoming a more standardized, centralized function that the line of business IT participates strongly in, but really is not in a position to own.

Successful customers adding problem resolution

Something I have observed in customers, who have successfully implemented a business service visibility and accountability solution, is that the next step in their evolution is to tie issue visibility to issue diagnostics and resolution. They find it is wonderful that they now have a business relevant way to measure IT service performance, but their constituents quickly move to, “Ok, now fix it when it breaks”.

Nobody in IT will be shocked to hear business takes a, “what have you done for me lately”, stance. So, the tool owners now find themselves sorting through how to integrate into the established event, incident and problem management processes. Depending on where they sit organizationally, this can be a painful yet necessary adjustment when trying to improve efficiency and time to diagnose/repair.

VP of IT Operations taking on end-to-end responsibilities

Seven years ago we conducted an extensive ITSM customer research project. At that time, there were a large number of CIO’s and industry pundits who had taken on the mantra, “Run IT like a business”. IT consolidation, adoption of ITIL process standards, organization alignment and tool deployment were all solid benefits from this era (and continue as we speak), but did not solve the issue of managing end-to-end business services.

At the time, too many IT Operations managers became “infrastructure service providers”, and when polled did not feel responsibility for the application, the end user experience, or the final business service. The CIO, and many of the application owners ended up shouldering the business service responsibility. Today, this is radically changing and ITIL V3 clearly reflects this evolution.

Application development teams continue to be organizationally aligned to the line of business more often than not, but research is showing a dramatic shift in mindset as to whom is responsible for the end-to-end application performance. The majority of IT Operations organizations today own Level 1 application monitoring and often own level 2 application support. level 3 application support typically remains aligned with the development teams, but there is no doubt that the VP of IT operations is taking on end-to-end responsibility.

Tools vendors are getting their act together

Alas, I must at least touch on technology… but only briefly! The major tools vendors have done a commendable job putting together portfolios of solutions that span the BSM/ITSM lifecycle. Plenty of improvement can still be made on integration, interoperability and ease of use; but I think it is fair to say IT finally has access to a management technology architecture that can be leveraged and multi-purposed to serve a wide range of persona needs and management disciplines.

The Prediction

You have probably guessed my prediction by now based on my biased presentation of the six clues above. I believe the ownership of the business service visibility and accountability solution will be homed under the VP of IT Operations, and purpose-specific instances will be customized for the application owners, business relationship managers, line of business CIO’s and executive IT management.

The VP of IT Operations – empowered by the CIO - will continue to drive compliance to a single, standardized IT process and software management architecture (not “single vendor”, but “limited vendors”). This will irritate many ‘best-of-breed’ fans, but in the end it will pay off.

The business service visibility and accountability function will be a module of a more comprehensive fault, performance and availability solution set that effectively ties together discovery, visibility, accountability, issue detection, isolation, diagnosis, business impact analysis and direct connection to the enterprise service model.

Implementing this cross-IT management solution will not be easy. Organizationally, the VP of IT Operations will have to empower an independent executive-level manager to drive, similar to an ERP Application owner. This will fail if owned by an “ivory tower” type, but must be practically driven by trading off the lobbying of existing IT domain and function specialists with the need to consolidate, standardize and implement a modular, multi-purposed solution.

Ok, maybe I got a little carried away at the end there, but one cannot ignore the demonstrable evidence of business, organization and persona driver dynamics. I would be surprised if we do not see a pragmatic, yet steady evolution toward this ultimate model.

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.

BSM customer evolution paths: Samples and observations

Michael_Procopio — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 01:41:00 GMT

When developing and marketing products, we often have questions which can only be answered by going out there and seeing what people are doing. We have a guy on the BSM team who does this for us. His name is Bryan Dean. I've worked with Bryan for many years and I've always been impressed by his objectivity and the insight he brings to his analysis (i.e. he doesn't just present a set of figures - he gets behind the figures).

At the end of last year, we asked Bryan to analyze the top 20-odd BSM deals of 2008. He formed a number of conclusions from this research. One set of conclusions concerned how people "get to BSM" - how they evolve towards an integrated BSM solution. I asked Bryan to help me with a series of posts to share what he learnt about evolutions towards BSM because I think that knowing what our other BSM customers are doing may help you.

________

Mike: Bryan, can you give a summary of what you learnt?

Bryan: There is no one evolution path. It's fascinating to me that a hundred different IT organizations can have virtually the same high-level goals, fundamentally agree on the key factors for success, and yet end up with a hundred unique execution paths.

Before I answer your question, can I create a definition? The term "BSM" is very poorly defined within the IT industry - different vendors have different versions, and so do the industry analysts (in fact, some other research I did last year concluded that very few people had a clear idea of what BSM means). So, I'd like to introduce the term "Automated Business/IT Service Management" or AB/ITSM.

Back to your question, I think I can group all the different evolution paths into five key types:

ITSM incident, problem change & configuration: this evolution is driven out of the need for process-driven IT service management with the service desk as a key component
Consolidated infrastructure event, performance and availability: this is driven by a recognition that having a whole ton of event management and performance monitoring systems is not an efficient way to run IT, and so there is a drive to consolidate them into one console.
Business service visibility & accountability: this is more of a top-down approach - start with monitoring the customer's quality of experience and then figure out what needs to happen underneath. This is popular in industries where the "web customer experience" is everything - if it's not good, you lose your business
Service discovery & model: this is where evolution towards integration is driven from the need for a central model (the CMDB). Often, the main driver for such a central model is the need to control change
Business transaction management: today, this is the rarest starting point. It's driven by a need to monitor and diagnose complex composite transactions. We see this need most strongly in the financial services sector

Mike: How about the politics of such AB/ITSM projects? (I don't see the AB/ITSM term taking hold, by the way :-) )

Bryan: Politics (or, most specifically, the motivational side) is important. I think many heavy thinkers in our industry have the mistaken assumption that that there is a single evolution path, controlled from the top on down by the CIO following a master plan. Trying to manage such a serialized, mega project is a huge challenge and too slow, not to mention that 99% of CIO’s are not in the habit of forcing tactical execution edicts on their lieutenants (I know I’ll get some argument on that one :-) ).

What I see from my research is that the most successful IT organizations are those who have figured out how to balance between discrete doable projects, and an overall AB/ITSM end-goal context and roadmap. Typically, the CIO lays down a high-level vision that ties to specific business results, and then allows key lieutenants to assess and drive a prioritized set of federated, manageable projects that independently drive incremental ROI. Some IT organizations may have a well-defined integrated roadmap, but the majority of IT run federated projects in a fairly disjointed fashion.

These parallel paths are owned by many independent personas within IT, each trying to solve the specific set of issues at hand. For them, being bogged down in how their federated project aligns and integrates with all the other AB/ITSM projects is daunting… if not fatal.

And on reflection this makes sense to me - the human side of things plays a large role in such endeavors.

Mike: What do you mean?

Bryan: IT organizations of all shapes and sizes have goals to reduce costs, increase efficiency, improve business/IT service quality, and mitigate risk all while applying technology in an agile way to boost business performance. What I find interesting is how specific, funded initiatives are created by specific personas to achieve the goals.

In future posts, I will share some specific examples of how customers evolved through these paths, the key driver personas, the core motivations and how these paths come together.

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. .

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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.

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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

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Mike Shaw.