All I want for the new year is a BSM Profile for ITM 6.x

One of the foundations of Business Service Management (BSM) is to see things from the business perspective. To get there, one of the best ways to do that is to instrument for BSM at the source. The majority of all server agent deployments for HW/OS monitoring and COTS application agents (DB, AppServer, etc.) are deployed in a pure out of the box (OOB) manner. Most clients will take what their vendor offers up within these OOB configurations as their own “best practices” and leave it at that. Some may take the time to modify thresholds in an effort to control the signal to noise ratio in the event console. This practice generally leads to a “needle in a haystack” approach for event management and a bad reputation for the tool in use for monitoring.

There will always be a need for the “best practice” OOB monitoring offered by vendors in their solutions. The primary audience is the NOC, EOC and support organizations. They speak this language and have been programmed to know what to do when the “95% CPU Utilization” event comes in. The BSM Profile concept is to help organizations move beyond this to focus how these lower level things may impact the business services, applications and activities that help the business meet its goals and objectives.

I want to see things change. I want to see the ability to configure monitoring with a purpose that’s above and beyond the OOB configurations. The establishment of a BSM Profile for managing the server HW/OS and deployed applications enables visibility into what that server or application really exists for - supporting the business.

The ideal BSM Profile for ITM 6.x would include the following:

1. Custom instrumentation into very specific business service, application and transactions ALIGNED to the LoB, services, applications and key business activities that they enable (and impact).
2. Custom free form text fields that enable creation of a specific and unique message relative to the above.
3. Mapping into custom event fields/slots of the ideal BSM Event Format.
4. Generate purpose built events, KPI/KPM or other data for the purposes of driving a service model or dashboard

In an effort to collaborate on how to create such a BSM Profile, DevCampTivoli has been created. The theme for this event is “Collaborative Development of End-to-End BSM Solutions”. The desired outcome is to come up various approaches for developing a BSM Profile for ITM 6.x, necessary configurations within the Tivoli EIF probe, Netcool/OMNIbus and TBSM 4.x that can be easily customized and implemented at any client. Whatever the DevCampTivoli produces will be freely available to anyone to take, modify and use to improve their BSM deployments.

Take a few minutes to visit DevCampTivoli. This event will be the May 17-18, 2008 which is the weekend before the annual IBM Tivoli User Conference Pulse 2008 in Orlando, FL. The thought and hope is that SME’s and practitioners in ITM, Netcool/OMNIbus and TBSM will already be coming to Pulse 2008 and will be able to come in a couple days earlier to participate.

More to follow…

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