Posts from — February 2008

• Martin Kuppinger » Still unsolved: The relationship between IAM, SOA, and BSM
  What is the relationship between IAM, SOA, and BSM, to use these abbreviations? And what is the state of integration between the different areas?

  * Some far out stuff here - only for those with very mature BSM strategies and implementations *

  (tags: bsm business-service-management IAM SOA itsm management)

• Netuitive Survey Shows VMware Virtualization Users Unhappy With Current Management Tools
  Among the top concerns, poor visibility into performance, difficulty in isolating root causes and increased administration time ranked high in the findings.

  *If they can’t manage the basics in the first place, they’ll struggle in virtual stuff for sure*

  (tags: netuitive management monitoring virtualization bsm business-service-management)
• Performance Metrics in TotalStorage Productivity Center Performance Reports
  TotalStorage Productivity Center performance metrics that are available for the Storage Subsystem performance reports and Switch performance report
  (tags: Redbook TPC Storage monitoring)
• Game Devs Got Game
  “Games are all about the end user experience,” Ambler observed, “so they really know how to keep users engaged. That’s where enterprise developers could probably take a page from game developer handbook.”
  (tags: user-experience performancemgt real-user-monitoring)
• Nimsoft Offers to Help Microsoft off the Hot Seat in Hotmail Outage
  “We would be pleased if Microsoft accepted our help to increase service reliability for their Hotmail and other Web services.”
  (tags: nimsoft monitoring)

First of all, I’d like to thank Doug for inviting me to the conversation. I’m really looking forward to discussing how solutions such as Integrien’s will be an essential part of the future of Business Service Management. We’ll look at what problems these solutions address, how they do what they do and real life implementation and operationalization issues. Now to the topic at hand! Why Real Time Analytics? Why now? 

IT Operations executives are facing a dichotomous situation today. On one hand, their infrastructures are growing rapidly. I was recently talking with the Senior Director of Operations at a large social networking site and he told me that his server infrastructure (at the time 15K servers) was growing at 6% a week! They are also dealing with increasing complexity due to new technologies like virtualization and SOAs. Look at virtualization alone. While it can provide the tremendous cost benefits of server consolidation, it increases the complexity of the management problem considerably. You now have to deal with the hypervisor, virtual machines and guest operating systems as problem sources, in addition to the physical servers, O/S and applications. Lets not even get into the issue of dynamically moving VMs… 

On the other hand, Operations executives are being asked to reduce their budgets or at the very least keep them flat. Consider that historically, increasing infrastructure and complexity have been handled by throwing more bodies at it. Hmmm…, if 70% or more of the Operations budget is currently labor spend and you have to reduce or keep it flat, how can you scale to meet the needs of the business? 

There is an obvious parallel with what happened in manufacturing 30+ years ago with the advent of Total Quality Management (TQM) practices. Increasing complexity and scale in the manufacturing process was making it impossible to keep up with the quality and just-in-time delivery demands imposed by customers. Deterministic, rules-based methods of analyzing manufacturing lines that relied on trying to identify and measure every variable to stop problems from slipping by were no longer working. Some manufacturers (such as Toyota) started to take a different approach using advanced probability and statistics, collecting a subset of variables and looking at possible outcomes to get more proactive in approaching problems. The manufacturers that adopted these techniques gained a competitive advantage that persists to this day.

IT Operations is in a similar situation today. Alerting based on static monitoring thresholds and the collection of more metric data at faster intervals simply hasn’t provided a proactive approach to business service performance and availability issues. It also requires massive manual effort of IT staff to process the alert storms and perform manual or rule-based correlation to solve problems. Consider as well that in a system with thousands of servers and hundreds of thousands, even millions of metrics, the correlation problem is humanly unsolvable. Manual efforts can no longer scale in the face of increasing infrastructure and complexity.

That is why real time analytics-based solutions that leverage existing monitoring infrastructures are a necessity in today’s environment. I’ll go into the requirements for these solutions in a future post, however, the basic premise is to use advanced statistics and probability to learn normal system behaviors, only alert to abnormal behaviors that are true precursors to problems and perform advanced correlation techniques to predict future abnormalities and specific performance and availability problems. This new approach will be a competitive advantage for the companies who adopt it now, just as it was for the early adopters of similar approaches in manufacturing years earlier.

One of the goals that I have for this blog is to complement my thoughts and views with other like minded people. I started this blog out over two years ago with an invitation to other folks internal to the IBM Tivoli Business Service Management (BSM) team to contribute via this blog but they never have been able to commit to the five or ten minutes to share their thoughts. I have always envisioned that the comments that folks leave would be a significant part of the “spirit” that this blog has. I think we’ve had some good conversations via the comment threads recently but I’m still always looking for more.

With that, I’m introducing what I hope will be the first of many SME Guest Authors for my blog. My goal here is simple, to enable others to share their thoughts on business, service and technology operations and management. I’ve laid out some “ground rules” for these SME Guest Authors and set them free. Free to discuss how emerging technologies and products align with the goals and objectives of Business Service Management. Free to talk about how practitioners can be truly successful. Free to offer practical implementation knowledge and insight. Free to make the sales and marketing slicks “come to life” and become something believable, implementable and manageable over the lifecycle (and free from the sales and marketing hype you all deal with weekly).

I’m introducing Steve Henning. Steve is currently the VP of Product for an exciting company called Integrien. While I do not know as much as I’d like to about their company, technology or products, I do know that what they bring to the market is something that could dramatically improve the status quo within the typical operations environment. I believe that having capabilities such as theirs are desperately needed within any maturing Business Service Management solution and will play a key role in the next generation of Business Service Management solutions in the future. I’ve invited Steve to share his thoughts and ideas on the technology and capabilities in this market segment. I expect that the conversations will be straight up, down to earth, transparent and honest and something that we can all learn from. Please welcome Steve to the conversation!

• New IBM Software Bolsters Mainframe as Service Management Hub for Businesses
  Tivoli Service Management Center for System z, automates the management of incident and problem management, change and release, discovery and business service management to be seamlessly managed from either mainframe or distributed computing environments.
  (tags: IBM Tivoli servicemanagement bsm business-service-management TBSM TBSMv4 ITSM mainframe z/os)
• Salesforce.com Selects Coradiant for High Quality End-User Experience
  Salesforce.com, the market and technology leader in Software-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service, relies on Coradiant products to measure the performance of the online services delivered to its customers.
  (tags: coradiant user-experience)
• Integrien Welcomes Former Mercury and Opsware Executive Sunny Gupta to its Strategic Advisory Board
  Sunny Gupta has joined the company’s Strategic Advisory Board. As a strategic advisor, Gupta will leverage his deep experience in enterprise software product management and business development to assist Integrien in further increasing business
  (tags: integrien)

• Review of ZenOSS v2.1: has the features, but usability is challenging
  Bottom line, even though the community product is free, we came to the conclusion we rather pay $2500 (to Solarwinds for Orion) and get something that has been polished up and is much, much easier to use then work with ZenOSS when it comes to monitoring..
  (tags: zenoss oss monitoring reviews)
• A top-down approach to IT management
  Continued dependence on a bottom-up approach to IT operations will cost enterprises millions of dollars in lost revenue and productivity annually
  (tags: bsm business-service-management alignment top-down bottom-up management monitoring bsm_value)
• XANGATI
  Xangati focuses on delivering its RPI solution by providing IT with knowledge of the application experience of every endpoint. By taking an “endpoint-in” approach, the IT organization is in a position to be the First to Respond instead of their end users.
  (tags: xangati monitoring application_performance top-down)
• Netuitive Beefs up Service Analyzer With Added Support for CMDBs
  announced a new innovation for companies implementing Configuration Management Databases. Netuitive Service Analyzer now helps maximize the return on CMDB investments by augmenting Configuration Item (CI) data for end-to-end IT performance management
  (tags: netuitive cmdb performancemgt analytics bsm business-service-management)
• Beware the “Alignment Trap”
  pursuing business-driven IT, don’t lose sight of the fundamentals, effectiveness, simplicity (to the degree possible), and constant communication. Host cross project/initiative forums with key players (project managers, architects and business analysts)
  (tags: alignment business-service-management bsm it-alignment)
• The Service Portfolio and Catalog Language
  The Service Portfolio and Catalog Language (SPACL) proposal provides a standards-based framework that will allow Service Catalog information to be shared with other IT functional areas and to promote the exchange of Service Portfolio and Catalog content
  (tags: servicecatalog serviceportfolio SPACL itmanagementguys)
• ScienceLogic: Using Flex for Complex Data Visualization - InsideRIA
  Cynergy Systems was brought in to help with the task of visualizing complex computer network topologies in a web interface. The Flex framework provides everything that you need to dynamically load and render complex socially related data structures .
  (tags: flex flash adobe visualization dashboards)

• Who’s Afraid of the “Consumerization of IT”?
  Unified Service Model (USM) - the information model that provides a complete 360-degree view into IT services, mapping the relationships of the technology assets that support a business service.

  * I need to whip out my 360* of Visibility deck from ‘02! *

  (tags: bsm business-service-management bsm_value)

• GDCM - Global DataCenter Management
  Software allows companies to intelligently manage power, forecast green house emissions, and optimize their critical data center infrastructure. The nlyte suite of software solutions is designed to provide a rapid and solid Return On Investment (ROI)
  (tags: GDCM datacentermgmt)
• OPNET Virtualization Planning SW
  Virtual Machine Quick Predict (VMQP) to quickly predict the performance impact of server consolidation and virtualization, enabling IT enterprises to make qualified decisions and investments regarding virtualization

  ** Isn’t this stuff waay expensive? **

  (tags: Opnet virtualization capacitymgt)