• Aternity IT Survey Ranks End User Experience Management as Top Priority for 2008
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  (tags: Aternity enduserperf user-experience monitoring)
• How Virgin Entertainment Group Keeps Customer-Facing Transactions Humming at its Virgin Megastores - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership
  Fort deployed Inetco’s Insight product in April to monitor credit card transactions and to make sure customers weren’t being held up by slow ones. He says the implementation was fairly straightforward. Installing the software on a server took a few hours.
  (tags: transx-monitoring transxmgmt creditcardtransx monitoring)
• Real time event processing and transaction management, transaction management in credit card process cycle - INETCO Systems Limited
  Real Time Event Processing and Transaction Management INETCO Insight manages POS and ATM transaction flow and application performance through real-time transaction monitoring, logging and analysis.
  (tags: Inetco Insight transx-monitoring pos atm creditcardtransx monitoring user-experience)
• NetQoS Acquires Helium Systems to Boost Financial Services Offerings
  NetQoS Trade Monitor. The acquisition makes NetQoS the first vendor to offer a passive Financial Information eXchange (FIX) monitoring product with a comprehensive network and application performance management suite
  (tags: Netqos FIX transx-monitoring transxmgmt monitoring appmgmt)
• Under new management - vnunet.com
  Service management is a discipline that manages IT systems in a holistic, business-centred manner. The approach encompasses everything from the operations architecture to business process management.
  (tags: itsm serviceassurance servicemanagement bsm business-service-management bppm cep)
• SeeWhy Real Time Business Intelligence - Home
  SeeWhy Software is the leader in real time business intelligence software. Our event driven business intelligence platform is at the forefront of BI 2.0 - a revolution in BI.
  (tags: analytics bam bi business cep dashboard dashboards seewhy bi2.0)
• IBM Tivoli Business Partner Accreditation
  With the new Tivoli Deployment Accreditation initiative, IBM Business Partners who have made significant investments in developing their skills are recognized and earn one of three levels of accreditation status
  (tags: IBM Tivoli Business Partners Accreditation)

A timely post by Tyler over at Quest Software indicates that they understand and will be talking about the problems of managing complex applications and the resulting impact on the organization and costs. It sounds like they’re thinking about how to address some of the issues I was pondering related to the proactive/predictive technology at the edge within the Foglight product.

Quest Software probably has the deepest knowledge base of what “should” be monitored according to industry recognized SME based best practices. One of the big reasons my former company invested in the Foglight technology was the expert advice embedded within their resource monitoring agents and associated alerts, metrics and events. If anyone can figure out the best way to only managed what’s necessary from an SME perspective, from a BSM, service or application management perspective, I’m sure they can.

Shall be interesting to see what Tyler and the Foglight crew cook up.

Just some rambling thoughts here…feel free to join in.

Is another tool what’s really required here? What should/could be done in domain specific resource monitoring solutions that addresses the problems at the edge? Should I really be monitoring everything that comes out of the box in a default configuration? Why do I have all of these profiles, situations, thresholds, events, etc. in the first place? Do I even now what I’m monitoring and why?

What if I have a multi-vendor, multi-sourced environment where I may or may not have visibility? What if I don’t have a CMDB or other source of topology, relationships and dependencies? What if I don’t even know the state and status of the applications, databases or services to begin with? What will I be able to do with investments into these technologies?

What if I have adopted a “manager of managers” concept where I have a consolidated operations eventing environment with feeds from across the entire business environment (facilities, plant, IT, datacenter, logistics, telephony, manufacturing, contact centers, etc.)? Shouldn’t this dynamic “learning” and “thresholding” concept be really applied at this level for some sort of “intelligent event management” free from manual intervention, policies, codebooks, etc? How about the context of the business calendar and schedule merged with the IT operations calendar and schedule? I doubt that this can all be “learned” magically.

If I invest in a BMC ProactiveNet, Netuitive or Integrien (or other fundamental dynamic “learning” or “trending” tool - my favorite was a company called Premonitia - now defunct, based on research from accoustic modelling of whales and shrimp IIRC), how will I recognize and measure the value from that investment? How should the operations environment change to adopt the promises of the “secret sauce” within these emerging technology areas? Will IT operations and second/third tier support teams need to change the ways they work today? If so, how? Does IT operations know how to respond to a future state that hasn’t occurred or someone stating that a service is “slow”? I think most operations and support teams are still in their infancy here.

I’m all for emerging technologies that speak towards making the lives of the folks on the front line better and for sensing, isolating and resolving issues within complex IT environments before they impact the business services, but will investing in these tools really improve the status quo within the typical operations environment? The Next Generation Operations Center, Command Center, Service Management Center or whatever we want to call it must be enabled with these types of technology, but also must prepared to think, operate and respond differently than they do today.

How are you changing? Will you change? Where’s your value proposition? Is it at the front line, second/third line of the support process, at the LoB? Is it about efficiencies in workflow? Do more, with less? Automation? Availability? Becoming proactive? Do you know the real root causes prompting your interests in this technology? What are your vendors doing about it? What is your monitoring tools group doing about it? Should they be doing something different?

Please share your thoughts on how best to operationalize and really recognize value from your investments into these technologies or what you’re doing to address the real root causes of the symptoms this technology addresses.