Category — BMC Software

Mark this up as another Big4 vendor opening up “a bit” and making some really useful content available now via their BMC Developers Network (BMCDN).

While they haven’t opened up access to all of their product resources and documentation, there’s some really good stuff up there now, especially related to the ITSM platform and Atrium CMDB.

In addition to IBM’s complete transparency and openness, this makes the second vendor to show “a bit” of what’s under the covers to the broader community. What’s up with HP, CA, Compuware, Quest Software, Digital Fuel, Oblicore, Managed Objects, etc.?

Let us see if we can find the five leading reasons (maybe more, maybe less) for why we need a proactive or predictive solution these days.

#1: I don’t have effective change control in place that spans into and incorporates the monitoring that I do on end point systems, applications and services.

#2: My boss wants me to “do more with less” so I need to figure out a way to clean up the mess I have today in my resource monitoring and event management solution.

#3: I know that when this thingy begins to slow down and that thingy drops packets that my transactions begin to fail. Now how do I write that policy to correlate all my thingys?

#4: My tool is better than your tool. I need to figure out a way to make you believe that your tool is always wrong so you’ll work my trouble ticket.

#5: My manager told us that we need to become more proactive. I sent the dba an email to tell him that we were going to have an outage to this database in three hours. He’d already gone home for the day.

These are tongue in cheek, but the underlying themes of each one are very valid in nearly all operations and application support groups. Why are we interested in predictive and proactive tools when we probably don’t have our own house in order in the first place?

How would you write the business justification and capital purchase plan to explain why you need them? How will you quantify your reasoning? Are you willing to give up one or more FTEs to purchase this solution? Have you had an honest look into the far reaching corners of your organization to see where the real root causes may be that spark your interest in these solutions? Are you ‘really’ ready to try and be proactive or predictive? Are you ‘really’ doing reactive well? What does predictive and proactive really mean to you? How would you describe the core capabilities such a solution should have? How would you associate expected value and ROI from having those capabilities? Where should we be looking elsewhere for help in these areas (BI, operational BI, BPM, BAM, analytic databases, statistical modeling and forecasting, etc.)

Please share your thoughts and ideas on why proactive and predictive solutions are of interest these days.

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.

BMC’s CTO Tom Bishop responds to Michael Biddick’s Information Week Article and adds to the conversation.

The article also makes an incorrect generalization by suggesting that smaller vendors do a better job of “playing well with others.” BMC – a charter member of the ‘Big Four’ management vendors – provides solutions that operate well in heterogeneous environments and integrate with the broadest range of technologies possible. This allows organizations to utilize current IT investments instead of replacing and beginning anew. As we tell our customers every day, a correct implementation of BMC’s BSM strategy makes our competitor products better. This is a fundamental difference between BMC and our competitors.

One of the biggest challenges I see personally, am asked by clients and integrators constantly, and see a very large amount of traffic headed to my blog from Google searches is around integration difficulties with the BMC Atrium CMDB. I’d like to invite Tom or some of his team to respond and share more about how client’s investments in other vendor technology and products can be improved, simplified or even realized when they desire to leverage the powerful information in the Atrium CMDB, especially complex service relationships and CI information.

I’m aware of the new(ish) Atrium Integration Engine, but I’m pretty sure we (IBM Tivloli) are not exploiting it in any way formally. Can we get a discussion going or information out there in the BMCDN or other place on integrating BMC Atrium with core IBM Tivoli products. Put the bad blood aside, let’s do it for the customers!

I recently attended a webinar presented by Aternity, Forrester and Intel entitled “Redefining End User Experience Management: Top 10 Keys to Success for IT and Line-of-Business Management”. Replay available here. Not sure why Forrester and Intel were really there other than to add credibility to the start up Aternity. Intel seemed way out of place promoting some fancy new desktop virtualization stuff.

Aternity sits firmly in the end user experience and performance management space. It’s sales and marketing pitch is that they’re unique because their platform empowers every work station to become a self monitoring platform that is user-aware; arming IT and business executives with empirical evidence on how usage and performance impacts business. As they say, “We are redefining end user management.”

As usual, there was no discussion of the technical details of the product or technology. I asked a few questions in the chat but the answers were not technical enough or the questions skipped due to time. This is a desktop agent based product. No agent = no visibility. They’re not snooping the wire with a span port here. He mentioned other agents were installed elsewhere but I’m not sure if they install an agent across all of your systems (I hope not).

Aternity competes against the following companies. I’m interested in comments or feedback on any of these companies and their products/technology. I hope to be able to learn more about how their products work and how they can serve as a key input into a maturing business service management solution.

One of the key debates within this space is the approach taken to measure end user experience and performance. Do I need to put an agent on the desktop, instrument the Web or Application U/I, turn on a span port on the switch, use special agents on all the servers, use an appliance, etc. I see a chart is needed for this. Also, this should fit nicely into Ryan Shopp’s Data Center Automation Blueprint series on his blog here.

End User Experience and Performance Management Space

• Serden
• Symphoniq [Upcoming webinar on 2/26]
• Knoa
• Premitech
• Tealeaf
• Coradiant
• Citrix - EdgeSight
• Moniforce (Oracle) - webProbe, uxInsight
• NetQoS - SuperAgent
• Lucent VitalSuite - The VitalAgent was probably one of the earliest end user agents on the market. Their agent had some really cool capabilities.
• Compuware - Compuware has a desktop agent as part of its Vantage suite. They could really turn their Adlex acquisition into something powerful along the lines of end-user experience and performance management, but it’s still a stand alone, non-integrated product.
• Quest Software - As part of the Foglight suite, they have an end user management and monitoring capability.
• IBM - ITCAM for RT/WRT
• HP - BTO User Experience Products
• CA - Wiley Customer Experience Manager (did CA have anything pre-Wiley, part of Aprisma/Spectrum or Unicenter?)
• BMC - Transaction Management Application Response Time / Real Experience Monitor
• Others?

The Top 10 list came from JP Garbani of Forrester, not from Aternity. Aternity’s eloquent CEO Trevor Matz attempted to align his company’s technology or product to this top 10 list.

1 - Stop living in the past (go beyond the data center, the holy grail is the end user experience)

*DLM* I agree, but ultimately the operations and support staff want to be told where the problem is. If we’re not doing the fundamentals of network, systems, application and service management and monitoring, we’re not going to be able to correlate end user experience issues to something blinking in the datacenter.

Correlation also must be done to understand the impact that poor performance and experience has on the end user. How much does it impact their productivity? The business in terms of sales or managing client relationships? How many more transactions (sales, orders, widgets) could be completed if the end-to-end transaction completed 5 seconds faster? This my friend, is the holy grail.

2 - Bigger picture, deeper perspective - (design a strategy for end-to-end end user experience visibility - from desktops to app performance to productivity (I asked if Aternity supported the Apdex initiative but this question did not get answered)

*DLM* Absolutely. See above.

3 - Capture it visually - (have the ability to collect, correlate, and analyze the data into usable dashboards/reports that display real business intelligence in a matter that easily conveys trends and offer a level of predictive analysis)

*DLM* Absolutely. This must be at the edge. Every end user should be able to craft the visual message they want to consume. We don’t need to share the gory details of the trasnaction performance or end user experience to everyone, especially to those outside of the operations and support organizations. We need to aggregate and communicate information and data in the language of the audience. You’re loosing this much money because the transactions from the UK take 30 seconds longer than those in Brazil. If you were to add more capacity here, you could increase the sales orders by 250 per day.

4 - Make friends - (IT management and LoB management must work together to achieve advanced end user experience management - get together regularly to discuss objectives, improvements and processes.)

*DLM* Very important not just at the top levels, but ALL THE WAY down through the organizational silos. The guys who manage the tools or the application support teams must all know the language of the business and FULLY understand how important the end-to-end service and experience is to the business. The fact that it takes the CEO’s secretary 7 minutes to open the shared spreadsheet on the file server could be the most important end user experience metric for the Windows SystemAdmin group. Especially if that spreadsheet contains the CEO’s weekly status report metrics. Stuff like this is important to someone, and with the visibility that technology like Aternity’s, the Windows SystemAdmins can be the heros too.

5 - Smart Virtualization - (embrace real-time technology for enterprise class virtualization)

*DLM* Not quite sure how this fits into the concepts talked about here other than the benefits of an “on demand” architecture on end user experience and performance.

6 - Get a bat phone - (Make sure your end user management strategy and any tools/software you implement/select handles alerts and triggers IT/help desk users - lowering the risk of disruption to frontline users)

*DLM* Ah yes, the customer monitoring system. Direct result of not doing the basics well enough, not correlating and enriching fine grained data with business services and applications context and living in a reactive world. Technology such as this and a focus on the basics can help you become more proactive and help deflect customer calls reporting problems. Now, organizational change and maturity to become proactive is an entire different story.

7 - Play nice - (Ensure your end user experience management tools integrate into your existing architecture.)

*DLM* Sounded like Aternity plays nice and integrates into existing architectures via the expected methods. I’d probably want the ability to integrate into the companies collaboration tools such as IM or the Portal/Intranet so I can send out proactive notifications of application or user experience problems.

8 - Don’t boil the ocean - (start small)

*DLM* Very important. Get the small wins. Ask how things have improved. Don’t accept soft benefits, try to get tangible value identified. Review, review, review frequently and often. Make immediate changes as the business needs change. Iterate from here across the business based on your own lessons learned.

9 - So SOA - (any tools/software applications you use for end user experience management should fit into your existing architecture via a loosely coupled, SOA approach)

*DLM* Please show me any vendors IT Mgmt/Monitoring tools with a SOA capability?!

10 - Come together - (gain a widespread view of which systems/applications should be included in your end user experience management project for a truly holistic view.)

*DLM* It may be a shocker to some, but not everything must be managed and monitored. The business needs should prevail here. If you’ve got 10,000 servers, but only 5,000 of those support the businesses most critical and valuable services and applications, you’d better have the best instrumentation, visibility, management and monitoring for that 5,000. I don’t see enough prioritization like this but rather clients just looking for the “check box” that we have got all the bases covered. With the amount of resources shrinking for the traditional monitoring tools groups, you’ve got to focus on what is most important today and get to the rest as you can.

I’ve been following Netuitive for over two years now. You can do a search for them on my blog and see all of the various activities and how they’ve evolved over the years. I was very skeptical of their early claims such as “BSM by Lunch” which I’m glad they’ve now backed away from to focus on their core competencies and value add to the overall BSM solution stack. I wish they would have stuck with the blog they started at BSM Digest, but I understand the challenges.

The power of getting accurate, trusted events free from false positives and false negatives is CRITICAL to the underpinning of any good BSM solution. If you’re putting garbage on the dashboards of your tools that operations, support and executives have to see, you’re NOT going to be successful with your BSM strategy. I’m also now very interested in Integrien and ProactiveNet (BMC) and look forward to digging in deeper into their solutions. Nearly every client I’ve seen and even when I ran the monitoring tools group at EarthLink we all have the same problems that these vendors are addressing. They’re the ONLY ones filling these gaps as best I can tell.

I’m looking for a really good discussion on Netuitive’s Active Behavior Profile (ABP). Which of your nine patents apply to this concept. Does every managed element type have a unique ABP or does every actual component have their own ABP? If I want to model/manage a Windows 2000 server different from a Windows 2003 server, how does this work? Is this where Templates come into play. What data streams are “mashed up” in the ABP? Templates?

What vendors do you play best with? Where are the key details of how/what you leverage from each of these vendor solutions? Please share some details. If a client only has the out of the box hardware and OS monitoring using their vendor’s solution with out of the box configurations, what can I expect to see in SI? What will I be missing? Do you recommend certain things be turned on to get health, workload and other outputs? Please discuss. Is one vendor’s CPU or Memory treated the same as another vendors?

When Trusted Alarms are sent outbound towards an event management solution as SNMP Traps, do they include group and function information? What can be mapped into varbinds? How is the trap constructed? Where does this happen?

I’d love to see some hard tangible ROI discussed on how these products are helping. I’m also very interested to know if the typical reactive based operations and support organizations are ready to get more proactive based on what these three vendors can provide. Can they mature from the comfortable, reactive “it’s broke” world and operate in a proactive, predictive “it’s a problem in this area, trust me” world?

Look forward to the discussion!

A newcomer to the Business Service Management (BSM) conversation has emerged from BMC over at BSM Views. He’s got a great tag line for his blog “Taking the BS out of BSM”! Wish I would’ve thought of that!!

Brian shares his blogs mission in his About page.

“As IT becomes an increasingly critical driver of business, the pace of maturity and change increases within the IT department, and many smart strategies are being employed with, at times, great results. IT now has a direct effect on the bottom line. In my work with BMC Software, I talk IT strategy with diverse organizations weekly basis, and this blog is a attempt to share many of the good ideas I am exposed to.”

Welcome to the BSM conversation Brian! I look forward to what you have to say and helping you “Take the BS out of BSM”.

There’s apparently a new EMA report available (anyone have accesss?) that talks to the SLM & BSM Market Forecast through 2012. Not sure how they come to their conclusions, but here’s some of the findings from the PR and my highlighting of interesting points.

According to the research, SLM and BSM revenues continue to grow at an astounding rate for some solution providers. The IT user community now is grasping the difference between SLM and BSM, and how to apply both technologies within the enterprise. As such, the report includes separate forecasts for both SLM and BSM. In March 2006, EMA published a market-sizing report that combined SLM and BSM offerings into a single category, with a total market size of nearly $1.4 billion. In the 2008 findings, EMA expects the SLM market to grow by at least 30 percent during the coming year, with BSM solutions growing by as much as 50 percent.

Other key findings from this research include: — BMC Software, CA, HP and IBM continue to lead the charge in both SLM and BSM. — Digital Fuel, Oblicore and Managed Objects have all demonstrated staying power and delivered innovative SLM/BSM functionality with a top-down, business perspective. — BSM enables IT to manage directly to business objectives and provides executives with visibility into IT’s value to the business. SLM supports this value by measuring individual technology silos to committed quality levels. — Many enterprises view best-practice frameworks as critical to operations, and ITIL clearly leads the pack for SLM and BSM. — The SLM and BSM market has experienced significant consolidation since the firm’s 2006 market-sizing report, resulting in more robust solutions for enterprise IT.

These may be useful resources for my readers:

EMA research director Erickson-Harris will share highlights from this new research study during a free Webinar titled “SLM/BSM Market Sizing 2007 Research” to be held on Thurs., Jan. 17, 2008 at 2 p.m. EST. To sign-up for the Webinar, visit: http://www.emausa.com/ema_lead.php?ls=slmbsmwebws0108&;bs=slmbsmweb0108

In addition, EMA offers a free online SLM and BSM Solutions Center where IT professionals can research and compare unbiased analyst profiles of dozens of leading SLM and BSM solutions. Register for free access at: http://itsolutions.slm.emausa.com/ This is TERRIBLY OUT OF DATE for the IBM Tivoli BSM Offering!