Category — E2E Service Management

What’s the state of operationalizing Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) monitoring and management tools? Are the typical network, systems, enterprise operations/management centers (NOC/SOC/EOC/EMC) up to speed on how to manage, monitor, triage, troubleshoot and in general understand how SOA is being used in companies that are adopting it? Should the operations center care that they have an event from something related to SOA infrastructure and respond differently than they would for a non-SOA event? Have SOA events, incidents, problems, process and workflow been thoroughly implemented in such a way that “it just works” like traditional enterprise monitoring and management? Or, are these fancy SOA monitoring and management solutions really reserved for those applications experts responsible for complex application support and development?

If a client continues to struggle with fundamental e2e service monitoring and management, transaction monitoring and management or even batch job monitoring and management, what will their chances of success be for SOA monitoring and management? Could SOA and associated “service or transaction oriented monitoring” be a catalyst to shore up these other areas? Should one be tackled/improved before starting on another? At a minimum, instituting a “service oriented” organizational structure and mentality is certainly something I’d recommend for anyone adopting broad based SOA principles.

Eric Roch offers some solid advice on SOA Monitoring and Management which highlights that there’s more need for doing the fundamentals of systems, application and service management and monitoring really well as a foundation for SOA Monitoring and Management.

Others (and my preferred focus area) feel that monitoring SOA should really be more closely related to monitoring what this SOA initiative and deployment’s all about - the business. Business Service Management (BSM), Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and Business Process Management (BPM) all play a key role in helping understand how IT infrastructure, systems, applications, etc. support and impact the business’s goals and objectives. The fairly new buzzword Business Transaction Management (BTM) spearheaded by Correlsense and OpTier really speaks to the desired need here.

I feel that it’s got to be a focus on both of these areas, but with a strong preference to the “B” buzzword set since most IT organizations are likely using the “improve/standardize/reuse/efficiency/time-to-market” spin to aide in business support and justification for their SOA initiatives. That said, you’d BETTER focus on the things that the business cares about and show them tangible evidence that your SOA initiative is making things better for them. This is very possible by adopting a BSM, BAM, BPM, BTM (or a preferred combination) strategy that focuses on providing the right level of business visibility into the SOA environment and more importantly the e2e business services, applications, transactions, processes and activities. It ultimately all ties back to the service level agreements delivered to the business anyway right?

What’s on the market these days for SOA Monitoring and Management? Should you get your monitoring and management tooling from your core SOA platform vendor or should you take a third party, “best of breed” approach? Are there true “vendor neutral” solutions out there? Are clients implementing SOA architectures based on multiple vendor’s technology, solutions and products?

• Progress/Actional
• Amberpoint
• Avicode
• CA Wily
• Correlsense
• HP
• IBM Tivoli ITCAM for SOA
• Manged Methods JaxView Suite
• MuleSource Galaxy and HQ
• Nastel Autopilot
• OpTier
• Oracle/BEA
• Progress (Actional, Sonic, Mindreef)
• SOA Software
• Symphoniq
• Tidal Software
• Truviso

Some additional content on some of these vendor solutions is available here.

Who might the “market leader” be of these SOA specific solutions? What makes them a leader? What capabilities, features, functions would be considered “best of breed”, differentiator, must have, core, desired, nice to have, etc.?

What’s “really” needed for SOA monitoring and management?

1. Web Services
2. ESB
3. Transaction Performance
4. Transaction Availability
5. Transaction State/Status
6. SOA Registry
7. SOA Security
8. Service Discovery and Relationship/Dependency Mapping
9. Transaction Discovery and Mapping

Anything else missing here? What here needs to be specialized in its own product versus just extending the investments clients have already made?

Please do share your thoughts here. There are folks lurking who really need help in figuring this stuff out and/or improving products and capabilities on the market today!

Tivoli Netcool Service Quality Manager (TNSQM), Tivoli Business Service Manager (TBSM) and Tivoli Netcool Customer Experience Manager (TNCEM) have been packaged as the new Tivoli Netcool Service Quality Management Center (TNSQMC).

I’ll be talking at length about what Service Quality Management (SQM) really is later, but IMO the easiest way to think of it as Business Service Management (BSM) for the Engineering/Network focused groups of Communication Service Providers (CSPs) such as wireline/wireless telcos.

Traditional BSM still is very applicable to the enterprise side of CSPs and is a must have in supporting the business of being a telco by understanding the IT impacts on the many OSS/BSS systems that exist within these environments (billing, provisioning, fraud/revenue assurance, accounting, legal, HR, CRM/ERP, etc.).

Now what I’m trying to find out is what content is provided for creation of value oriented solutions within TBSM. I’d expect there to be templates, instances, rules, service models, scorecards, custom dashboards, layouts, launch in context actions, etc. available for various audiences (NOC, Eng, Mgmt, CustSvc, etc.).

Some backgrounders:

SQM Solution for Telcos
Tivoli Netcool SQM Service Solutions
Tivoli SQM Story
Tivoli Netcool Customer Experience Management
Service Assurance Demo Scenarios

IBM® Tivoli® Netcool® Service Quality Management Center V4.2 delivers:

• An integrated dashboard-based solution for service availability, service quality, service level agreement, and customer experience management.
• End-to-end Service Quality Management delivered via common visualization and reporting measures, and reports against key metrics to more effectively manage critical services.
• A rich set of extensible, off-the-shelf service-specific solutions for voice, video, and data services, which dramatically reduces total cost of ownership and accelerates time to benefit.

IBM Tivoli Netcool Service Quality Management Center is used to:

• View combined business and technology service indicators to quickly determine the impact of events on availability and performance.
• Discover root causes of quality issues throughout the service path, while helping your efforts to maintain aggregate service levels and SLAs.
• Get a detailed understanding of the individual subscriber experience combined with broader service quality trends.
• Share service quality and client information across multiple business units.
• Invest in modular architecture to help you address initial needs more cost effectively, and then expand as your requirements evolve.

In an repost of an article from a couple years back, Robin Bloor provides some updated color on the state of BPM and SoA. It’s apparent that some of the other “B” buzz words have the same challenges that exist on the BSM front.

Things to ponder…

• How can these projects with such touted value to the business or IT be successfully implemented?
• Where are vendors falling short in helping “solve the organizational problems” that often cause these “B” projects to fail?
• Is throwing technology/product at the problem the best place to start?
• What should a next generation organizational structure look like? Can IT and Business organize around end-to-end business service/process delivery and support?
• How can organizations be incented, encouraged, mandated to have an end-to-end business service/process focus?
• Where success stories for BPM, SOA, BSM, BAM, etc. exist, how have these technologies been operationalized, organizations changed, workflow/process/procedure modified to reap the benefits?
• Is it foolish to think that any of these organizational challenges can ever be solved or at least minimized?
• Do we have generational issues here that will change as Baby Boomers retire and Gen X/Y/Z move up the ranks in IT and Business?

Give the post a read, I found these two very applicable to all of the things I’m seeing with BPM, BSM, BAM, etc.

Question 5: What are the most difficult steps within a BPM project – and what makes a SOA project tedious?

This is Dan Tabor’s Business Service Management (BSM) presentation and audio from the IBM Tivoli Pulse user conference held last month in Orlando. Dan is the Senior Product Manager for BSM and a few of the enabling BSM products and acronyms (TBSM, Impact, TADDM, TIP, TCR) at IBM Tivoli. Listening to this presentation, you’ll hear Dan share what BSM is and how he’s driving IBM Tivoli’s BSM direction in current and future releases of the BSM portfolio from IBM Tivoli.

While Dan and I agree on many things related to BSM and the direction IBM Tivoli should be taking or where investments should be made, we agree to disagree in many areas. Dan has the very difficult job of balancing customer wants and needs with the difficult IBM politics, process and bigger picture.

If you’d like to hear more about IBM Tivoli’s Business Service Management story and solutions, feel free to contact myself or your local IBM Tivoli (or Business Partner) representatives.

See the screencast presentation here.

FireScope’s countdown excitement was revealed today (a little bit late ) and their next steps in Business Service Management innovation are now visible. It appears that there will be a 28 day launch cycle of numerous new products and tools.

FireScope’s Business Edition (BE) concept consists of a couple key components aimed as initial entry points for smaller enterprises. The fuller featured Enterprise Editions (EE) are the natural migration paths or starting point for larger enterprises. Pricing modelers are available right on their website.

Some of the “coming soon” tools looks like it puts them in company with PacketTrap and SolarWinds. FireScope BSM:BE and CMDB:BE puts them in company with Nimsoft and Managed Objects.

BSM BE

Optimized for the unique needs of small to medium sized businesses and starting at only $2,450, FireScope BSM:BE features an engaging and user-friendly interface and flexible auto discovery provides rapid time to competency, with multiple setup wizards and inline help designed to make implementation accessible for any level of user.

CMDB BE

FireScope CMDB:Business-Edition delivers the same enterprise-grade functionality as traditional CMDB’s, minus the exhorbitant price tag and pain inducing deployment. For less than $10,000, IT Organizations gain real-time visualization and documentation of their infrastructure along with a complete view of the interrelationships of the software and systems impacting those operations, without the need to hire an army of consultants and mind-numbing planning sessions.

Hmm, the free trial download isn’t available to me yet. Anyone else?

Michael Biddick has put together a gloomy article on the realities of implementing Business Service Management over here. While I do not agree with much of what he says, he’s certainly correct that it’s a challenge for most organizations to successfully implement Business Service Management.

–snip–

However, this promised future of BSM as a product is far from assured. We’re seeing early BSM adopters feeling downright gloomy, mainly as a result of unmet expectations. Many deployments simply don’t provide clear links between IT events and business services. In others, things start out well enough, but maintaining systems lacking in automation is not realistic given limited IT staff. The truth is, you can’t buy your way to BSM, and companies that persist in thinking a single product, no matter how big, complex, and expensive, will deliver are doomed to disappointment.

–snip–

Why are clients expectations being unmet? Is it because they’ve put their faith in a suite of tools and technologies over the changes required to implement Business Service Management successfully? IMO, yes. There are significant organizational barriers to success with Business Service Management that most IT organizations just don’t put the effort into addressing.

My challenge for Michael and his Information Week series would be to stop talking about the product and vendor capabilities and really start a series that shows companies how they can get started.

Don’t tell us we need a service catalog, CMDB, or application discovery tool, tell us how we can use the investments we’ve already made in millions of dollars worth of software to achieve service management excellence.

Tell us how to define a Business Service Management strategy that’s right for our own company, how to create a roadmap, architecture and design that guides every initiative and project at our company along the lines of service centric, top down, business aligned, operationally superior Business Service Management.

I know Michael’s company has the capability and background and hopefully they are helping establish these things when deploying software from these vendors. I challenge Michael to share these experiences. Talk about how we as vendors and you as consulting and systems integrators can improve a clients environment and chances of success with Business Service Management after the sale has been done.

The time is now to start talking about what needs to be done for clients to succeed with Business Service Management!

Today, competitive Business Service Management solutions must provide quick time to value, be highly effective, easy to implement and manage and truly enable progress towards a business aligned organization and operations. In my efforts to assess and increase the Business Service Management readiness of our vast products within IBM Tivoli, I’ve just completed a quick first cut for our core monitoring product and associated monitoring modules. My results don’t shock me, and we have a long ways to go. I hope this can set a benchmark towards improvement in 2008, a year which brings significant change and potential for the BSM solution suite.

In my initial list of assessment areas below, I’ve tried to focus where I feel attention is needed “if I were king for a day”. Historically, we’ve focused on integrations at the back end and front end. We’re starting to focus more on some other useful areas via our navigation and reporting initiatives, but we’re still not focused on BSM solution oriented content (although we’re talking a lot about solutions for this and that).

Every release of the core products enabling the IBM Tivoli Business Service Management story (does everyone know what this is?) must include content into the core Business Service Management products including Netcool/OMNIbus and Tivoli Business Service Manager (TBSM). If we’re not doing this, we’re forcing our clients to take these tasks on themselves further increasing their workload, product management lifecycle, and drastically increasing their time to value from these investments. We absolutely must have value added content out of the box (or immediately available on OPAL) that coincides with every significant release of enabling technology (ITM, ITCAM, TWS, TPC, etc.) to be competitive within the BSM marketplace.

As I understand things within the ITM world, we include specific workspaces and reports with each release (core, IF, FP, etc.). Taking this work into consideration, exposing this with the appropriate Business Service Management context within our BSM products is a logical step. While every client environment will be unique and different, the trick here is to get to something that is 80% there that can be customized the rest of the way by our clients. Are there documents describing content associated with TEPS workspaces? Are TEPS workspaces just structured queries into TDW, TEMS and TEMAs? How would one find out about the queries used to drive a TEPS workspace? I’m sure someone could create a magic script to convert this stuff to relevant configuration components for a TBSM content pack.

The assessment lists things that I think are the relevant within the managed system, Netcool/OMNIbus and TBSM to further expand our end-to-end BSM solution and story using ITM based monitoring. I would like this to be a topic for discussion at DevCampTivoli. How can we do it? Should Tivoli do it? Should it be community driven? Would it provide value? Would it speed time to deployment? Would it enable more successful demonstrations, proof of concepts and sales? I certainly think so!

What are your thoughts?

Check out some of my other thoughts for improving the end-to-end BSM story here:

BSM Profile Concept for ITM 6.x
BSM Descriptor File Concept for ITM 6.x
Oranizational Structures for BSM Success
BSM Situation and BSM Event Concepts for ITM 6.x

These topics are all the rage now and have taken center stage in the virtualization, utility, cloud and next generation datacenter discussions. Great stuff, good things to shoot for, but on an even more fundamental level, anyone who’s attempting automation, autonomics, run book automation, etc. without having a solid implementation of the fundamentals of network, systems, application and service management and monitoring in place is, frankly, F-O-O-L-I-S-H.

You’ve absolutely got to have the right level of visibility into the environment first. When some automated activity takes place, you’ve got to know if it was successful, and the impact it may have had on the bigger end-to-end service or application, system or network environment. The only way for this to happen is to ensure instrumentation and eventing is in place, have a consolidated (network, server, application, service, mainframe, distributed, middleware, transactions, virtual, vmware, cloud, etc.) event view with analytics in place to ensure that operations focus is on the right events and a presentation layer that ties everything together into a business service context.

That’s hard to do. It’s no wonder that the things that are first to go are patch management, operating system or core system (CPU, Memory, Disk/Storage) automation activities. They’re low(er) risk, repetitive and time consuming tasks. What group owns these tools? The systems administration groups for the most part. Do they have an end-to-end business service focus? Do they understand (or care) about the impact on the bigger picture? Do the tools used provide eventing, status and insight into what they’re doing? Are they integrated into the broader IT management and monitoring architecture? Would the operations group know how to respond to a “CPU Provisioning Event” if they even got one? Would they know what system, application or business service it’s impacting? Would they know how to prioritize this event against the hundreds of others they are faced with?

What are your thoughts or experiences here? How are you operationalizing investments into automation, autonomics or run book automation beyond the systems administration groups? Can you get useful eventing from these tools? What’s the level of effort required to instrument an “autonomic lifecycle”? What’s being done to align these “sexy” buzz words into the Business Service Management (BSM) story?