BSM Solution Analysis: Netuitive Service Analyzer

I’ve been asked a lot of the past few years what my opinion is on this company or that solution, product, technology. While I don’t have actual hands on experience with every one of those companies, solutions, products, etc. I’ve always been able to pick apart the sales and marketing slicks and get to a list of questions that I’d use to form an opinion on whether or not to go to the next level with a vendor. I also read a lot – hundreds of emails a week, countless blogs and RSS feeds, and plenty of trade magazines and web sites all give me a pretty far and wide perspective on what’s real and what’s not out there.

I guess I’ll start documenting some of the things I’d want to know about some of these vendors, technologies, solutions, etc. if I were to sit down face to face with a vendor and give my time up to hear what they have to say. Take this all with a grain of salt and kick the tires yourself. I have no personal experience or exposure with the Netuitive products in my past careers or my present career (with a company that has products that would compete with this product). I like to think of this as my “sales and marketing slick” analysis that I’d go through as if I were evaluating their technology.

I encourage anyone to join in the conversation here! Correct me, educate us, share your thoughts, opinions and experiences!

“Twenty Questions” for the Netuitive Service Analyzer Pitch

Netuitive plays in a couple spaces from what I can tell – event management and reporting and business service management and has two core products Netuitive SI and Netuitive Service Analyzer. Their Netuitive SI product is OEM’d by BMC as BMC Performance Manager. I appreciate what they’re doing for the industry with the BSM Digest portal located here.

Netuitive Service Analyzer comes out swinging in the BSM space with some pretty big claims including “Instant BSM” and “BSM by Lunch Tomorrow”. I like their flash demos that talk about the challenges and their claims, but there’s little to no tangible technology or product content being positioned in any of the content on the web page of in the demos.

Netuitive states:

“Netuitive real-time analysis software automates the most difficult, time-consuming and costly processes in managing IT systems and business services. Self-learning and continuously adaptive, Netuitive software works with your existing monitoring infrastructure and deploys in just hours — enabling you to identify, forecast, and resolve problems before they impact quality of service.”

** I’d ask what those most difficult, time-consuming and costly processes in managing IT systems and business systems are? What data indicates this? What state or maturity/capability level are the customer’s in that leads to this statement? How would your environment be assessed?

** Works with your existing monitoring infrastructure… Again, I’d want to know the details here and how every part of the integration and data flows and transformations occurs. It looks like they’re capable of integrating with the usual monitoring solutions – HP, Mercury, Microsoft, CA, BMC and NetIQ, IBM Tivoli, etc.. One of my biggest concerns here is the “garbage in – garbage out” scenario. If you don’t have a solid foundation in the fundamentals of network and systems management and monitoring, how can the Netuitive Service Analyzer expect to perform well?

Netuitive states:

* Learn more about Netuitive real-time analysis technology.
* Automate the deployment and administration of business service management (BSM) with Netuitive Service Analyzer.
* Optimize your current systems management solution with Netuitive SI.”

** I’d say that the challenges laid out here are artifacts of a poorly designed, implemented and maintained monitoring and management architecture and systems. For every ounce of effort ($, FTE, Resources, etc) one places into building a solid foundation in the fundamentals of network, systems and application management the payoffs for the business and IT will be significant. Effective business service management absolutely 100% without a doubt requires a solid foundation in these fundamentals.

** The latter statements speak more towards more sophisticated event management more than they do business service management.

Netuitive states:

In fact, deploying BSM without Netuitive Service Analyzer requires you to do what’s humanly impossible.”

** I’d take in these statements with a lot of skepticism, especially in any sales and marketing material. I just don’t have the faith that this is possible, especially with the dependency on a having enough of the right data, events, information, etc. coming from existing monitoring sources.

** What’s not known here are the assumptions Netuitive Service Analyzer may be making about a customer’s environment. Chances are the average customer doesn’t have a solid foundation of monitoring, not everything is monitored, has incorrect thresholds (which they may be able to help with), no data points, etc. I don’t see how the Netuitive Service Analyzer product can accurately build and understand a complex service model when key components may not be providing input into the equation. Even if they do, 95% of every customer environment that I’ve seen, the monitoring tools are generating information for functional silos only, with little to no service aware correlation. How will the network, server, application, database, and security silos all come together to represent a complex application or service topology??

Netuitive states:

Netuitive Service Analyzer, on the other hand is self-learning, self-configuring and continuously adaptive. It speeds and automates BSM deployment. And then it improves service health by analyzing and correlating system performance in real time to forecast and alert you to problems before they happen.”

** I’d agree that most solutions today fit into their “old paradigm” classification, but the leap to a fully automatic, autonomic, self-learning, self-maintaining solution is probably too much for most to really buy into yet. If it were so easy, there certainly would be others doing it.

** Today’s BSM solutions simply consume that data and information and enhance it with a more complete perspective of the business service or application health, performance, availability, etc. This enhancement capability comes through a rich data integration layer which consists of much more than infrastructure monitoring data sources. There’s little to no evidence that the Netuitive Service Analyzer solution has any capabilities in this area.

Netuitive states:

Netuitive Service Analyzer accelerates and simplifies BSM adoption by automatically correlating your current user-experience data with the real-time inputs from your existing infrastructure monitoring agents — regardless of platform or format. You have no other new software or hardware to buy or deploy. You already have the foundation in place for effective BSM. All you need is Netuitive Service Analyzer to make it work.”

** What about other sources of data, information, events, metrics, KPI, etc?? Again, this all seems to be an event management function for me. I was correlating user experience data from up to five different user experience system (Quest Foglight, Keynote Transaction Perspective (private and public agents), Netcool/ISMs, Compuware Application Vantage) all with traditional infrastructure monitoring events, in real time, with aggregated synthetic events, etc. years ago.

Netuitive states:

As soon as it’s installed, Netuitive Service Analyzer begins to self-learn your operating environment and self-configure its own accurate service models. With no manual rules, scripts or dependency mapping required, Netuitive Service Analyzer identifies all of the component relationships in any business service, wherever those components reside — across domains, silos and platforms. Then it automatically generates Dynamic Thresholdsâ„¢ that define every component’s range of normal behavior.”

**I get the event management “dynamic thresholds” bit, but I still don’t buy the automatic discovery of business services. The assumption here has to be that you’re providing a wealth of information from the infrastructure monitoring layers. You’ve got to be doing the fundamentals well and have EVERYTHING instrumented and generating enough events (good or bad) that their logic algorithms can pick out pieces and put them together into a business service context. What happens if you never get an event for that ultra-critical business transaction between the ERP system and the Provisioning system??? What if your application group doesn’t care about monitoring and doesn’t instrument their applications or provide anything for the systems agent to pick up? What if you’re using open source monitoring tools like Nagios, BigBrother, etc. or solutions you don’t have an integration for?

**Even if you’re doing a great job monitoring, how will the Netuitive Service Analyzer solution learn those complex topologies, relationships, dependencies, transactions, CRON jobs, green screens, IPSEC tunnels, etc. exist in most custom, complex application and service environments? Making assumptions about how email, Intranet, three tiered environments, etc. are built is one thing, but I doubt it will hold up in the most complex of environments without some sort of discovery and mapping component, CMDB, etc.

Netuitive states:

Predicts problems in service health before they happen. Because your environment changes by the second, Netuitive Service Analyzer correlates and analyzes live streaming data as fast as it is received. Combining the best aspects of rules-based and statistical analysis techniques, it can identify multiple, simultaneous, anomalies and predict conditions that will affect the quality of service up to two hours in advance. When that happens, you receive a Trusted Alarm,â„¢ the industry’s most accurate and reliable indicator of impending problems in service health.”

** I get the event management “trusted alarm” bit as well – the big assumption here is that you’ve provide enough data input into the Netuitive Service Analyzer equation for proper analysis and tracking. If you don’t have the fundamentals of infrastructure monitoring in place, watch out! Garbage in – garbage out! Nothing in – nothing out!

Netuitive states:

* Complete in just one morning a BSM deployment that would otherwise take months. Free your staff from the time-intensive and costly manual processes of BSM deployment and administration, as well as baselining and thresholding for systems management.
* Avoid the lost revenue from system and service downtime. Trusted Alarms provide the early warning that lets you resolve performance issues before they become expensive problems. Netuitive customers report up to 10-times faster problem diagnosis and resolution. And a high rate of meeting their quality-of-service commitments.
* Reduce alert volume by 99.5%. Because Netuitive Service Analyzer sends only system-verified Trusted Alarms, IT staff spends far less time responding to alerts, pages and trouble tickets and more time focusing on more profitable customer service or development projects.
* Increase the return on infrastructure monitoring systems you’ve already invested in. Netuitive Service Analyzer leverages your existing solutions and requires no new agents.”

** All very eye catching to feed into most commonly found problems within an IT environment that can likely be attributed to a lack of focus on the fundamentals of infrastructure, application and service management and monitoring. As I said before, if more effort was put into these areas, there wouldn’t be a need for statements like this because the problems wouldn’t be as bad as they’d been.

** I just don’t see enough real product information on their website. There’s little to no screenshots, examples, etc. available. If I were presenting a BSM solution, I’d be showing more about the product and what it can do than talking about the “secret sauce”.

Again, I encourage others to join into the converstation and share their experiences, opinions here. I want to learn more!