I firmly believe that the next generation of Business Service Management (BSM) will consolidate, integrate and leverage Business Transaction Management (BTM), End User Experience (EUE), Real User Experience (RUM) and Application Performance Management (APM) solutions and their respective domain data and information.
While the simplistic definitions of what BSM is still hold true, the value of understanding each of these domain areas is critical to the business and should be to emerging IT operations organizations who are maturing beyond resource management and IT silos to a true end-to-end service management methodology.
The ITCAM for Transactions v7.x product and broader ITCAM family provides industry leading depth and breadth across any large enterprise IT environment. I haven’t come across anyone’s portfolio that covers more than what Tivoli’s does today. The “manager of managers (MoM)” concept that we’ve had tremendous success with in the event management space is similarly replicated with the ITCAM for Transactions v7 product’s ability to consume, consolidate and stitch together complex transaction level information across a multitude of technology domains and IT organization silos. For more insight into BTM, check out some of the information and podcasts available here.
As part of ITCAM for Transactions v7.1 FP2, the ITCAM development team has developed an initial foundation for integration and data exchange between ITCAM and TBSM v4.2. This integration leverages all of the latest model and resource build capabilities of our DLA based integration as well as our new ITM Data Fetcher capability to bring in the relevant metrics and KPI’s from the backend ITCAM (ITM) systems. All of this is used to underpin and drive a basic example of an operations dashboard where business transaction information such as availability, performance, quality, etc. and the supporting IT infrastructure component relationships are displayed.
From this foundation, it would be very easy to build out follow on views, pages and portlets that would enable application support groups and LoB executives to see availability and performance information for transactions from any technology domain or IT silo within the service delivery chain.
I’ll try and get some examples built of what this could look like in the future. I’ve included a picture below of what the ITCAM development team has included in this integration package. This integration content is available via the ITCAM for Transactions v7.1 FP2 download site as an individual download component. See the FP2 release notes for more information. You can review the white paper detailing the integration on the TBSM Wiki here.
ITCAM for Transactions TBSM Integration
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We second your thoughts that business transaction management
is a growing concern for today’s increasingly complex environments. We’ve seen a growing number of customers rely on business transaction management, as I’ve described in my blog at http://blogs.amberpoint.com
I think its a given that you’ll see consolidation and integration between user, application, transaction and server mgmt solutions. Why do customers need to buy 4 products when you can present all the relevant metrics from each and provide a single comprehensive end to end view? I would add network and storage mgmt products to the equation also. Disk i/o plays a major part in latency these days, discs are getting bigger but response times are not getting any faster for retrieving data. Not all data lives in databases so storage mgmtcan play a key role in BSM.
I agree with your thoughts that BTM and BSM will merge. I also see the need for a merge with BAM. While BAM does not have the tightest, universally accepted definition, I use it in the sense of measuring non-IT activities such as market volume, number of widgets produced, profitability of the order to cash cycle, or even something like a Sales forecast. I believe that this type of non-IT metric or KPI should be correlated with the performance of business transactions in order to truly determine if improving transaction performance affected business performance.
@Charley Rich – absolutely, I’ve spoken on that topic many times on my blog. The entire B-I-N-G-O alphabet soup of B** acronyms need to converge, integrate, consolidate, etc.
This is key to the next generation operations center – the Business Operations Center if you will where we’ll see Service Management for IT, Service Management for Facilities/Infrastructure and Service Management for Business Process/Performance all converge. Imagine that!!
This is the *ONLY* way for large, legacy enterprises to think about becoming more dynamic, smarter and lean for their future survival and have any chance of staying on top of technology and business change!
Thoughts?
Doug
The integration of BSM (and SLM), End User Experience EUE (Real End User Experience Monitoring and Synthetic Monitoring, Business Transaction Monitoring or whatever name people may want to refer to this) and Application Performance Management (Java and .Net, SAP, Oracle etc ..) including other technology domains (e.g. Systems availability/performance, Network availability/performance, Security, Storage, etc …) is a natural next step in the evolution for the old generation Infrastructure-Centric (Event Management) driven BSM tools.
These next generation solutions are a reality today with the Compuware Vantage solution ( http://www.compuware.com/vantage11 )
Thanks for the advertisement @rafi.
Can you explain in detail the advances that AppVantage and ClientVantage have made over the past few years? Can you describe the approach for transaction discovery, stitching/mapping, monitoring and analytics?
How have these products changed as part of Vantage 11?
Tks,
Doug
@Doug
I agree that this is a good idea for services provisioned over smaller -mid range networks <10K nodes and <100k managed objects. But for bigger and more complicated services and networks – the technical feasibility of correlating Business transactions management with realtime service state changes seems debatable. In additions, these organizations generally plan a service paths with ample redundancy and virtulization to ensure high availabiltiy. This makes it even more challenging to reflect BTM impacts accurately.
To summarize my opinion, abstraction of a data model [BSM in this case] to an objective which it contributes partially [BTM in this case] seldom provides accuracy of reporting. Association of a service impacting event to the BTM makes sense, but to integrate the very solutions seems to be an overkill.
Hi Doug,
My intention is to add value to the content of this blog item by providing your readers with existing solutions that address the subject matter of this specific article.
There has been many advances (too many to mention individually) in all aspects of the Vantage solution over the last few years, ranging from BSM, EUE and APM. Let me mention a few specifically in the areas that you have asked about:
* Vantage 11 through its award winning Real End User Experience Monitoring (http://software-assessment.yphise.com/Gifs2/081208-user-experience-monitoring.pdf) provides discovery and visibility into all transactions from all users and all locations all the time (for Web and Non Web applications) across all tiers of the application (Front, Middle and Back End tiers).
* Vantage 11 provides deep integration between Real End User Experience Monitoring and Synthetic Monitoring that displays
results from both solutions in consolidated views to take advantages of the strengths that both solutions provide to End User and Business Transaction Monitoring (e.g. you can only monitor real users when they are actually using the services and the applications and running transactions, so in order to provide a better proactive approach the addition of controlled synthetic simulations of business transaction enables 24×7 visibility in the availability and performance of business transactions) .
* Vantage 11 combines this information (EUE) with Application Performance Information (APM) and automatically create a Performance-Driven Service Model that combines this information with other domain monitoring information such as systems availability/performance, network availability/performance, database availability/performance and Mainframe availability and performance to provide a true End-To-End visibility into the performance of business services.
For more details on this please check the link above, and if you or any of your readers have any questions, you are all welcome to come to the roadshow in the next weeks and months to any of the cities across the globe. (http://offers.compuware.com/vantagetour/?cid=70170000000Inj0)
Regards,
Rafi
@robin – dude, you should check out the advances in this space. I’ve talked to and seen nearly every vendor in this space and you’d be amazed what’s possible in complex service and application environments now – across all domains. Listen to some of my many podcasts, some of these guys have this stuff figured out. We (IBM Tivoli) can do some pretty amazing things in the entire cross domain area – I’ve seen some huuuuge mainframe environments that have gazillions of transactions!
In no way is this about consuming all data all the way up the chain! BSM is about consolidating the RIGHT data, information, metrics, state and status that enables specific and purpose built BSM use cases, scenarios or solutions to get someone looking at them to Think, Operate and Respond Differently because they now have the right information in the right context at the right time to take the next action (ask question, navigate someplace, etc).
BSM is about leveraging the underpinning BSM Value Proposition tools in each of their expertise domains. BSM must incorporate what they have to offer, how we navigate into them to get to the lowest level data, how we report at an aggregate level how those things impact higher order business services, applications, processes, activities and ultimately the business goals and objectives.
There’s a whole different approach for scaling this stuff and still getting value from BSM.
Doug
@rafi – no worries, you are welcome here. Just want to get into technical details!
Interesting blog entry exploring the governance side of BTM at CIO magazine:
http://advice.cio.com/david_mavashev/do_cios_really_care_about_business_transaction_management?opgcb=172885