These are my links for October 7th through October 8th:

• Measuring End-to-End SLA Metrics – One of the discussions I have with clients is how to identify the right SLA metrics. My advice is that the best SLA metrics look at end-to-end services, and measure how they are delivered. The idea is to consider the service as a ‘black box’ – look at the business outcomes and then how the business outcomes should be measured. So instead of measuring components of the service – servers, applications, internal processes, we measure the service which the customer receives.
• ServiceFrame™ // Service Level Agreements, SLA Management Tool, Manage SLAs, SLA Templates – New SLA player
• The Great Business Divide – Much is made over the historic divide between IT and the business, but the great divide that nobody ever seems to want to acknowledge is the divisions within the business that conspire to make a holistic IT approach to the business almost impossible.
• Compuware buys Web application management vendor Gomez | Applications – InfoWorld – Compuware said Wednesday it has agreed to acquire Web application management vendor Gomez for $295 million. The transaction is expected to close in November.

  Gomez's technology will work in concert with Compuware's portfolio of tools for managing the performance of on-premises applications, providing coverage "from the datacenter to the customer," the companies said in a statement.

These are my links for October 5th through October 7th:

• Tech Horizons: OpTier, A Step Toward Business Service Management (BSM) 2.0 by Jean-Pierre Garbani – Forrester Research – BSM is firmly established now as a way to manage IT as a business tool rather than as a collection of fragile technologies.

  However, the problem of properly managing the technology to achieve the required quality of service is still important, if no longer visible. OpTier's fundamental proposition is to expand on the fundamental concept of managing services from the business perspective by providing visibility into the individual transactions that compose a service. This mapping of services to infrastructure technologies provides IT with the ability to not only understand the service level received by business users but also pinpoint accurately where problems are and communicate with the business, armed with clear and documented facts. This should make IT more efficient by improving the quality of service while reducing costs. As such, we believe that OpTier is a solution that represents the next step in the evolution toward the next generation of BSM tools.

• The Forrester Blog For Vendor Strategy Professionals – Compuware announces this morning their intention to purchase Gomez, one of the two major forces in web application monitoring services (the other one being Keynote). This is a very interesting and potentially game changing move in both the end user experience monitoring and the application performance management (APM) markets.
• CFOs: Questions to ask your CIO about Cloud Computing – Cloud Storage Strategy – • Is there a strategy to use cloud computing as part of the IT services mix? Companies need to take a "business service management" approach – only in reverse. That is to say, they map out their "mission critical business processes" and leave them alone! Instead, they look to outsource non-critical IT tasks to cloud computing service providers who are better equipped to execute them, which frees up the internal IT organization to focus on business critical processes.
• Free Real User Measurements | End-User Experience Monitoring – There are a large number of products on the market today that analyze end-user response time data in different ways, you may know these solutions as; Real User Monitoring (RUM), Customer Experience Monitoring (CEM), Real Experience Monitor, Quality of Experience (QoE) and End User Experience Monitoring. They all accomplish the goal of mesuring the end-user experience and total round trip time for a single transaction, they tell you that you have a problem… What they do not do is tell you WHERE the problem is.
• myDIALS Integrates Business Intelligence Application With NetSuite’s Cloud Computing Platform – "By delivering timely, relevant information and analysis suitable for all employees, myDIALS helps users to improve performance of critical business processes," says Wayne Morris, myDIALS CEO. "For example, myDIALS lets users drill into Key Performance Drivers (KPDs), as well as the more typical Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), to determine the root cause of the problem. With the combined myDIALS and NetSuite solution, customers can now reap the benefits of an integrated SaaS delivery model." With myDIALS' highly visual, interactive dashboards and "every person analytics" tools, employees can constantly monitor performance, identify and characterize performance problems, make rapid decisions and take corrective action to fix issues. This includes a drilldown tree consistent with each user's role to show where the user is in the analytics process, as well as intuitive display of metrics as bar charts and other graphics, rather than cumbersome spreadsheets of statistics.
• A "Bird’s Eye View" of Your Business Transactions (For Free, Too) – Business IT Buzz Blog – The company is taking a new approach to application management (now usually called transaction management) with the SharePath RUM, its enterprise-class Real User Measurement (RUM) tool.

  And the best part is, whereas other RUM tools are typically priced at 100-150K, you can get this one for free.