Links that I have found interesting for April 7th:

• IT Ops or IT Slops? Definitions Matter: Part One – ** May be some good stuff to harvest from Kevin's series here for the BSM Strategy and next generation IT Org/Ops. **

  The basic definition of Operations is “The act of harvesting value from resources”. More specific to IT I believe that IT operations represent our collective approach (strategy) and tactics (tasks, instructions, and programs) designed to prevent outages and interruptions to the IT services that existing business operations depend on.

• Monitoring Best Practices – I remember back in the days one of my first IT jobs. It was a fancy institution. One that the others followed in terms of technology. I am not sure how they are doing today but back then, it was like this

  They were monitoring. Yes they were. We would get alerts at all times, all day and all night. Most of the times we had no idea what the alert was for. But we had to respond since we were on call and we carried the cool Beeper.

  They made the biggest mistake, they didn't ask themselves one simple question Why to monitor?, If they did the answer to that question was. “ We want to monitor so that we get an alert on every single event” So they did what many IT shops do, monitored everything. Back then I really didn't understand how wrong this was. To me that was just one cool IT shop.

  This never happens in your IT shop right? How many of us find ourselves monitoring just the default installation? So we have a great monitoring solution installed, now what?

• Managing BUM expectations – Network World – Assuming that the IT organization can get over that cultural hurdle, the next challenge is not to identify the critical applications, that is usually pretty straight forward. The next challenge is how does the IT organization market this information? Does it, in an attempt to ‘align IT with business’ tell the company’s business unit managers (BUM) which of their applications and services are deemed to be critical and which are not? That approach leaves the IT organization vulnerable to pushback from the BUMs that all of their applications are critical. Analogously, asking a BUM to identify which of the applications that support their business are not critical, may not be the best approach.
• Are SLAs worthwhile? – Network World – That raises a critical question: If the SLAs we get from our WAN service providers are not that useful, what are we going to do differently with our internal SLAs to ensure they make a difference? Put another way, in 2009 IT organizations do not have the time or the resources to go off and create SLAs merely as a check-off item because some senior IT executive or industry pundit thought it was a good idea.
• Establishing SLAs for key applications – Network World – ** Hmm, something feels off in this…***

  We believe that all IT organizations offer internal SLAs and that the only question is, “Are those SLAs explicit on implicit and which is better for the IT organization?”

  We further believe that IT organizations will be more successful if the SLAs are explicit and if they are crafted along lines that the IT organization feels comfortable it can meet. With that in mind, we recommend IT organizations get started crafting those SLAs but that they do not discuss this activity outside of the IT organization until they have implemented the infrastructure changes, management tools and processes they need in order to be able to successfully meet the metrics contained in the SLAs.

• AmberPoint Introduces Business Transaction Safety Net – ** Like what they are doing here!! Great sounding BTM Innovation! **

  AmberPoint's next-generation Business Transaction Management (BTM) solution introduces the Business Transaction Safety Net™ which includes Active Transaction Recording, the Transaction Search Engine and facilities for extending BTM to custom applications. AmberPoint traces each transaction end-to-end across complex application streams such as claims processing, user provisioning or procurement systems, discovering any transaction failures and quickly isolating the root cause.

  Utilizes a non-invasive "message fingerprinting" approach to dynamically trace transactions as they flow through composite applications—in real time.
  * Enables orgs to establish SLAs for tranx and manage their systems to meet those goals
  * Real-time alerting for lost, failed, non-compliant and fraudulent tranx
  * Can be applied to any variety of application component—not just services, but anything that can process a message

• The Amber Point: Vendors & Rants – This week we are announcing some truly unique capabilities in the area of Business Transaction Management. Having announced SLA Management and Exception Management for business transactions in the past, we ran into many customer scenarios where proactive detection of problems was next to impossible. Software systems always find a way to surprise you!

  That’s why we’re rolling out an end-to-end Transaction Saftey Net™, a rich set of capabilities that help organizations manage the risk of their business transactions.

• Illuminata » The 90/10 Attack on Systems Management – Watch This Space If you want the utmost in functional refinement and depth from management tools, you’ll find that in the commercial alternatives, not here. These are all about what ManageEngine calls its 90:10 promise: “90% of the features of the Big 4 at 10% of the price.” You can argue whether the proportions are really 90/10 or 80/5 or 85/20. What’s clear is that it’s a very different approach than full-feature/full-price competition.