Business Service Management Hub

I have worked with many customers to track service level agreements in their BSM implementation. I can honestly say that there is only one thing that all of the projects had in common: they were extremely difficult.

Now, I was usually called in mid way through the implementation when the decisions had already been made and the schedule was looking impossible. Or even worse, I would become involved after the implementation had been put in Production and the mistakes were already made.

So why are SLAs so challenging to track and manage?

• Have you seen the contracts? In general, I don’t like contracts. I’m not a lawyer, and let’s face it, they can be difficult to decipher. With SLAs, the first thing that needs to be done is take the contract and figure out what exactly was promised. Then determine what underlying data should be used for the calculations. Then figure out how to get that data from the IT devices and put it all together for the service. These steps are crucial to success, and must all be done before implementing the SLA solution.
• It’s just (total time – downtime)/total time… Saying that a service needs to be available 99% of the time during peak hours is easy. Determining the actual availability key metric is more challenging. You need to determine what exactly constitutes an outage, set up calendars for peak hours, and determine any outages that shouldn’t count (should 1 second of downtime count?). The math for simple availability isn’t difficult, but accounting for all of the necessary factors…well, that is more complex.
• So many numbers…so little time. Since computers have existed, engineers have worked tirelessly to optimize performance. There are limitations to what software can do. One must think about the amount of data to be stored and calculated. For instance, if the data for availability is being stored every minute, and the report shows the last two years of availability metrics, oh, and also real-time metrics, this report is going to take some time to calculate and display the results.

These are the main three challenges I see when working with SLA implementations. Now how do we solve these?

1. Know the data before starting. This sounds like a simple task, and most people think they have a good understanding of all of the underlying devices, metrics, relationships that go into defining the service and the key metric for their SLA. No one would want to start implementing a SLA project without knowing all of the ins and outs. Or would they? People often start modeling their services and tying services to SLAs before all of the underlying infrastructure is in place. A thorough understanding of where this data will come from (monitoring software, trouble ticket systems, back-end databases) is critical because the calculation can change due to the type of data.
2. Determine what details can alter the key metric. Like I mentioned earlier, calculating availability is not difficult. However, determining the total time and downtime can be. Take into account the time periods that determine maintenance. Is there a weekly maintenance period? What is “on time”? Also, what sort of data can be ignored? Are there certain outages that do not affect the service’s availability? Don’t be too generic…try to figure out all of the details that contribute to the SLA’s key metric.
3. Be realistic when creating reports. The dashboards or reports are what we really care about. We need a way to show how the SLAs are tracking. We need a nice way to get a quick visual on what might have failed or what is on its way to failing. Putting 1000 services on a single page is probably not the way to go. Let’s also not reinvent the wheel. If your organization has been calculating SLA metrics for years in an external program, use that data. Why spend the extra time to set up the lower level data to feed into a program that is going to do the same calculation?

Tracking and managing Service Level Agreements will continue to take time and effort. It requires buy-in from many different departments and resources, but BSM should and can simplify an SLA implementation.

The Hub Commentary_

It’s the age old question…are IT departments organizing their assets to more effectively deliver valued  services back to the business or are they still organizing for their own convenience based on the technology assets they have gathered along the way?    This Baseline article provides valuable insights to the value of a service-oriented IT organization.

Randy

A service-oriented IT organization that’s built around the business services that IT provides, rather than around its assets or activities, offer real value to the enterprise.  Read full article

There were some funny commercials and some not so funny commercials during the Super Bowl.   The one with Ozzie and Beiber was kind of funny, but I question if the commercial had impact, as in, did it sell something?   If you saw the commercial, which company was the commercial for, what is it that they were selling?

Business Service Management has some of the same challenges.  There are many metrics that IT is watching, but in the end, what is it that they are trying to get out of the metrics, what is it that we are watching in IT?   Does looking at a dashboard with response times mean BSM, does looking at a group of correlated alarms equate to doing BSM, does showing the availability of a database imply BSM… no, but all of it together with even more gets you into the ball park of Business Service Management.

The point is, focusing on the underlying technologies or only specific areas of the enterprise does not allow for IT to have a good understanding of the Services being offered and/or if the Services are up, running and happy.  One of the main objectives of Business Service Management is to have a clear picture of the Services that are being offered to the end customer (internal or external), being able to see the services end to end and understand the overall health and availability.   Don’t allow IT to get distracted by the technology silos, get them focused on the Services being provided to the end users.

Tobin

The Hub Commentary_

The lack of clarity and transparency of IT services as consumed by the business is a catalyst for many of the service providers and as-a-Service offerings.  The service providers are in business to grow and drive revenue as should IT organizations.  Business Service Management practices and knowing your services is first step in achieving this transparency in measuring services both for quality and cost.

For many years IT has pushed back against such transparency and as the article ends, it could work in their favor to provide this visibility to costs.  It’s like cell phone minutes, as long as I’m not paying the bill I just use the phone without regard.  As soon as I had to assess my own usage and purchase my own phone, I had an eye opening experience.  You mean when I was in Europe it was like $2.00/minute and then there was roaming too!  Yikes!  Why didn’t someone just tell me and I would have planned accordingly and may not have used the phone as much or as often.

As long as all services are created equal and there is cool mobile and remote technology to use, the business will continue to ask for the highest levels of service and support for 24×7, where ever I am and on whatever device I choose to use.  If the costs were exposed and the tables turned to ask the questions “what is the value”, we might find the value isn’t really there and the business would say turn that off.  Currently, IT doesn’t have the right to ask the business value question until they can answer the cost question.

Do you know what your services cost and what the value is they deliver?

Michele

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For years, enterprise IT departments could be fuzzy about the costs of individual IT services and applications, but tight budgets and the relative clarity of cloud computing costs have forced CIOs into sharp focus.  (Read Full Article…)

This is not the first article about Business Service Management and cloud computing, and it will certainly not be the last. The one thing I’ve learned about the cloud, both private and public, is that this is new technology, and it is constantly changing. Companies setting up private clouds are adopting different technologies to make their lives easier, while public cloud providers are updating their products and APIs on a regular basis to improve and accelerate the transition. This leads to an exciting, dynamic environment that causes more challenges when implementing a BSM solution…or does it?

How exactly should BSM work with the cloud? Once cloud resources are incorporated into a company’s IT infrastructure, there needs to be a way to tie these virtual/cloud resources into the company’s business service views. Then the health of the business services will reflect all of the IT resources. And voila, problem solved. Now, I have been told I sometimes over simplify things, but when it comes to BSM, I don’t think people should look at “the cloud” as some complex, unknown entity. The cloud should simply provide another data source to be incorporated into a business service view.

BSM is only as powerful as its underlying integrations. How can one look at the availability of a service or the root cause of a service breach unless these metrics are driven by ALL of the underlying IT resources that make up this service? The resources in the cloud should not be treated as different, special data sources. Cloud resources need to be integrated with all of the existing underlying technology that drives the business service. Given how fast cloud computing technology is growing and changing, this will force BSM products to continue to create and enhance their underlying integrations. Of course, this is nothing new for BSM vendors, or any software vendors who integrate to third party software.

The cloud will continue to bring change to BSM, and BSM products will need to grow and evolve along with the cloud technology. But since BSM is based on underlying integrations, BSM is ready to go “to the cloud”.

The Hub Commentary_

Calculating ROI and managing costs in the data center for Business Service Management (BSM) projects is difficult.  In fact, I was asked this question so many times that I put my META Group analyst hat on and said, “Michele, what would Herb tell you to do?”  Yes, the very same Herb VanHook who is featured in the BSMDigest this month.  He would say create a model to calculate it and thus I did.  Anything that improves processes and does not remove people, hardware or software from the environment is really cost management.  This is still a good thing and needs to be recognized and justified and can be done quite simply.

What makes virtualization and cloud computing so appealing in the early stages is that it removes hardware and better utilizes hardware and software licenses and thus has a hard dollar impact early.  So let’s turn the tables, I posted a news piece that spoke of the same costs of outages that I have used for years now – $100,000/hr is what it costs for a mission critical system to be down.  10 hours per year =  to $1M, so Michele, cmon scale it, ok the usual metric is 1-2% of revenue to consider the size of your organization.

The insurance policy is your BSM strategy which is reliant upon the integration platform that brings together the bits of data into a meaningful view as services.  I also venture to guess that most solutions start at <10% of that outage and the automation they bring to the table helps to shift the resource utilization pie in favor of using resources to new and growth projects versus monitoring the screen for events more than paying for itself in it’s early adoption.

I’ll post my ROI calculation method very soon to give you a real idea what you are losing by postponing you BSM practice.

Michele

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Often, IT budget costs appear expensive as a result of being inflated by arbitrary allocation and loading of costs that should be shared or are otherwise improperly assigned. Unfortunately, old habits die-hard and the misallocation of costs continues to the detriment of both the organization and mainframe computing.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

The theme of integration still rings true.  The key to efficiency remains in the ability to get the most out of what you have and pull it all together for that end-to-end view to avoid impact, proactively manage change and take full advantage of agile technologies.  A key to Business Service Management is fundamentally just this integration capability and the end-to-end live view and if you don’t have it, you are no doubt behind the 8 ball.

2011 is the year of Business Service Management and communicating service performance in terms of service and not technology and that will require integration of all the data points you already have in your data center.

Michele

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Improvements and simplification of data center management software, standardization and virtualization of IT hardware and software assets, and improved integration of new technology into existing systems are all proving to contribute mightily to a company’s bottom-line profit.   (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary___

Great read of an inspirational CIO taking advantage of agile technology.  What is missing is how does he manage and measure the workloads in the cloud?  How does he instrument them or does he to make them intelligent to proactively monitor, manage and measure back to the business on the cost and value.

What I find intriguing with many of these articles on the those being successful with the cloud is that only half the story is told, sure they took advantage of the agile technology, but what about the operational side of it too?

I’m all for the adoption and deployment of agile technologies as I am in the long term future for that technology with the operational management that makes it cost effective and valuable in the end.  Another article I posted yesterday indicates the all too common reality of downtime and how it costs on average $100,000/hour of downtime and this has been my experience in working with customers and prospects on Business Service Management projects that proactively monitor, manage and measure services versus technology avoiding downtime.

Real power of the cloud can be short sided if not managed and measured.  How do you measure your cloud?

Michele

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Leave it to Rob Carter, the CIO of FedEx, to clarify what’s really powerful about cloud computing. Carter, the company’s CIO since 2000 and an InformationWeek advisory board member for almost as long, has a knack for discussing technology in a way that cuts to the business payoff, but without leaning on buzzwords that whitewash the complexity involved.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

IT by the numbers and with Business Service Management.  In lean times, we need to get the most out of what we have, look at lower cost alternatives for the commodity and make the investment in the things that will drive value to the business.  Delivering real ROI has been something IT has been notoriously poor at executing because they manage by technology and not by the business service and lack the understanding of the cost / value to the business.

We are entering a time of growth and expansion of technology and the time will come to reimagine IT as business services and manage them as such.  Investing in new, agile technologies also require the right management baked in.  Last week the press was all over the Gartner report dissing Amazon for not providing enough monitoring.  Whose responsibility is it to manage your workloads in the cloud?  Service enabling those workloads and instrumenting them to manage as end-to-end services will be key in taking full advantage of agile technologies and opex subscription services.

Time has come to think in terms of Business Service Management of the infrastructure.

Michele

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You can’t run a company without technology, but you can’t invest in technology without the blessings of the finance department. And thanks to the stagnant economy, the pendulum of power between Finance and IT is swinging decidedly toward the chief financial officer’s door these days.  (Read Full Article…)

The concept of Business Service Management and why it is good for IT (and the business) is reasonably understood by most people.   The reality is that people tend to buy BSM solutions for the features it provides not just on the definition of BSM.   For some organizations, a BSM product is purchased within some type of internal project like ITIL or a Dashboard project.  When it comes down to it, those projects have requirements and they tie to specific features needed in the end solution such as;

• Console consolidation
• Root cause analysis
• Impact analysis
• Service Level Management
• Dashboards
• End to End visualization of Services

The list tends to go on and on.   When it comes down to it, BSM is something that you do within the solution (Managing to the Service, not the technologies), the features and functionality tend to be part of the BSM solution and where the purchasing focus should be.   One of the core features required for BSM is the ability to integrate to many sources.   There are many upon many tools within a large enterprise and many opportunities to pull in specific silo’s of data in order to provide a more complete view to the end users.  Large enterprises need the luxury of swapping out underlying tools/application in the future due to over priced maintenance renewals, bad support, acquisitions, poor software and numerous other reasons.  If the BSM solution is limited or not highly flexible in the ways in which it integrates to third party products, you may be stuck with some of those underlying technologies.

When evaluating BSM solutions, ensure that the solution has a robust integration feature.   Some BSM solutions are only good with integrating with their own companies products, this is a bit limiting.   Ensure that the are a few different options, ie: more than an SNMP trap or CSV import.

Tobin

Earlier this year I suggested a prediction regarding the waning discussion of ITIL and this week I expanded upon that prediction in a post, “ITIL will be the end of ITIL”. The same day I posted my discussion, I received my brochure for the HDI Conference where Malcolm Fry is set to speak on “What’s up with ITIL?”.  The description starts with questions regarding the dying of ITIL, what’s going on, etc.  Defense – first indication that a wave is starting to swell in the market.

I received many great questions and discussion, which still says ITIL is alive and well in the ranks of IT organizations, trainers, consultants, certifying organizations, etc.  I do want to mention again, I do not see the practices and advice dying, going away or becoming replaced, just that the outward facing conversations will and need to stop being about ITIL and need to start being about the business service, value and performance.  ITIL is merely advice on how to manage your internal operations efficiently.

The catalyst in the market is the cloud and the explosive growth of service providers.  They need to have good operational processes in place or they are one outage away from being out of business.  However, the difference is they are not talking about ITIL, they are talking about the benefits to the business and the simplicity of running and subscribing to services in The Cloud.

The business leader has an internal organization  talking about justifying a CMDB project and a cloud provider talking about monthly subscriptions to online purchasing systems at a monthly or usage fee and here is a rate card, use it like a credit card.  Did I just see that leader walk away from the project justification discussion table and walk off into the sunset all googly eyed with the cloud service provider?

Last night I pulled another article from CIO regarding the innovation expectations the business has for its IT organization.  Embrace the development of innovating services and automate the commodity, routine, mundane that merely powers the lights – free yourself to drive growth.

I had a discussion with a very large and mature cloud service provider organization this morning on just the topic of providing the value add transparency on top of their services – the dashboard view that will communicate service performance to their customers.  The providers know that the business wants transparency and the providers want to insure that there isn’t a perception challenge regarding service delivery and the ones that will be most successful are baking it into there infrastructure and services from the beginning.  IT, are you or are you still talking about ITIL?

I’ve digressed, but the example is clear.  Those that sell technology services for a living know how to speak to your business leaders and how to bake proper service monitoring, management, measuring and communication into their services.  Steal a play from their playbook – implement and deliver the communication of service performance and service value into your services and sell your services, not the process of building services.

Are you communicating Service Value by selling the car or are you still selling the parts and directions as to how to build the car?

Michele

In order to understand the overall health of a service, it requires several management tools such as network monitoring (device up/down, switches, etc), device (CPU, Memory, disk) monitoring, application (logs, SNMP, etc) monitoring, etc.  The common approach is to use more than one tool such as EMC SMARTS, IBM Netcool, BMC Patrol, home grown monitoring tools, etc.   Since there are now multiple tools and multiple consoles with health and availability information, the next common approach is to set up some type of cross product integration like forwarding SNMP events out of SMARTS and Patrol into Netcool.   This is a great approach for integrating management tools into a single console, but the problem is, not everything fits (IE: Network Maps in SMARTS, Knowledge Modules from Patrol).

SMARTS does a great job discovering the network, it provides more than up/down events, but most of that information is not sharable to Netcool via an SNMP forwarding mechanism.  Patrol has the same challenge, not everything is going to fit inside of Netcool.  This is not a negative against Netcool, this is the common challenge with all event managers.  Netcool is providing a lot of value around things it is monitoring directly as well as event correlation, de-duplication, etc.

Forwarding events from one management system into another tool provides value, it should not stop there.   A single unified console with a Service Catalog type of view into the infrastructure with direct and indirect feeds from the management tools is the approach for end to end management.   In the end it places all of the important details at the tips of the Operators fingers and in turn reduces the complexity, knowledge required, multiple tools, etc and in turn you should be able to reduce downtime.

Forwarding events from one system to another is not integrated.  Bi-directional interaction (IE: able to receive alarms/events and perform actions such as Ack and Close on them) between the tools as well as an ability to leverage more than just the alarms/events is important.  Don’t settle on event forwarding, leverage the investment you made with the other tools.

Tobin

The Hub Commentary_

Tobin and I had the opportunity to speak with a new friend, Bojan Simic, yesterday of TRAC Research.  We shared thoughts on what is required to deliver Business Service Management (BSM) and help organizations communicate Service Performance thus Value to their organizations.

As Bojan writes in his last BSM post, there are many management tools, each has a strength and in all likelihood you have many in your environment.  In fact, we shared there are those with a half dozen, those with a dozen and those with >2 dozen.  Yes, I said 2 dozen and greater.  Each of these contributes a piece to the story, but what is really required is the integration platform that brings it all together in a single view representing Service Performance.  By Service Performance we mean, it’s availability, performance, volume of business transactions, etc.

The environment is becoming ever more complex and agile requiring the integration and automation that will bring all the data together that allows your IT organization to take full advantage of the best in breed monitoring tools.  With this end-to-end visibility in real-time you can then make sense of what you have, consolidate where necessary and potentially take advantage of lower cost open source options potentially.

The investment is in the integration and intelligent view of the infrastructure.  Where are you investing today?

Michele

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Preliminary findings of TRAC’s end-user survey show that organizations are still struggling to gain full visibility into their IT services and infrastructure. Many of the organizations surveyed are reporting that, even though they made significant investments in new IT monitoring and management tools and increased the amount of performance data that they have on hand, they are still not seeing any significant improvements in key performance indicators (KPI).  (Read Full Article…)

Free Summary – EMA Radar for Business Service Management: Service Impact Q3 2010  – Enterprise Management Associates(Read Full Summary Report …)

So you have a console that has your Business Service Management views.   You set up the views to show the key Services you are providing to your end customer(s) (EMail, Databases,  CRM, etc).  You somehow are bringing in monitoring data in order to light up the service views in order to show some type of condition and health. You figured out how to measure the Service Levels and provide all of these details back to the end users and management in a dashboard.  The question is, how do you maintain it?

If you have been following ITIL, one approach is to integrate the BSM solution with the CMDB solution (assuming they are different solutions).   The CMDB probably has discovery populating it with new CI’s and updates to CI’s.  The CMDB should have inputs to other systems for additional details around the CI’s.   In the end, the CMDB is the location for the factiods around the Services such as all of the CI’s comprising the Service, relationships between the CI’s, current configuration of the CI’s and so on.   If those details are available, why wouldn’t you use it to drive the way in which IT is managing the environment.   As things change within the enterprise, the CMDB is updated and in turn the BSM views should auto-magically update also.

Tobin

If you are reading this, then there must still be some questions in your mind on what Business Service Management (BSM) is, I’m not going to give you the elevator pitch, there are lots of companies with different flavors of those, I’ll take another angle on it that might help.

There is this large shipping company, they ship thousands of packages a day.  One of their critical operations is in a large hanger at an airport.   Planes and trucks are unloading packages and they need to be sorted and loaded back onto different planes and trucks.   There is significant computer automation that moves these packages along their way and in turn, these systems need monitoring.  Having an end to end view of the unloading, sorting and reloading of packages with a realtime update on volume, outages and other metrics is important to them.  Some might say that this end to end view is a very technical view and not BSM, to this shipping company, shipping packages is their business and being able to see this piece of the Service is important.

A large financial firm has many traders, it is important to ensure that all of the trading systems are up and running, network links to the outside world are required for these trades as well as the traders workstations and how well they are performing.  Having an end to end view of the complete trading application with up to date availability, trading volumes and other metrics is important for them to understand if they are making or losing money.

The typical BSM for a company is to be able to set up end to end views of the important corporate applications like EMail or CRM, but that is not the only example of BSM, shipping, trading, manufacturing, banking, there are endless examples of managing the environment in a manner that aligns IT with the business they are in.  By IT leveraging the BSM approach, they are ensuring that they are looking at the things that are important to the business, in turn they are providing value to the business.

Tobin

A true story, names not revealed to protect the innocent and a Dilbert in the making.  An illustration of Business Service Management, rather than a Wiki like definition, of technology impact and calculating costs and value.

Early in my career, green and wet behind the ears, about 8 months into the job working the 4:00 – 12:00 shift solo (the shift where stuff gets done, but not discovered until 7:00 am the next day) in a distributed data center.  You know what I’m talking about and likely already sense the pain that is about to come.  I knew how to run the jobs, I didn’t know what they were really doing or how to fix things if they went wrong – at least not until one fateful summer night.  I was working for an outsourcer processing insurance claims for the customer to pay the beneficiaries.

The Set-up:

I worked my shift, I left at midnight, jobs done, reports printed, tape back-ups done, the girl working midnight was about to have an easy night.  That is until about 6:30 am when she would attempt to bring 3 mainframes online for the next days claims processing.  Yes, she was greeted with more error codes than she knew what to do with, The Boss received an early alarm/wake-up call, I can’t bring Rodney to life (that’s the nick name of each of our mainframes) HELP!!

The Solution – Scavenger Hunt:

I arrive at work at 4 to chaos, looks of anger and irrecoverable damage on your shift yesterday.  I look around, machines are humming and I say it was not irrecoverable, Rodney is up and running.  The phone rings, I answer it, my friend Richard in a distant location, he asks how are you, I say worst day of my life, he says, “it was you!”, meaning he had helped restore service, but no one ratted me out as the root cause.

Richard walks me through my previous night’s shift and what I did and didn’t notice.  I trashed a bunch of  files.  Not a big deal if you have back-ups, which we did, just hang a tape, reload the files and restart Rodney – 5 minutes.

The Cost – my Penalty:

The Boss comes into the data center and waves at me, come take a walk with me.  I figure I’m about to get fired, afterall, the data center was down for 7 hours, not a single claim processed, beneficiaries didn’t receive checks, my company missed an SLA, dozens of people worked 7 hours to fix my mistake, but there was something even worse I was about to experience.  At 20 something, I couldn’t calculate the number of zero’s for the cost of my simple error.

The Boss walks me through a room with the folks that input claims and reminds me they get paid by the claim, meaning the number of claims they key each day.  My simple mistake caused a 7 hour outage, a team of people to find the root cause in order to restore service, my company may have been slapped with a fine, beneficiary checks were delayed, but most heart wrenching to me was that I impacted the paychecks of more than 100 folks that were paid by the number of claims they keyed each day.  As I walked through the room, they didn’t know I was the root cause, but they were glaring at us none-the-less.

The room seemed the length of a football field that day.  As we exited the room The Boss simply said, “are you going to do this again?” and I quickly responded, “I hope you fire me if I do!”.

Business Service Management – claims processing was my business, my company caused an outage of significant cost.  This happens every day, the cost is quite easy to calculate and the insurance policy to mitigate the risk is far less costly, however, as IT professionals we have a difficult time justifying service enabling our data centers with proper management until there is an outage.  A single outage can cost 1-2% of revenue and a solution to avoid it can be a fraction of that cost.

Data centers are growing more complex, virutalization and cloud computing are seen as low cost options by removing hardware and software costs, however, the cost of support is overlooked and we are entering a familiar cycle of short sided savings over long term cost to repeat the dotcom bust of the 90’s with the hosting providers and web services.  Service Enabling infrastracture with an end-to-end view to pinpoint root cause, visibility to read the indicators before impact so that restoration can be minutes – not hours greatly reducing the cost of an outage has to factored into the solution.  By service enabling with management upfront allows you to take risks, be agile with new technology by having the right management in place to monitor for thresholds, errors, etc. avoiding and mitigating outages.

I know my Boss wasn’t really mad that I was the root cause of an outage, he’s was mad that a 5 minute fix relied upon a 7 hour scavenger hunt!  This is my Dilbert – what’s yours?

Michele

Setting up a tool that performs some type of end user performance testing is not enough, it is a type of testing that provides a view of the end user experience of using a part of a specific service.   Adding Service Level Management on top of the testing is still not enough.

Business Service Management is a bit more encompassing, when there are slow response times, which piece of the supporting technology is the culprit, is this something that can (or needs to) be addressed now?   If we were to take this slow database offline in order to address the issue, what impact would that have on the enterprise or end users.  Business Service Management helps with these problems and more.  End user response time measuring is just a piece of BSM, it might be a good starting point, but don’t be fooled, you are not done.

Remember there are several layers in the OSI model and having a health indicator from each of those layers (or several at least) is going to provide a better picture end to end of the health of the service.  The big management tool vendors typically compete against each other, the typical model is rip and replace, they sell you new tools and get you to stop using the old tools… very expensive and disruptive proposition.  Since there is no single vendor that is the best of breed for each of the OSI layers, then a single vendor for the end to end management doesn’t make sense.   It makes more sense to purchase some of the tools to do specific types of monitoring, leverage opensource to monitor some of the other aspects and then roll all of these together into a single end to end view.   This approach allows you the ability to swap out tools when they become dated or when the vendor is trying to hold you hostage at renewal time.

Having a single console that is able to integrate with all of the underlying technologies managing the environment and providing an end to end view is a better way to manage the enterprise, using a response time tool and crossing your fingers that everything will work out is risky.

Tobin