Business Service Management Hub

What do you suppose worries businesses about transitioning to a hybrid cloud computing environment — that is one that includes both public cloud services outside the firewall and private clouds inside? Interestingly enough, it’s management, the subject of this Blog.

When asked in recent survey, what worried business most about cloud computing, a whopping 71 percent of respondents answered concerns about managing a hybrid environment. Ironically, according to an IT Pro article citing the survey results, in spite of this, 91 percent of respondents were thinking about a hybrid cloud.

The survey  was conducted by marketing and research firm Vanson Bourne for service provider 2E2.

What these findings show is that there is a huge disconnect between what companies think they want in terms of a cloud solution, and there ability to monitor, manage and deploy it. There is a lack of understanding of how to make sure the public cloud vendors are keeping to their Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and how IT as an organization can keep an eye on the entire organization, even as part of the infrastructure shifts to public cloud services.

There are tools, techniques and systems organizations can put in place that give that vision across systems. While there are limits to managing information outside the firewall, the ability to manage and monitor should absolutely enter into your decision-making criteria when choosing a public cloud vendor.

One other interesting data point found that more than half of respondents, 56 percent, were concerned about “losing control of their infrastructure.” While companies may be right that managing cloud resources is a difficult task, it’s also not impossible and there are tools available to help.

What we seem to be witnessing here is a transformation. In the first phase of cloud computing, IT was resistant. Now it seems to understand that the some form of cloud computing is coming, but there seems to be a lack of understanding, if these results are to be believed, about how to proceed and how to maintain control of the computing environment.

What they have to learn now is that total control outside the firewall is probably impossible, but some semblance of control is certainly well within reach, and there are systems that can help.

Photo by runran on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

The Hub Commentary_

Figuring out  facts from fiction will be key for CIO’s as they map out their cloud computing strategies and justify the investment to their CEOs.  Cloud Computing ROI will be measured in ways far beyond the typical promises of cost savings.  Business Service Management ROI can’t be overlooked as enterprises accelerate their way to the cloud.

Randy

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To borrow from Mark Twain’s famous remark about the weather, everybody talks about the cloud, but nobody knows anything about it. At a time when companies’ use of clouds is just getting started, the chief information officer’s judgment and store of knowledge are invaluable assets. These are especially important when the CIO sets out to educate that most important stakeholder of all, the chief executive officer.  (Read Full Article…)

Business Service Management practices have the greatest chance of success when:

• The solution provides several different views of the same data. The technical team needs a few different views (top down, bottom up, inside out), the end users of the systems (internal or external customers) want to see the services they are using along with the health (email, payroll, etc), management wants to see impacts to the business, revenue related metrics (trade volume).

• Granular security control is needed to control the depth that end users are allowed to drill in as well as controlling which users are able to perform actions such as Acknowledging an alarm.  While the BSM solution must be able to represent the service from end to end, there rarely is a reason to have an executive drill down and look at the performance metrics of a network card on some obscure server.   Showing that a single node of a cluster is down is important to some users, this is useless data to others.

• The solution fully understands health of the Service. Integrating with the JUST the top management tool may provide ‘all’ of the alerts within the environment, it won’t provide easy drill down into the underlying tool reporting the failure in order to get at additional details or command and control, it won’t tell you to fix Service A over Service B, it won’t tell you that if you do not reboot server123 in the next 10 minutes you will breach a critical Service Level.

• Root cause is more than determining the router being down is the root cause of the server being unaccessible. While this is useful information, this type of root cause does not always map to why a Service is down.   Don’t get me wrong, it is very important and needed information.   The team responsible for resolving outages need quick answers, they need to be able to to quickly see within the sea or red alerts that this particular server being down is the reason that payroll is down.  Between this server and the 15 other outages, they might want to work on this server first… it’s payday.

• The end users of the implementation are consulted with to understand their requirements. Just because you can set up the view one way doesn’t mean that it provides value to the end users.  They need easy access to the data, they need quick access to other internal tools (knowledge base, help desk, etc).  The solution needs to make their lives easier.

• Start with an important Business Service, or a single important application or one that keeps the CTO up at night worrying about it.   If you start with mapping the one service end to end (as best as possible without getting stuck in a rabbit hole), get an internal win, ROI, etc., it helps map out the next Services, rally other teams to get involved, etc.   Trying to do every service end to end completely automated, etc is trying to boil the ocean, it’s not going to work.   Sometimes a partial view is better than no view.  Stating small and working out from there is key.

One other reason that I purposely omitted is management buy-in.   I feel that it is important, but to get started, it may not require complete management buy-in.   What I mean is, sometimes management buy in is only needed within your own group or department, other management buy-in is sometimes needed in order to expand the footprint or get additional details.   I’ve seen that come along as the BSM team gets wins under their belt.

Okay, don’t be shy, what are some reasons that Business Service Management worked for your organization (or you think you need for your planned BSM implementation to be successful)?   Dashboards, HA/DR, CMDB, Discovery, ITIL projects…

– Tobin

The Hub Commentary

Do your customers have more visibility into your end-to-end management processes than you do?  You’re probably not alone…

Randy

In dealing with a service provider, I found that I have more visibility into the process they are providing than they do. That’s pretty sad. Part of me wonders if they’ll call me up and say, “David… what do you see from your view? Tell us, because we can’t see the whole thing.”  Read full article

Why aren’t we at Service Level Agreement (SLA) nirvana?  I mean really, we have had SLA tools for 10, 15 years or more.  You probably have 1 or 10 or more tools that measure SLAs, of which most probably aren’t used.  Why aren’t all of our data centers, applications, servers and everything else just numbers on some dashboard that we just glance at to make sure everything is good to go and that we are open for business?  This troubled me so I decided to make a list of some of the possible reasons:

1.  Too many different tools, specialties and areas of focus

You have tools the measure SLAs for the network, different ones for the infrastructure, different ones for virtual machines, different ones for the cloud, and the list goes on and on.  I think this is one of the biggest issues with SLA reporting.  Who wants to look at 3 – 10 different tools to know if they are passing all of their SLAs?  Or who wants to maintain integration into all of those tools to then pull all of that data into one dashboard?  And then what do you do if someone wants to see historical data?  This becomes a very deep and very big hole. So then companies move on to my number 2 reason.

2.  SLA monitoring via trouble tickets

Wow, this is great.  Finally one source for all of our SLA data.  All we have to do is make sure every issue we have gets opened as an issue in our help desk tool.  Right!  The issue eventually happens that you missed an outage and that outage caused you to violate your SLA.  Then the logic pervades the company something like: ‘If our tool missed that SLA, what else is it missing?’  And eventually: ‘We just can’t trust this tool’ or ‘We just can’t trust our monitoring’ etc.  Also, this is dependant on someone putting in the correct data and time.  Not to say they would purposely fudge the numbers but how long would you say something was down that you were responsible for?

3.  SLA status based on Network availability

Ok, we have all been guilty of it.  If you have ever had to guarantee 5 9’s availability, you reported on just the network availability.  Why?  Because you had the data, your data met what was expected ( 5 9’s ) and you could easily report on it.  Did that meet the intention of the SLA?  No, but (insert your excuse here).  When someone that cares about an SLA defines it as 99.999% availability, they truly want to be able to access the application or business function 99.999% of the time not just the network.  This is discussed further in item 5.

4.  Can’t get the data.

Sometimes we just can’t get at the data that we would need in an automated fashion to allow us to have an SLA  defined.  This may be due to  political or technical issues, I am sure you have seen both.  This must be resolved with either the customer pushing for it or someone pushing for the customer.  In the IT world we live in today, virtually all data is accessible with permission and ingenuity.

5.  Technical vs business data

This one is also very common.  You report you are meeting your SLA of 99.999% up time and the customer says, ‘but it is never available when I need to use it.’  Been there?  Why is this?  Because you are reporting that all of the things that you are responsible for technically, are available.  But when the customer goes to use the application or business service, some piece that he uses and you might not be responsible for isn’t functioning or responding in a timely manner, etc.  Does this make your SLA data wrong?  Yes, from a customer perspective (and does anything else really matter?).  Your SLA must be looked at from the business point of view as much as possible.  Now, you won’t be able to take into account the customer’s home network being down and then having that blamed on you, but if you have enough data showing the service was available from a business point of view, you will be able to push back on them.

What do I mean about monitoring the SLA from a business point of view?  Well, it means a few things and these will change depending on how your customer uses the service.  Through put, response time, transactions processed per time period, synthetic transaction, functional status of all single points of failure for the service.

6.  Data is too bad

When you do get everything monitored and all of the data in one source, sometimes the data is just too bad.  Instead of 5 9’s, you’re showing 5 7’s.  So instead of showing this to the customer or management instead you (insert your excuse here).  This issue can be overcome by either going into the underlying tools and fixing the monitoring to only report outages when they are outages or by fixing your applications and infrastructure.

7.  SLA’s just a punishment tool

I have seen this in many different companies.  You struggle to meet the SLAs and whenever you miss, here comes the stick.  This will then motivate you to either fix the issues or quit reporting.  Too often I have seen the later.  This doesn’t have to be.  Used correctly SLAs can be a carrot and a stick. They can allow you to qualify exactly what is part of the SLA and what hours you are responsible to meet the SLA, thereby reducing/eliminating penalties for off hours and devices that aren’t part of the service or not in you control and then allow you to better meet the SLA for the true service times.  SLAs need to have the carrot to be managed effectively.

As we have remained in a reactive mode for many years, now is the time to turn that around into proactive and aligning with the objectives of the business.  In the next post we’ll talk about how you turn this around and stitch together a successful Service Level strategy.

What would you add to this list of challenges?

Lee Frazier

The Hub Commentary

We’ve all had to “do more with less” in ever changing IT environments.  Cloud computing offers up an encouraging promise that we can actually “get more for less”.  But more of what?  Access to more applications, more compute power, more flexibility, more agility and certainly more innovation.

Randy

Cloud computing is more about agility, cost control and being able to do things previously impossible rather than increased productivity doing what the organization has always done.  Read more

The Hub Commentary

SaaS is a delivery model and all services delivered by IT need to be categorized for their cost and value to the organization and the then the delivery model mapped to the service.  Highly custom, competitive advantage, differentiating services are not well suited for outsourced or SaaS delivery models.

Those services that are not unique to your organization and less integrated are very well suited for SaaS and outsourcing.  While you are likely offering a premium service to your organization, it is not necessary and outsourcing is just the ticket to standards and right sizing the service.

Many IT organizations hang on to the commodity because they have resources that can do it.  Just because they can do it, doesn’t mean they should do it.  Use your expensive in-house resources for the mission critical, unique, revenue driving services and shift the routine, commodity out of house.

ITSM and monitoring has often been something that could be offered as a service removing the infrastructure and the requirement for you to maintain resources that have knowledge of monitoring tools rather than you mission critical services.  We are fast approaching the day where much of the management is commodity and should be outsourced.

Are you right sourcing your IT management?

Michele

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Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is more than just a cloud-based delivery model. It is a service approach that IT organizations are considering for meeting their IT service management needs. With a SaaS model, IT organizations can focus their staff and infrastructure on high-priority activities and initiatives while still enjoying access to IT service management productivity solutions.  Read more

The Hub Commentary_

I respect my friend JP, however, on this post I might have to push back a bit.  Business service management isn’t really a single tool, nor is it ITIL, but the practice of aligning infrastructure as services to facilitate the cost and value discussion.  That takes bringing many data points together to understand the infrastructure in a logical manner.

Discovery is a nice automation for input into knowing what you have and relationships, however, I have found there are many types of discovery.  Some are good at physical devices and configurations, others read network topology maps, some sniff network traffic and others listen to ports and communication between devices.  All add relevant pieces to the puzzle, but none are BSM or the CMDB.

It takes an integration platform to bring it all together, make sense of it and provide the best early warning view possible to mitigate risk prior to changes and in live environments.  It also could include business data and volume of transactions or value of those transactions to illustrate value of business impact at a point in time raising or lowering risk based upon true business impact.

Many tools have something to contribute to the practice of Business Service Management and it is the organization that can piece them together in the manner that best meets the needs of their business that becomes successful.

How do you define Business Service Management?

Michele

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I have in the past lamented the evolution of BSM into more of an ITIL support solution than the pure IT management project that we embarked on seven years ago. In the early years of BSM, we all were convinced of the importance of application dependency discovery: It was the bridge between the user, who sees an application, and IT, which sees infrastructures.   (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary…

Several good  insights into effective ways to quantify the cost, quality, and value of IT in a way the business understands.

Randy

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Recently, we brought together 60 CIOs and IT leaders from the Fortune 1000 for our bi-annual “CIO Technology Business Management Council” meeting. The purpose of this event was to provide participants with an opportunity to learn from their peers about how to transform their IT organization into a services oriented organization and run “IT like a business.”  Read full article

I’ve seen a bit in the news about support, the consumerization of devices in the workplace and virtual desktop infrastructures that has brought this post together.  We seem to ebb and flow with new toys in the workplace and standardization of support.  The plain truth is that the standard environment is the most cost efficient.  If the role did not dictate that a given device be provided by the company to the individual, why would we assume we must support it?  I understand it did not come with a capital expenditure and made the employee accessible, if they choose to be, however, it does carry a significant cost burden that is often overlooked.

Service and support is commodity.  It is something that can and should be easily outsourced and the service provider will either standardize the support or will tax the customer for the varying types of devices that are supported.  I know that sounds harsh, but in these days where we should be seeking to spend less on operating and more on innovating this is one of the easiest and biggest cost saving area.  In most IT Operations budgets, the service and support function represents about 10% of the budget.  Tools no longer need to be in-house and custom if the business would rather not outsource, there are good SaaS offerings on the market to at least alleviate the burden of supporting the tools, paying the big boys maintenance taxes and paying for customized support of a commodity function.

I’ll make another bold statement, we care too much about the “end user” for the wrong reason.  No one outside of a data center even really knows what an “end user” is, but we all know who is our customer.  IT has to make this transformation to drive business growth and this is one of those starting places in knowing who is really the customer.  Whether or not our “end user” in the business is really happy or not with IT services is a debateable point.  The most important factor is whether or not we are able to transact business and support our buying customers that grow the business.  This is the mindset shift that needs to occur.

So supporting the latest version of iPhone from whichever provider and carrier and how happy our “end users” are when we re-image their machine because it is far cheaper to re-image to standard than figure out what they downloaded that broke something.  It’s about keeping the business productive, growing and making the customer of our goods and services happy and buying.  We should be automating the operations and shifting this attention, focus and resources on the growth side of the see saw.

I know this post is a bit controversial.  This is something that happens with each new toy that comes to market and budgets loosen, we forget the good efficiency practices we put in place in lean times.  I’ve answered hundreds of inquiry calls on this subject just before this function gets outsourced, the services are cheaper because the service provider will impose a standard and tax for the luxory.  We should be doing the same with good business service management practices shifting our focus and resources to the growth of business.

Are you taxing for the non-standard or spending more reacting and maintaining?

Michele

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Network World — Cost-saving technologies remain a priority for IT in 2011 and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), with its ability to streamline operations, is one of the technologies at the top of the list.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

Open Source is gaining in adoption.  I find this part of the business service management swell and transformation trend to evaluate the automation and driving down of operational costs to focus on the use of technology to drive business growth.  Just look at “Watson” on Jeopardy, powered by SUSE Linux.  It’s the Watson analytics that is relevant, not the cost of an operating system to drive it.

This same transformation will cut across the whole of the IT commodity monitoring and support functions with SaaS service and support tools and open source monitoring tools that have been on the market for quite some time and proven stable.  If you aren’t leveraging it, I guarantee your competition is using it.  It’s time for IT transformation and re-thinking that which is commodity and that which drives and differentiates your business.

Have you stopped paying the Big Boys the taxes to monitor your command center yet?

Michele

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Vendors of proprietary software are fond of warning potential customers that open source software isn’t ready for business, typically citing subpar features or a higher total cost of ownership (TCO).  (Read Full Article…)

Tonight we’re gonna manage like it’s 1999.  I was introduced to a prospect today that made me feel like I was in a timewarp.  I was given of of those old school 400 question RFPs  which called for in-depth answers about Event Management – and I mean everything about it, correlation, rules, weighting, etc.  I had two reactions: isn’t this a “done” topic? Hasn’t Netcool been doing this so long that IBM bought them years ago to replace that dreadful T/EC? Couldn’t you have used the time and resources to put together this treatise to just download open source Zenoss and give it a try?

I know I shouldn’t be snarky about customers, but imagine you are a car dealer and someone comes in and wants to know every minute detail about the workings of a seatbelt. Wouldn’t you say “it’s a seatbelt, you click it and it holds you in”?  My next reaction was, “what does this have to do with Business Service Management (BSM)?” and the answer I got was “well, we want the events to be on a dashboard, that’s the BSM part”.  So now BSM = webpage front end?

We asked about managing from a business perspective, for example, if they are an insurance company perhaps managing the availability of claims processing, as opposed to servers and network segments and then spoke of setting service levels based on the business process as opposed to a server being up 99.xxx% of the time?  Actually, my point is that many of us that live and breathe BSM take if for granted that IT shops are up-to-date simply because we strive to stay ahead of the curve with BSM.

Here’s a quick definition, courtesy of Wikipedia.  “Business service management (BSM) is a methodology for monitoring and measuring information technology (IT) services from a business perspective; in other words, BSM is a set of management software tools, processes and methods to manage a data center via a business-centered approach.” Oh, and here’s a link to download open source Zenoss for monitoring, it might save you from having to write a 400 question monitoring rfp:  http://community.zenoss.org/community/download

I find more and more customers taking advantage of the open source technologies and consolidating at the monitoring level to remove costs in order to invest in the business service view.  The dynamic and distributed nature of the environment makes it nearly impossible to understand the monitoring events in terms of business impact without technology to map and present it as a single-pane-of-glass view.

I hope you enjoy my little humor for the week.

Phil

The Hub Commentary_

Business Service Management practices need to be baked into the workloads as they are configured and deployed just as you would instrument applications and hardware as it is deployed into production environments.  The difference in this situation is that the workloads are a bit more dynamic and potentially paid for with a subscription on outside infrastructure.  Management to decommission workloads is as important as deploying additional resources during peak periods to monitor costs appropriately.

Management practices are often the last applied when moving or changing services into production.  However, in order to be properly instrumented for monitoring and management, the management must be planned and implemented during the planning and configuring stage in order to properly test and move to production.

How intelligent are your workloads?

Michele

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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”.

As an end user within an organization, I require a dashboard that I can log into from time to time to see the Services that are offered to me and the health of the services that I currently am using.   There are pieces of this that fall into the Service Catalog arena, but in the end, these services need managed.

The Service Management console needs to be able to slice and dice the infrastructure into the components of the individual services being provided to the end customers.  It should provide a view based on the role the person plays within the organization.  As an end user, I should see the services I can sign up for and the services I am already signed up for.  As a manager, I should be able to see the services that my team is using and the availability of those services.

End Users do not and should not be required to know the servers, routers, NAS, etc supporting a particular service.  To them, it is EMail, CRM, Timesheet and a slew of other Service offerings.  The IT group needs to manage the services in the same way.   When users open tickets, it’s on the service, not the technologies supporting the service.  Business Service Management makes the focus of the management on the Service and the technologies supported them.

Tobin

Business Service Management can provide a single pane of glass across any environment:  public/private cloud, virtual and physical – How important will this be as we move to the cloud?

I heard a great quote a couple of months ago: “Every company in the IT industry with revenue of less than $100m is currently changing their strategy to focus on the cloud.” If you combine that assertion with the fact that every company in the IT industry with revenues over $1 billion is modifying their strategy to make it “cloud-enabled” or “cloud-ready”, it becomes difficult to support the naysayers who are claiming that the cloud is just a fad. It’s here to stay whether or not you want to accept it.

So the question for this audience becomes “What does that mean for Business Service Management?” From my experience with a very large service provider who is aggressively moving into the public/private cloud space for their internal operations as well as their external customers, Business Service Management becomes a necessity instead of a nice to have. Adoption of the cloud exacerbates the technical challenges that spawned the BSM industry in the first place: namely IT heterogeneity, physically/geographically dispersed data centers and the need for IT organizations to provide higher levels of service at lower costs. At the most simple level, the ability to co-locate two virtual machines on one physical server cuts costs in half. However, this cost savings brings along complexities in terms of resource sharing, how the virtual machines got provisioned to the box, how they are being independently and jointly monitored and how they will be managed moving forward. Additionally, cloud adoption may very well increase the number of systems management tools that an IT organization needs to deploy, manage and monitor.

The ability to provide IT operations and management a single pane of glass view into all of these complexities, focused on the most critical business services, becomes necessary to ensure that the costs of these complexities do not overcome the costs savings enjoyed through virtualization.

How are you measuring your services in the cloud?

Kevin

The Hub Commentary_

Management instrumentation required, service enable during development.  New technology getting ready for production, but not ready for production creates the virtual stall.  Service enabling, instrumenting and an integration strategy will keep management on track.  Old management tools are no going to provide the data required for virtual infrastructures.  It will be a combination of the virtualization and traditional management tools that will provide the end-to-end view through an integrated strategy that will break the stalemate of the virtual stall.

Michele

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We’re hearing a lot about “virtual stall” these days. Supposedly, this is what happens when too many virtual machines clog up both physical infrastructure and traditional management systems, bringing productivity to a halt. This places an artificial cap on the amount of virtualization the typical enterprise can handle, and, by extension, its ability to leverage cloud technology.  (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

The Hub Commentary_

IT, what are you waiting for?  Compete with the Service Providers today!  This is the year to re-tool and invest in your data center of the future.  The Service Providers are – Are you?

Michele

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New equipment purchased in 2011 is eligible for 100% bonus depreciation as part of 2011 tax legislation.  (Read Full Article…)

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