In our March 24 and 25 blogs we laid out an architecture covering both infrastructure and application performance management. Although it looks daunting, it really is not if you build the capabilities of incident, availability, capacity and service level management over time. Each capability constitutes a building block that relies on the others to create the structure, and each capability can be applied with varying levels of sophistication or "maturity".
You can't deliver any of the processes to their full extent or rigor from day one. The best way to implement a new process or improve an existing one is to understand where you are on the performance management maturity scale, and assess how well you have mastered your current level. After that you can determine how to advance to the next level. We advocate incremental improvement steps, each adding value to your enterprise, and each easily achievable. The maturity levels start with reactive diagnosis, and proceed through proactive intervention and quality warranty to reach their most sophisticated in portfolio management
Reactive Diagnosis
Reactive diagnosis is the first level of sophistication, and it is the starting point for most enterprises. Reactive diagnosis is the default mode of most operations, and it is characterized by the use of diagnostic tools for fault identification. Often there are more performance issues than can be addressed, leading to problem triage. Reactive diagnosis is fire fighting mode, and it is characterized by few periods free from fires.
Proactive Intervention
Tools that provide historical data and can project probable measurements into the future allow you to implement processes that elevate your enterprise from reactive diagnosis into the realm of proactive intervention. Ongoing measurement, trend analysis, and resource planning enable availability and capacity management. With these capabilities you can detect and correct problems before they affect your IT service users and customers.
Quality Warranty
The next step constitutes a quantum improvement in which you warrant the quality of the service you supply to other parts of your organization or to other enterprises. The supplier-buyer relationship need not be with external vendors - in fact many enterprises support service quality to internal service consumers. The extra work required at this level is often underappreciated, and entails several difficult process steps. Initially service objectives must be stated in terms the consumer can understand, they must be then be related to the consumer's objectives, and eventually - after more terms such as the service level target are defined - a service level agreement can be reached.
Portfolio Management
An enterprise does not rely on one infrastructure technology (column) or one application class (row) [see our March 11 posting for definitions of columns and rows]. It is not unusual for an enterprise to provide SLAs for servers but not the network or desktops. Similarly an SLA may guarantee service of SAP but not email, even though it is used by more employees. Portfolio management is the process of formally defining and operating many - if not all - the business applications and technologies as a group. With portfolio management the enterprise has common information on how well each key IT element supports the business. This enables management to make holistic decisions about investments and changes.
It is useful to identify how high up the performance management maturity scale your enterprise operates, and if you are not where you want to be, to determine what is holding you back.
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