* New trends in automated business service management minimize the FUD factor
Management products have been around for a long time but, to date, haven’t made much of a dent in overall IT administration costs. As products improve, infrastructure becomes increasingly complex, with each balancing out the other. Recent announcements of intelligent business service management products, such as ProactiveNet 7.0, CA-Wily Introscope 7, and BMC Atrium, may start to turn that tide, and the day may come when IT support personnel can actually take occasional weekends off. Intelligence and self-learning are increasingly being driven into automation, making a handoff of monitoring and support from humans to technology more and more realistic.
ProactiveNet CTO and Co-Founder, Atul Garg, was the original architect for HP OpenView. Building on his years of experience with HPOV and other products, his group designed ProactiveNet to be predictive and proactive. ProactiveNet gathers data by watching end-to-end transactions as they traverse the infrastructure. Built-in intelligence enables it to see the transaction from the end-user perspective and to link transactions to underlying infrastructure. ProactiveNet provides an “early warning system” by applying sophisticated algorithms to stored data points to proactively notify of impending problems based on past behavior. Its rolling baselines help organizations to understand levels of service being delivered and to formulate service-level agreements (SLA).
CA-Wily (CA acquired Wily in January) announced Introscope 7 in May. Introscope is Wily’s flagship Web application management product, and calculates and stores rolling performance baselines that are used both for trending and for thresholding. These baselines help cut product configuration time by monitoring “normal” performance and configuring notification thresholds accordingly. Introscope also extends reporting to IT technologists and business managers, and associates performance issues with the cost of their impact. Introscope’s focus on providing detailed root-cause information helps less-expert users to troubleshoot much more effectively.
BMC’s product line has been significantly re-engineered in the past eight to 10 months, resulting in Atrium, a tightly integrated product set built around BMC’s newly federated Atrium CMDB 2.0. BMC leverages ITIL-based products and workflows to provide end-to-end business service management. The integrated product monitors the infrastructure, forwards notifications to the Service Impact Management module, checks predefined policy for a response and, if appropriate, automatically opens up a trouble ticket. The system can prioritize tickets based on SLAs and link tickets with predefined, automated actions. For example, it can provision virtual environments in response to rising utilization or execute a “workaround” solution for known problems. Closed-loop client management automates the change lifecycle by following the provisioning process from request, through the authorization and implementation cycles, then to verification using BMC’s Automated Discovery technology. Further, all activities are logged, providing an accurate audit trail.
These products are providing “next generation” support options to IT organizations willing to take advantage of them. While support teams have eagerly embraced notification products, they have traditionally been reluctant to relinquish control over remediation, mainly due to lack of visibility to actions being taken. Today’s policy-based, audit-friendly products specifically address this concern, and may prove to be the “missing link” that will begin to move intelligently automated solutions, as well as remediation, into the mainstream.
