* Opticom’s distinctive approach to service management
Opticom has always operated on the basis that understanding the financial and business impact of delivering a successful service ought not to require labyrinthine provisioning.
In fact, Opticom’s products have always yielded high levels of automation and relatively facile deployment – in many cases delivering useful initial results within hours of installation. Opticom also was early to recognize the relationship between assets and “performance” – for instance, linking brand-related data on mean time to repair and mean time between failures. It has historically been network-centric, but it offers inventory capabilities for pretty much any device with an IP address.
This summer, with iView 5.0, Opticom introduced a capability for discovering application infrastructures by leveraging the discovery capabilities of products such as OpenView, Spectrum, SMARTS and NetView. More specifically, Opticom has introduced a series of “Application Discovery Dictionaries” that exploit iView’s existing correlation and data-mining capabilities to capture the relationships among applications, servers, network devices and transport services. Business processes can also be mapped across the infrastructure.
An Application Discovery Dictionary ships with rule entries for more than 50 applications including BEA’s WebLogic, Oracle, SAP, Siebel and Microsoft’s SQL Server, Exchange and IIS. It even supports management-specific applications such as HP OpenView Network Node Manager, Aprisma Spectrum or IBM Tivoli NetView, and security applications such as Symantec Antivirus. The Dictionary can easily be extended to support other applications by adding an entry to the application database and following Microsoft guidelines; for example, adding itself to the Add/Remove Programs registry so the Host Resources MIB gets populated.
Historically, Opticom has focused on the Service Delivery processes within the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). Opticom’s capabilities include Continuity Management for projecting risks to service delivery based on usage and capacity; Availability Management for assessing brand-based or component metrics on availability; Financial Management for mapping asset performance and asset utilization to cost in the delivery of a service; Capacity Management for addressing under- and over-utilized infrastructure components (the ability to accurately capture underutilized ports has been a big crowd-pleaser); and Service Level Management for addressing service and business impact.
In keeping with this ITIL focus, the new capabilities for application infrastructure discovery and dependency mapping provide asset-to-inventory reconciliation that is supportive of ITIL’s definition of a Configuration Management Data Base (CMDB). This concept is beginning to come into prominence. In the ITIL model, the CMDB becomes a critical enabling resource for other management applications, such as change management, capacity and availability management, and service-level management.
The customers I have spoken with appreciate the new application discovery and dependency mapping because they can shorten the time it takes to create meaningful and accurate service-level agreements – from weeks to minutes, in some cases. This is again in keeping with Opticom’s traditional emphasis on automation and relative ease of deployment and administration.
Opticom’s approach is laudable and heralds much that’s needed if such concepts as business service management and on-demand computing are really going to take off.
However, like all products, Opticom’s iView is also limited – in some respects by design. In terms of granular information for troubleshooting and trending, iView remains network-focused. And its metrics are focused on availability, with more limited detail on performance and responsiveness. But Opticom is a clear leader – and in many respects the best single example I can think of – in recognizing that the future of service-level management resides ultimately in understanding relevant infrastructure assets and their contributions to the services and business at hand.
Comparing Opticom with traditional asset management is like comparing statistics that list an Olympic team in terms how fast they run and how high they jump vs. just listing their height, eye color and weight. Understanding asset performance will assist in everything from troubleshooting to planning and can bring real dollars-and-cents empowerment to making IT investments.
