Where’s the Beef?

1. Where’s the Beef? Are Open ESM Tools BSM Ready? How can the community move up the value chain? How can everyone improve? Doug McClure http://dougmcclure.net

2. Thoughts • Are current Open ESM tools capable of enabling BSM? • Can current Open ESM tools instrument for BSM at the source? • Can current Open ESM tools help assess the impact on the business, service, application, transaction, process?

3. Thoughts • Can current Open ESM tools provide a robust business service, application, transaction modeling capability? • Can current Open ESM tools speak “business”? • Can they rise above the low level domain specific metrics, KPIs? • Can current Open ESM tools pull off an executive or LoB look and feel?

4. Thoughts • What about Visualization? Dashboards? • Reporting, charting and graphing choices are plenty • Is BIRT the answer for historical? • What about real-time / near term historical? • Where will the next Open ESM innovation be? • Can Open ESM tools (and incumbents) move beyond the “Google Maps” sex appeal?

5. Industry Opportunities • “SMDB” for the monitoring tools group • CMS, Wiki, Request/Workflow Engine • Cross platform, datasource, event source modeling • Cross platform, vendor ESM configuration management, provisioning, documentation

6. Industry Opportunities • Event profiling – why on earth do companies have 100000’s of events that never get touched, never actionable? • Solution for consuming the event stream, analyzing it, looking for trends, patters or gaps, making recommendations for tuning tooling, thresholds, gaps in monitoring for a system, application against a golden standard, etc. • Something similar but different than ProactiveNet (BMC), Netuitive, Integrien, etc.

7. Industry Opportunities • Visualization – what can we take from Web 2.0, RIAs, etc. to get the right visualizations with the right ease of use at the edge • Is AJAX the answer? What’s next? What’s easier? • What about portals?

8. Industry Opportunities • BSM at the Edge, Edge Enabled Dashboards • RSS, Pipes, Gears, Aggregators, Pipelines/Factories for collecting edge data • Every desktop becomes the publisher of content into the BSM (or BI, BAM) model to drive visualizations and dashboards • Why? The real insight is being kept in Excel spreadsheets, not the central tool or data warehouse! • Spend a day/week with the persons or groups that create the weekly/monthly/quarterly management reports or other reports/scorecards that get sent up the IT or business site • What are they doing? What data sources are they using? What tools are used? • All of this can and should be automated and become a fundamental part of a BSM solution • If they trust this more than they trust your tools, GUI, reports, BSM solution, etc., you’re NOT PROVIDING VALUE

9. An Example BSM Readiness Assessment

10. Conceptual BSM Solution/Capability Readiness Assessment • Capable of implementing the BSM foundations • Ease of implementing and maintaining the BSM foundations • Operational Value OOB • IT MGMT Value OOB • Executive/LoB Value OOB • “Sixth Sense Test”

11. Ease of Implementing BSM Foundations • Instrumentation for BSM at the source in addition to normal stuff • Template or profile of any/all monitoring with BSM in mind • Customization of events and notifications to fully communicate impact on business services, applications, transactions, etc • “Speaks” business language as well as IT • Visualization – end user configurable dashboards, data driven widgets, visually appealing, lots of white space • Charting, Graphing, Reporting – Real-time, near real time, link out to historical • “One Green Dot” Aggregation – modeling, dependencies, relationships, rollups

12. Ease of Maintaining BSM Foundations • Automation • Tie into enterprise IT process tools (change, configuration, asset, discovery) • Autodoc • Versioning • Easy incremental dev, test, release process • Responsive support organization or community

13. Operational Value Out of the Box • Does it help Operations, Support or other SMEs to identify the specific problem? • Help them accurately assess, understand and prioritize the issue? • Help me do my job better? (less work, more automation, less repetition, fewer clicks, fun to use, personalized) • Communicate a “real” message rather than 95% CPU is Utilized?

14. IT Management Value Out of the Box • Does the solution help the IT Manager do their daily job? • Can it help them manage their boss? • Can it keep them off the “firefighting” calls? • Can it provide real value? • Something they “depend” on and “must have” or just another tool with a pretty picture? • Can they make decisions or take action from what’s shown? • Help with the non-IT stuff like managing employees, workload, ITSM processes (change, release, incident/problem mgmt)?

15. Executive/LoB Value Out of the Box • Can it “speak” business? • KPI, KPM, Transactions, Revenue, Cost, Lost Sales/Revenue, Trends, Reports, etc. • Can they manage the business service? • Does it provide real or perceived value? • Can it warn them of potential problems before they occur? • Can it keep them off the “firefighting” calls or from having angry clients? • Does if “feel” professional, have lots of white space, easy to consume?

16. The “Sixth Sense” Test • Does it “feel” right? • If something is “green” on the dashboard, do they really believe it? • Would I put my [name|job|bonus] behind it? • Is the value apparent and believable?

17. Thanks & Q/A Join the conversation at http://dougmcclure.net