Maximizing Open ESM Tools for BSM Readiness and Value Chain Enhancement

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