Occasionally I get asked a simple question by IT Operations managers, “Why do I need another monitoring tool? I’m already monitoring all my IT and network technology – what else could I need?”. And then in the next meeting an Executive will ask me “Why are we still only discovering incidents when the customer calls in a problem. Don’t we monitor this stuff ?”
Executives naturally have a world-view oriented around measuring and improving business targets such as customer satisfaction, churn, volume of new customers…etc. They’re generally not interested in megabits per second, memory leaks, or whether the CPU is working at 50% or 90%. Sometimes I hear amusing anecdotes – for example the reaction of a CEO being told that Customer Sat was down due to high loading on the Mediation server CPU.
IT Operations on the other hand live and breathe CPU Utilization, load-balancing, bandwidth, megabits per second and other dark arts. If the servers are up and the applications are responding, then there is often an implied conclusion that all is good in the world.
There is a real language barrier in most organizations between IT and Business departments, and all too often this results in real execution problems that affect customers and revenues.
A coherent monitoring strategy and implementation will play a critical role in building a bridge between these two valid but orthogonal viewpoints. Specifically the ability to monitor Business Activity in terms of key indicators (e.g. data connection set-up time, number porting delay, online ordering, automated fulfilment) extends the view of IT operations to provide assurance that technology is delivering Business Performance targets and not only technical metrics such as those described above.
Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) provides executives with the ability to access real-time business performance metrics. Service Activity Monitoring (SAM) is the IT department equivalent and provides Operations staff with the ability to access real-time service delivery performance metrics, and to associate the service with underlying infrastructure as well as the corresponding business process, transaction, and customer.
In other words, by using products that combine BAM and SAM capabilities, both Business and IT executives have a common viewpoint and shared language. The beginning of the end for “Lost in Translation” costly situations.
July 28th, 2008 at 8:31 pm
Hmm, I’ve never heard of this Service Activity Monitoring (SAM) term before.
The appropriate term is Business Service Management (BSM).
Take a look at what it is here: http://dougmcclure.net/blog/business-service-management-bsm-defined/
Tks,
Doug
http://dougmcclure.net
July 29th, 2008 at 11:29 am
Hi Doug, thank you very much for your comment.
SAM is very different than BSM in many ways. BSM is essentially a meta-data driven correlation between individual pieces of hardware, and the business activities that the hardware participates in, all stored in a big database called the CMDB. And SLAs continue to revolve around things like uptime and other technical KPI’s.
SAM (Service Activity Monitoring) looks at traffic at the application layer. With SAM, you can see how individual technical services operate to deliver a single business transaction. You can measure the performance of a service for all activities, or analyse to see if the service delivers different performance levels for different activities. It’s a very powerful capability that shows IT Operations and Development how the application software is working in real-time, with real traffic.
Obviously, to process the potentially large amounts of traffic, some clever bits are needed. Part of that answer involves using Complex Event Processing (CEP) technology.
Perhaps a further blog post or white paper is required to describe the differences in more detail.
July 29th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
Hi Brian, you are absolutely right by remarking the differences between the SAM and BSM approaches. Actually, the SAM concept can be pushed further in order to have visibility (and SLA-related automated reactions) over every single transaction “emitted” by the services that you mention. As you rightly say, to process large amounts of traffic/transactions implies some clever bits and strong horizontal scalability.
In 2006 we developed a scenario (that interestingly enough we called “TAM” – Transaction Activity Monitoring). It is not my intention to “steal” your blog space with kind-of-ads urls, however you can find some info at the following url http://www.warelite.net/articles/WareLite_Transaction_Activity_Monitoring.pdf
Regards
daniel