The evolution of enterprise monitoring has evolved greatly in recent years by focusing on the service being delivered to the Business rather than the health of the underlying IT infrastructure. We have ITIL and ISO20000 frameworks and certification to learn how to align the services to Business needs, and we also have CMDB and BSM solutions to help organize and manage our IT resources. And while these products have improved how IT delivers services and prioritizes resources, it’s only half the picture and severely limits the ability of IT Operations to detect and react to threats. So while IT has better tools to organize management of IT infrastructure resources, IT Operations is still a stressful place where most problems are still reported by users.
An analogy that’s often used is monitoring the human body. If you monitor the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of the human body, you probably end up a list such as heart rate, respiration, and temperature. You may even try to develop a more holistic approach by not only monitoring each KPI, but also monitoring the relationship between each KPI. Therefore if you see an increase in the heart rate, you also expect to see a corresponding increase in body temperature and respiration. And if you see such an increase, you might infer that the body is exercising – perhaps riding a bicycle.
To me, this represents a problem. Sure, the body may be biking, but is it going in the right direction?
Applying this same technique to IT system management is inaccurate and results in many business problems remaining undetected. It is just not possible to qualitatively monitor business activities from infrastructure data.
But a complete 360° view is possible. By monitoring the myriad interactions and units of work that make up the business transactions and activities, the IT organization now provides a business context for the work that the infrastructure is carrying out. We use Service Activity Monitoring (SAM) to qualitatively monitor the units of work, and Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) to qualitatively monitor the desired Business Activity or transaction. By looking qualitatively at Service Delivery from Top Down as well as Bottom Up, an IT organization can control all aspects of Service Delivery with all the benefits such as lower costs, higher revenues, and happier customers.
Note: In my previous musings, Doug McClure kindly pointed me to his excellent blog, and mentioned that he hadn’t heard of “Service Activity Monitoring” (SAM) before. It’s a term I used after I first came across it from a presentation given by CITT online describing an architecture overview in Deutsche Post. Essentially, SAM sits between BAM and infrastructure monitoring and monitors how services from applications are being delivered as units of work within a business process.
August 20th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
Great post. I like the analogy – most IT departments concentrate so much on keeping things up and running that they plain forget to sometimes look up and see if the business is benefiting or suffering.
I’ve seen another similar analogy – driving a car while looking at the dashboard and not looking out the windshield.
Jon
June 24th, 2009 at 3:54 am
I read Doug’s blog also and I’ve never heard of SAM either.
At a recent conference there was a discussion that the difference between a business service and an IT service was that a business service by definition (at least his) required something beyond IT. His example was a loan process where a loan officer needed to talk to the applicant then use and and IT service to process the loan.
Or are you saying that a business activity is made up of 1 or more service activities?
At HP we use the terms End User Monitoring which is Quality of Experience (QoE), Business Transaction Monitoring which is the flow of data thru multiple systems and Infrastructure Monitoring which is monitoring of servers, database, network etc.
I agree with your statement “It is just not possible to qualitatively monitor business activities from infrastructure data.”
It is unfortunate the naming in this space isn’t more standard, but I hope I’m getting your point. I may blog about this myself.
Michael Procopio, my opinion, not HP’s. http://www.hp.com/go/BSMblog
June 24th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
Hi Michael,
There’s a lot of confustion with definitions. A Business Service is essentially a service that is offered and delivered by the business. Many of these services fall into the subset of business services that require something outside of IT like the example of a loan application. But increasingly, many Business Services are now completely automated and handled within the IT infrastructure, for example booking a hotel room.
It is relatively safe to say that all Business Services have a coarse granularity. That is, they can be decomposed into logical steps. At this point, since the steps are no longer recognizable by the business as services that are on offer, the are referred to as IT services. Often times, at the right level of finer granularity, these steps are aligned with IT services. An IT service is recognizable by IT as a unit of work that is performed by an application. For example, when booking a hotel room, one step may be to process the user login and retrieve user details, another service will check for room availability on the selected dates, and yet another may be to validate payment details, etc. IT services usually have the characteristics of being reusable too, so that individual IT services may also participate in multiple difference Business Activities.
HP have many great products, and we have customers that get a lot of value from combining our unique monitoring and (especially) real-time alerting capabilities with products such as BAC for example. Drop me a line and perhaps we can explore this topic further.