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.

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

I’ve seen another similar analogy – driving a car while looking at the dashboard and not looking out the windshield.

Jon