The BTM Blog

A partner of ours returned from a meeting recently with the reaction from the prospect of “I already monitor my systems, why do I need more monitoring?“.  Great question.

I get that a lot. It’s a normal reaction. Usually from the IT Operations Director who has spent considerable sums of money on monitoring to date, and can boast an arsenal including:

• Hardware monitoring
• Application availability
• Network monitoring
• Website monitoring
• Transaction monitoring
• Speciality tools for monitoring Oracle, SAP and the like
• And perhaps some dashboard aggregators that consolidate information from many separate sources into one single dashboard.

So why would an organization need more monitoring?  Well, the single most compelling reason is to cut down on the number of outages and incidents that impact business performance.  To do this, there’s more to monitoring than just detecting when things go wrong which is what the products in use by most organizations are stuck with.  By then, the damage is done, and something has already gone wrong.

Ideally, monitoring should be smart enough, and powerful enough, to detect a situation that indicates with a high probability that something needs attention before the situation develops into something bigger and more costly.  It’s the equivalent of warning you that your car is about to be towed instead of telling you that your car has just been towed.

In other words, rather than coping with IT disasters, what about averting them in the first place?  A system that constantly monitors your key business activities and transactions, with the ability to connect events together in order to detect variances within your business transactions.  Tells you exactly what’s going on in real-time and provides timely warnings.

For example, your current monitoring systems for processing orders might provide the following information:

1. Database server OK, ping round trip 0.112s
2. Database OK, 32 transactions per second, average transaction 1.232s
3. Web Server OK, 42 connections

Whereas a system monitoring business events would instead report:

1. 14 Orders in progress
2. Average time to process orders is 6.687 seconds
3. Alert: 13% of orders processed in last 5 minutes were above 9 seconds.  Current trend is that an order will breach the SLA of 12.5 seconds within 40 minutes.

So rather than overworked IT staff trying to filter millions of seemingly disconnected IT events, most of which report little or nothing by way of business significance, they can instead focus on meaningful business objectives and performance indicators, and can react quicker to events that impact business performance, as well as communicate with non-IT staff using the lingua franca of your business.  And most importantly, if you’re already solely relying on traditional monitoring approaches, then you can expect to significantly further reduce the number of outages and incidents from anywhere between 20% and 80%!

Many vendors use variations of the concept of enabling an enterprise to “Align IT with the Business”. For example, products to help to manage IT from the perspective of the Business and to do more of what drives the business and less of what doesn’t. Or to view your IT as an engine for business value. These are valuable perspectives, and Business Service Management (BSM) is being promoted as the answer. Here at WestGlobal, we believe that BSM is only half the picture.

Let’s ask an important question:

Q. What does the business want from aligning IT with the business?

A. The business wants a clear and simple solution that monitors how well IT services are being delivered to support business activities and transactions. The business also wants quantitative and qualitative data in order to understand how well individual services are performing, and would like the IT department to prioritize their Operational activity to maximize business activities and minimize negative business impacts.

In order to deliver this vision, there are two different aspects that need to be addressed.

The first part concerns IT resources. Servers, networks, routers, websites – all of the technology and resources and tools that are used to deliver services. Monitoring solutions are required to check the health and availability of these components. Enterprise monitoring tools are vital in this regard, and they’re readily available and do a good job.

The second part concerns Business Activities. Sales orders, shipping, payments – all of the vital business transactions and processes that rely on IT infrastructure that are the life blood of any business.

Traditionally, enterprises are very good at addressing the first part – it is well understood and products are available. On the other hand, very few properly address the second. Without the second part, an enterprise will not be able to align the business and IT departments. Instead of measuring how well sales orders are being processed, the IT department only has lower level tools to measure server uptime or CPU load. Reporting a monthly statistic that the web servers were available within their SLA of 98% does nothing to assure the business that all orders were captured and that every customer had a satisfactory experience. It’s why enterprises that only address the first part still rely on their customers to report problems first.

Addressing the second part means adopting a different approach to gathering data for measuring service delivery. Event processing is an ideal underlying technology to extract relevant and meaningful data from the thousands of events that occur every hour in the enterprise. In terms of Business Activity Monitoring, an event is simply the fact that a process or transaction or activity has progressed. For example, an event may signify that a customer has logged in. A subsequent event may signify that a customer has queried stock availability or placed an item in a basket, and so on until the individual transaction has completed. Because most business activities can be broken up into a start and end, with varying numbers of units of work in between, figuring out the significance of each event is straightforward. By measuring how long it takes for each unit of work, and by tracking events that relate to different activities, the IT department can report to the business in terms that are meaningful.

Enterprise Monitoring Systems with Business Service Management (BSM) do a great job with the first part. Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) that is capable of monitoring Service experience and Customer experience does a great job on the second part, and together enables IT and Business alignment.