By Rich Ptak
BMC introduced its TrueSight family of products last fall.
They promised “to help improve the user experience, optimize service levels,
and reduce ownership costs”. They would accomplish this by first seamlessly
integrating their capacity optimization and operations management solutions
with real-time and predictive analytics for root-cause analysis. Second, they
announced a strategic initiative focused on enabling a speedier, more
successful transformation to the Digital Age with solutions that bring “IT to
life”. They will produce intuitive tools that facilitate collaboration between
IT and business staffs “while
fostering delivery of digital services that directly engage customers, partners
and stakeholders.”
We liked their approach at the time and subsequent
announcements
[1]
reinforced our opinion. BMC’s announcement of TrueSight IT Operations
Management 10 offers new levels of sophistication, innovation, simplification
and effectiveness.
Modernizing
IT Operations in response to Digital Change
Succeeding in today’s Digital Age requires modernizing
management, analysis and reporting of IT Operations. IT staffs have had to
juggle multiple screens, unintegrated and unconsolidated data coming at them
from a variety of sources. The problem wasn’t a lack of data, but the inability
to quickly assemble a coherent, informative view. BMC focuses on three areas to address those
issues. These are: 1) Smart Operations,
2) User-centric performance, and Proactive Analytics. Here is what BMC
is providing in each of these.
Smart Operations
Digital Age enterprises must be able to rapidly respond to
changing customer and market demands for services. Service delivery depends
upon application performance which is directly linked to consistent, reliable
infrastructure operations. Dependencies that extend and interact across
multiple, different infrastructure devices and elements pose a management
challenge. Adding to the complexity is handling combinations of infrastructure
and apps that are increasingly dynamic and mobile. The piece-meal, siloed approach
of yesterday’s solutions complicated the task of just visualizing end-to-end
relationships across infrastructure and applications, let alone identifying and
correcting problems.
Smart Operations allows IT and business staff to
create customizable converged, end-to-end views of infrastructure and
application that are meaningful to them. Problem identification and analysis is
faster and easier. Data from multiple sources including events, devices,
health, performance, status, etc. can be consolidated to provide
application-centric views of what is happening.
Customizable dashboards allow creation of converged views
that reflect the interests and responsibilities of operations and management
staff. Workflows can be created to speed analysis and facilitate drill-down to
identify and rectify problems. Baselines are automatically and dynamically
created along with notification of abnormal events. Probable cause analysis
reduces alarms and false positive using enterprise specific rules.
User-Centric
Performance
Today’s market for service development and delivery is
increasingly competitive and global in its expectations and operations. Fickle
customers demand a perfect or near-perfect experience in every exchange. IT
operations staff cannot afford to wait for a user’s complaint of poor service
to initiate efforts to identify a problem. They need a User-centric Performance view
along with an understanding of
how application and infrastructure performance impacts the user’s experience.
IT operations staff needs information that allows them to know if undetected
problems are causing service disruption.
This approach marks the next step in the logical evolution
of Application Performance Management (APM) for IT operations. By converging
the perspective of applications and infrastructure, IT can more quickly resolve
problems (when they cannot be avoided) and proactively manage their environment
so those problems don’t crop up again.
Proactive
Analytics
Today’s users have been conditioned to expect an exceptional
experience. They demand rapid resolution when (expectedly rare) problems do
occur. IT must be able to detect and even anticipate when changes in
application and infrastructure performance indicate potential service delivery
problems. IT operations must be able to monitor health, performance and
availability data on all infrastructure and applications involved in service
delivery. In practice, this means the hardware, the OS, any middleware, and
finally the application. They must be able to detect anomalies, identify and
assess the potential impact on service delivery and decide on the appropriate
action to avoid disruptions. To do this, IT operations staff must have access
to Proactive Analytics able to
rapidly process large amounts of the full range of data (log, event, machine,
structured, unstructured, etc.).
In addition, BMC’s TrueSight recognizes the difficulty in
handling problem determination across multiple suppliers. It is capable of
handling the events and data from most 3rd party suppliers. It will
use this data in the analytics engine for a probable cause analysis. It is also
able to collect and index data and events across a wide range of environments
to help pinpoint the root-cause of a problem.
Summary
BMC’s TrueSight 10 is a significant
step forward for IT operations management. It should materially reduce the
number of false positives that IT departments have had to waste time on in the
past. Moreover, it offers new functions that will make IT a more valuable and
attractive partner to the business functions in the company.
It’s our opinion that the
introduction of BMC‘s TrueSight approach accelerates a much needed advance in
the modernization of IT’s abilities for proactive monitoring, managing and
resolving the increasingly complex problems of delivering IT services. This approach places them at the "head of the pack" of those offering operations management solutions. No other vendor has adopted and implemented an equivalently comprehensive integration of function with a comparable focus on the user's experience. And, that's how competition benefits everyone!