Application Management

Sneak Preview: HP Software Universe - Hamburg

amyfeldman — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 22:16:00 GMT

Software Universe is only a few weeks away. We hold this event twice each year, alternating between a United States and European location. The upcoming event is in Hamburg at the Congress Centre Hamburg (CCH) from Wednesday, December 16th – Friday, December 18th 2009.

(If you missed our last Software Universe in Las Vegas, you can download some of the presentations here.)

We are very excited about this year’s show. There are many interesting presentations which we have put together based on information we have received after talking to many of our customers. Some highlights* (based on their relevancy to managing applications/ services - both physical and virtual) include:

Wednesday, 16.12.2009

16:00-16:45 hall B22: How to design, build and sell HP Business Availability Center (BAC) to end customers Rolf Vassdokken, Ergo Group

16:00 - 16:45 room 15: Enrich Service Quality Management with end-user Quality of Experience - Sacha Raybaud, Hewlett-Packard

17:00 - 17:45 hall G2: Application Lifecycle Management FastTour: Redefining the Lifecycle -Brad Hipps, Hewlett-Packard

17:00-17:45 hall 6: Bankwest: deploying HP Business Availability Center solutions to monitor business services to help maximise service uptime and drive out cost - Richard Rees, Chief Manager, Platform Integrity; Richard Walker, Hewlett-Packard

18:00-18:45 hall G1: Quickly identify and resolve 4 common application issues using HP's Application Management Solution - Amy Feldman, Hewlett-Packard

18:00 - 18:45 room 13: Rabobank - An IT Operation's transformation. Maturing from silo management to a Unified Operations solution, underpinning a best practice approach for better business outcomes - Toine Jenniskens, Rabobank

T

hursday, 17.12.2009

09:00-09:45 hall D: Isolation and Business Transaction Management: How new technologies in BAC help you better manage applications - Michael Procopio, Hewlett-Packard; Chris Tracey, Hewlett-Packard

10:00 - 10:45 hall F: Reducing costs and accelerating your BSM solution through HP SaaS - HMRC's experiences with on-site deployment and SaaS. -Spencer Holland, HMRC / CapGemini

10:00 - 10:45 hall D: The all new Operations Center (& BAC) licensing model: escaping the hardware bonds - Jon Haworth, Hewlett-Packard; Peter Crosby, Hewlett-Packard

15:15 - 16:00 BTO Impact of Virtualization on IT Management -Dennis Corning, Hewlett-Packard

15:15 - 16:00 hall C21: The Impact of Virtualization on IT Management - Mike Shaw, Hewlett-Packard

16:30 - 17:15 hall 6: Impact of HP Business Service Management solution on service provider business and end-user value (panel) -Rolf Vassdokken, Stefan Danisovsky and Vincenzo Asaro Telecom Italia

Friday, 18.12.2009

09:00 - 11:00 room 17: BSM - Advanced Workshop - Gundula Swidersky, Hewlett-Packard

* dates, times, and speakers subject to change

Hope to see you there.

Sanjay Anne, Amy Feldman & Aruna Ravichandran

The Cloud and your Applications: What is the Impact on Application Management? (Free Webinar)

amyfeldman — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:53:00 GMT

The Cloud and your Applications: What is the Impact on Application Management? (Free webinar)

Are your applications doing what they are suppose to be doing? Can you confidently answer the question, are you cloud assure when it comes to your critical business applications? Cloud computing, tiered applications, Software as a Service (SaaS) – all add complexity and make that question more difficult to answer.

Customers are finding more business service problems. The result: customer satisfaction and retention is at risk. The good news is that despite declining budgets, you can reduce downtime, increase service levels, and improve user experience quality.

Hear EMA Research Director Julie Craig share the early results of a recent market research survey. You’ll also hear from HP Product Marketing Manager Amy Feldman, who will share customer best practices and success stories.

Date: Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Time: 6am PST/9am EST/2pm UK

Learn how you can become more cloud confident by registering for this free webinar at http://www.enterprisemanagement.com/research/asset.php?id=1593

Thanks

Amy Feldman

Product Marketing - HP Business Availability Cente
HP Software and Solutions

BAC 8.03 release - what's new

Michael_Procopio — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 22:56:00 GMT

by Michael Procopio

Release Highlights

Service Level Management (SLM) enhancements:

SLM now enables customization of the First day of month setting which is used in calculating agreements.

A new business rule, EMS Events Availability, calculates status for the System Availability KPI assigned to an EMS Monitor CI. This enables you to include EMS events as part of the SLM calculation.

Platform enhancements:

Update of Java Runtime Environment running on Business Availability Center servers to JRE 1.5.0_18

Mutual authentication: Users can set up authentication for both the Discovery and Dependency Mapping (DDM) Probe and Business Availability Center running an embedded UCMDB, with certificates. The certificate for each side is sent and authenticated before the connection is established.

Real User Monitor Engine enhancements:

Support for Oracle Forms NCA version 10g

System Availability Management enhancement:

Added the ability to control the location of the ellipsis ("...") used in long labels in System Availability Management Reports. This enables you to move the ellipsis from the end to the middle of the label.

Dashboard enhancement:

Added the ability to drill down from Dashboard to the Event Log report from Windows and UNIX CIs.

TransactionVision enhancement:

Support for LW-SSO 2.2 has been added to the UI/Job Server.

Database Admin privileges are no longer required to set up a database for use with TransactionVision.

For Business Availability Center, Michael Procopio

Get the latest updates on our Twitter feed @HPITOps http://twitter.com/HPITOps

Join the HP Software group on LinkedIn and/or the Business Availability Center group on LinkedIn.

Are you reinvesting IT savings? We want to hear your story.

Michael_Procopio — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 20:15:00 GMT

When the recession hit you answered the call. Whether it was through consolidation, virtualization, automation, or other means you found ways to save money in IT.

Now comes an equally important part: how are you reinvesting those savings? Because while cutting costs keeps you competitive, figuring out how to turn those savings into business value is the ultimate goal. New products and services, innovation, training, reallocation of IT funds to sales and marketing can all build business value and competitive advantage. If you’ve saved money through one of these initiatives, what areas are you targeting for reinvestment?

We’re exploring this topic in a feature article on HP.com and want to hear your story. We are not seeking any kind of endorsement, comment or opinion of HP or any of its products or services. As a source for the story, you’ll have a chance to review and approve any quotes or references prior being published.

Please respond if you’re interested and include an email address or phone number so we can follow-up. Michael [dot] Procopio [@] hp.com

RUM the Real User Experience Manager

Michael_Procopio — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 02:20:00 GMT

by Michael Procopio

RUM or Real User Monitor is a tool to monitor actual user traffic running over your network.

Its part of our EUM or end user management suite. In the area of EUM there are two primary ways to monitor 1/ synthetic, which is covered by BPM or Business Process Monitor and 2/ real user monitoring.

Each has its place in a monitoring strategy. BPM is good for making sure things are up 24x7, even when no users are using your applications. Real user monitoring can give you information down to the specific user.

When I first moved over to BAC group and heard about RUM, I was impressed. One of the things it can do is replicate a users web session click by click. This allows someone troubleshooting a problem to see exactly what happened and what the error message was the user saw – no guessing. (sensitive data like passwords and credit cards are filtered out in memory before writing to a disk). Further, if you do find a problem it can turn the session into a script that can be passed to the QA team to replicate the problem, if they are using LoadRunner.

How does it work? It starts by capturing packets as they go over the network. This is done by a RUM Probe, which is software that runs on a dedicated piece of x86 hardware (typically). The Probe passes the relevant data to the RUM engine.

The RUM engine stores the data and key performance metrics are aggregated before being sent up to BAC for reporting and alerting. For example, an alert might be round trip time for the Savings Deposit transaction is taking too long. Here are some of the reports RUM provides:

Global Statistics
Page Summary
Transaction Summary
End User Summary
End User Over Time
Server Over Time
Session Analyzer
TCP Application Summary
TCP Application Over Time
Event Summary
Business Process Distribution

Figure: Example RUM deployment configuration

Originally RUM strictly focused on HTTP/S traffic. But a while back support was expanded to due general tracking of TCP traffic, both streaming and non-streaming. In more recent releases additional upper level protocol analysis has been added. Beyond HTTP/S current support includes:

XML/SOAP
Siebel
WebSphere
MPLS

Related Items:

RUM webinar
HP Real User Monitor product page

For Business Availability Center, Michael Procopio

Get the latest updates on our Twitter feed @HPITOps http://twitter.com/HPITOps

Join the HP Software group on LinkedIn and/or the Business Availability Center group on LinkedIn.

Do you have an ITIL problem manager?

Michael_Procopio — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 04:38:00 GMT

by Michael Procopio

What do Healthcare, Banking and Managed Service Providers have in common? Well at least the ones I spoke to all had ITIL problem managers. I’ll define problem management then give some examples.

What is the role of an ITIL problem manager? This was role introduced in ITIL v3 as part of Continuous Service Improvement. To understand the role we need to back up and describe incident and problem management.

An incident is a service interruption. Incident management is the process of restoring normal service. Frequently this is done with a work around, like killing a process and restarting or rebooting a system. Incident management is not worked about finding the root cause of the interruption.

The goal of problem management is prevent incidents from happening. What this means in practice is finding the root cause of incidents and fixing them and maybe along the way fix some others before they happen.

Let’s move to a couple examples.

1. Those darn log files. This came out in the first interview I did. What this showed me is that problem managers work closely with folks working on incidents. The result of the incident investigation was that an application written in-house wasn’t checking for disk space before writing the log file. Result, volume ran out of space and application stopped working. This was an easier find than many, but the problem manager put this in her monthly newsletter to developers and QA teams to prevent future problems.

2. One thing software can not fix is hardware. You have mission critical application and you end up getting hardware problems approximately every month for a few months. The problem manager, as part of his normal duties, is constantly monitoring incidents looking for patterns. While looking through incidents notices this pattern and starts investigating. In this case after talking to a number of folks and not hitting any answer he started investigating the hardware records and found the hardware was over four years old which is over their policy standard. Somehow the systems supporting this application missed their refresh. As you might guess once the hardware was refreshed the problems stopped

3. Sometimes its what’s not happening. A global ecommerce capability is not working at one location for 8 minutes. This problem manager says he is in the subfield of epidemiology, I think of more as forensics. This brings up a second learning I had: problem managers often orchestrate the process as much as they investigate themselves. After looking at a number of things that were happening to no avail, he asks each team to look at log files for abnormally low activity. This took some convincing, but the network team found a router that was showing almost no activity relative to normal. I didn’t get all the details but the source was someone made a change to a routing table and 8 minutes later changed it back. That change routed traffic around the site in question. The problem manager made an interesting observation: network folks often think what they do won’t affect anything and since they rarely get feedback to the contrary it re-enforces that opinion.

I’ll wrap of this post with what we can do to help the problem manager. For workflow we have the HP Service Manager Problem Management module. This includes logging, categorization, prioritization, communication and progress tracking.

For investigation we have HP Problem Isolation. Its proactive module helps find anomalies in performance data that can indicate potential upcoming problems. It also brings together incident and change data to help determine the cause of the problem.

Advanced analytics reduces downtime costs – detection

Advanced analytics reduces downtime costs – isolation

Fighting or friendly, Problem Isolation and OMi

Michael_Procopio — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 20:27:00 GMT

by Michael Procopio

In the post Event Correlation OMi TBEC and Problem Isolation What's the Difference, my fellow blogger, Jon Haworth, discussed the differences between TBEC and Problem Isolation. To be consistent, I'll use the acronyms PI for Problem Isolation and TBEC to refer to OMi (Operations Manager i series) Topology Based Event Correlation.

Briefly, he mentioned that TBEC works “bottom up”, that is starting from the infrastructure, with events. PI works “top down”, that is, starting from an end user experience problem, primarily with metric (time series) data.

Jon did an excellent job describing TBEC; I’ll do my best on PI because like Jon I have a conscience to settle.

Problem Isolation is a tool to:

1. automate the steps a troubleshooter would go through

2. run additional tests that might uncover the problem

3. look at all metric/performance data from the end user experience monitoring and all the infrastructure it depends

4. find the infrastructure metric the most closely matches the end user problem using behavior learning and regression analysis techniques (developed by HP Labs)

5. bring additional data such as events, help/service desk tickets and changes to the troubleshooter

6. allow the troubleshooter to execute Run books to potentially solve the problem

Potentially the biggest difference in the underlying technology is that Problem Isolation does not require any correlation rules or thresholds to be set for it to do the regression analysis to point to the problem. Like TBEC, it does require that an application be modeled in a CMDB.

An example: Presume a situation with a typical composite application - web server, application server and database. No infrastructure thresholds were violated; therefore, there are no infrastructure alerts. Again, as mentioned in the previous post, end user monitoring (EUM) is the back stop. EUM alerts on slow end user performance, now what?

Here is what Problem Isolation does:

1. determines which infrastructure elements (ITIL configurations items or CIs) support the transaction

2. reruns the test(s) that caused the alert – this validates it is not transient problem

3. runs any additional tests defined for the CIs

4. collects Service Level Agreement information

5. collects all available infrastructure performance metrics (web server, application server, database server and operating systems for each) and compares them to the EUM data using behavior and regression analysis

Problem Isolation screen show performance correlation between end user response and SQL Server database locks

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6. determines and displays the most probable suspect CI and alternates

7. displays run books available for all infrastructure CIs for the PI user to run directly from the tool

8. allows the PI user to attach all the information to a service ticket, either existing or create a new one

Another key differentiator of OMi/TBEC and PI is the target user. There is such a wide variance in how organizations work that it is hard to name the role but let me do a brief description and I think will be able to determine the title in your organization.

There are some folks in the organization whose job is to take a quick look (typically < 10 minutes, in one organization I interviewed < 1 minute) at a situation and determine if they have explicit instructions on what to do via scripts or run books. When they have no instructions for a situation they pass it on to someone who has a bit more experience and does some free form triage.

This person might be able to fix the problem or may have to pass it on to a subject matter expert, for example if they believe it is an MS Exchange problem to an Exchange admin. It is this second person that Problem Isolation is targeted at. This is helping automate her job, reducing what might take tens of minutes to hours and performing it in seconds. If it ends up she can’t solve the problem it automatically provides full documentation of all information collected. That alone might take someone five minutes to write-up.

OMi’s target is the operations bridge console user. Ops Bridge operators tend to be lower skilled and face hundreds if not thousands of events per hour. Jon described how OMi helps them work smarter.

TBEC and Problem Isolation both work to find the root cause of an incident but in different ways. Much like a doctor might use an MRI or CAT scan to diagnose a patient based on what the situation is, TBEC and Problem Isolation are complementary tools each with unique capabilities.

Problem Isolation will not find problems in redundant infrastructure that OMi will. Conversely, OMi can’t help with EUM problems when no events are triggered, where Problem Isolation will.

We know this can be a confusing area. We welcome your questions to help us do a better job of describing the difference. But these two are definitely friendly.

For Business Availability Center, Michael Procopio

Get the latest updates on our Twitter feed @HPITOps http://twitter.com/HPITOps

Join the HP Software group on LinkedIn and/or the Business Availability Center group on LinkedIn.

Related Items

Law School Admission Council (LSAC): customer case study

Sanjay,Anne — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 21:06:00 GMT

LSAC is a nonprofit organization founded in 1947 to facilitate the law school admission process. Today, however, LSAC has evolved into a cutting-edge technology services provider: its newly updated software application, ACES2, provides data-hosting services and online, real-time admission processing to LSAC members, which number more than 200 law schools in the United States, Canada, and Australia.

Challenges:
A key turning point in LSAC’s thinking about business technology management was Hurricane Katrina, recalls Jerry Goldman, Director of Technical Services, LSAC. “The hurricane didn’t affect our business, but we saw how it did affect some of the law schools we serve,” Goldman says. “It opened our eyes to the importance of having a business continuity solution in place.” They stared on a journey to enable business continuity and IT Service Management (ITSM) best practices for Storage Area Network (SAN) management.

Approach:
In view of achieving their objective - LSAC began implementing HP Real User Monitor (RUM) software, part of the HP Business Availability Center solution. “RUM lets us better analyze our ACES2 services,” Jerry Goldman, Director of Technical Services, LSAC says “We can look at transaction volume, network performance, and application-response times, and analyze whether performance issues are related to application or network issues.” With this set of comprehensive and accurate data, LSAC can work constructively with its member law schools to optimize ACES2 performance. “We’ve committed to delivering platinum service levels to our clients,” Goldman says. “HP RUM software is a critical enabler in achieving that goal.”

Results:
Goldman says “HP Real User Monitor (RUM) lets us better analyze our ACES2 services”. This solution has helped in improving the ability to deliver platinum-level services to clients, reduced risk of data loss, and reduced risk that outage will impact on operations.

For the full story please visit: LSAC boosts service with technology

Do composite applications really need to be managed?

Sanjay,Anne — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 21:04:00 GMT

YES - large-scale applications such as SAP and Oracle Siebel support core business functions. Many build and implement integrations between SAP systems and non-SAP applications such as Seibel using SAP NetWeaver, SOA and/or other middleware components to support complex business processes. If they fail, business goals are in jeopardy. These complex applications are woven into heterogeneous networks, and every change or fix ripples through multiple systems and applications.

The focus of IT has been on managing systems, efficiently and at low cost. In today’s environment, this systems orientation results in disconnected monitoring data that does nothing to indicate the health of overall business services, making end-user complaints the first indication that service levels aren’t being met. It also makes it extremely difficult to assign problems to the team that can fix them most quickly.

HP Business Availability Center for SAP applications is a comprehensive solution to proactively manage SAP & non-SAP environments in a production environment, so that IT is able to best leverage its resources and respond faster to SAP incidents, thus increasing the value its SAP applications deliver to the business.

We have a very exciting flash demo (total run time 3:34) highlighting our approach to helping our customers better manage their business services and complex IT landscapes.

Check it out:

https://h30406.www3.hp.com/campaigns/2009/demo/bsm_sap/index.html

You can read more details on the solution here: http://h20229.www2.hp.com/partner/protected/assets/pdf/4AA1-9302ENW.pdf

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Broken RSS/ATOM fixed

Michael_Procopio — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 18:32:00 GMT

Thanks to reader Chris who emailed us that our RSS feed was broken. Typical typo with an extra space in the URL. It is now fixed. If you use RSS to read the blog please double check your feed.

Thank you for your readership.

Freddy Kruger, James Bond and IT Cost Optimization

Michael_Procopio — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 17:33:00 GMT

by Michael Procopio

Top 10 Ten ways to improve IT Cost Optimization. Another fun video from Mark Leake, this time with an appearance from Freddy and James.

Get the latest updates on our Twitter feed @HPITOps http://twitter.com/HPITOps

Join the HP Software LinkedIn Group

For the Business Availability Center, Michael Procopio

Announcing a New BSM Solution Offering for Virtualization

Michael_Procopio — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 18:02:00 GMT

by Michael Procopio

The new offerings include enhancements to HP Server Automation, HP Client Automation, HP Storage Essentials, HP Network Automation, and HP Operations Manager software.

According to a recent report from Gartner⁽¹⁾, "Virtualization’s impact on the overall IT industry has been dramatic, and virtualization will continue to be the leading catalyst for infrastructure and operations software change through 2013. Organizations are looking at ways to cut costs, better utilize assets, and reduce implementation and management time and complexity."

Although virtualization is often adopted to help reduce capital expenditures, it can trigger increased management expenses and lead to more pronounced organizational silos. The new HP offerings bridge all the physical and virtual data center silos through management and automation. This reduces complexity and ultimately management costs.

"HP business service automation software helps us eliminate manual, error-prone tasks by automating server lifecycle management, including provisioning multiple operating systems, software installation, deployment of patches, configuration management and audits," said Ron Cotten, senior manager IT OSS Engineering, Level 3 Communications, a leading international provider of voice, video, and data communications services. "With HP Server Automation, we are able to patch over 1800 servers in 24 hours, which helps us reduce scheduled downtime."

The updated HP business service offerings help you:

· Increase administrator effectiveness with HP Operations Manager for virtualization by monitoring the availability and performance of all virtual and physical assets through a common dashboard.

· Reduce the risk of downtime with HP Network Automation, which for the first time gives the network administrator control of the VMware vSwitch in addition to the physical network environments.

· Provision the right amount of storage to keep applications performing properly without overspending on excess storage with HP Server Automation, the first solution in the industry that gives server administrators this capability.

· Reduce problem resolution times with HP Storage Essentials Performance Edition by quickly identifying, troubleshooting and reporting performance metric related trends in physical and virtual environments.

“To make virtualization cost effective, customers must minimize operating expenses and have seamless management of infrastructure silos,” said Erik Frieberg, vice president of Product Marketing, Software & Solutions, HP. “Our newly enhanced HP business service offerings help customers manage all aspects of the physical and virtual application infrastructure to unlock the true promise of virtualization.”

HP Software Professional Services provides solution consulting services to accelerate the value of business service automation and business service management software investments.

HP Server Automation, HP Client Automation, HP Storage Essentials and HP Network Automation are available now. HP Operations Manager Virtualization Smart Plug-In will be available next month.

Free conference session HP Software Universe Online

Michael_Procopio — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:25:00 GMT

by Michael Procopio

If you missed HP Software Universe 2009, here’s your chance to get the session information from the comfort of your computer.

HP Software Universe Online, offers:

· Session PDFs and audiocast recordings to more than 180 presentations delivered by HP experts, customers, and partners. Topics included implementation best practices, new releases, and product roadmaps.

· Partner literature—white papers and product briefs—from one of the dozens of our strategic partners.

· Live, on-demand webcasts featuring product-migration information, tips and tricks, best practices, and product launches

· Roundtable sessions, moderated by HP experts, where your customers will learn best practices and methodologies that their companies can use immediately

· Interaction with HP Software Services managers and technical staff in the Services Zone, where you can talk about you experiences, share best practices, and develop solutions

Go to registration !

Webinar - "The Cloud and Your Applications: What is the Impact on Application Management"

Michael_Procopio — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 22:10:00 GMT

Date: Thursday, July 30, 2009

Time: 11 am Pacific / 2 pm Eastern / 7:00 pm GMT Daylight Time

Are your applications doing what they are supposed to be doing? Cloud computing, tiered applications, Software as a Service (SaaS) – all add complexity and make that question more difficult to answer.

Customers are finding more business service problems. The result: customer satisfaction and retention is at risk. The good news is that despite declining budgets, you can reduce downtime, increase service levels, and improve user experience quality.

Hear EMA Research Director Julie Craig share the early results of a recent market research survey. You’ll also hear from HP Product Marketing Manager Amy Feldman, who will share customer best practices and success stories.

HP Business Availability Center 8.02 What's New

Michael_Procopio — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 01:17:00 GMT

by Michael Procopio

BAC 8.02 is now generally available. Here are the highlights of what's new. There are also a number of defect fixes in this release.

Netuitive integration:
Enables integrating Netuitive alarms into Dashboard
System Availability Management (SAM) enhancement:
SAM administration now displays SAM points in use, enabling more effective management of SiteScope license points by increasing visibility into point consumption
Apache Web server upgrade:
Upgrade of Apache Web server to version 2.2.11 keeps Business Availability Center current with the latest industry release and compliant with security requirements
End User Management (EUM) enhancements, including:
Real User Monitor (RUM): Additional OS support for RUM probe (Windows 2003 and RHE5 64 bit); Improved SSL traffic handling for special environments; Seven protocol decoder packs for slow requests: MSSQL, LDAP, MySQL, IMAP, POP3, SMTP, FTP; Improved system health; Keystore management improvements
Business Process Monitor (BPM): Support for VuGen 9.5; BPM support for Windows Vista; New MSI installation replaces InstallShield on Windows platforms; New Solaris packaging (SPARC) installation replaces InstallShield on Solaris platforms
Business Process Insight enhancement:
Implemented a way to link sub-processes to parent processes.
Interactive integration documentation for Business Availability Center-Service Manager/Service Center integration:
New interactive document that enables selecting specific integration parameters and viewing only the documentation relevant for the integration specified

For the Business Availability Center, Michael Procopio