These are my links for July 7th through July 9th:

• Why Business Transaction Management is not average – Today many IT vendors are providing Business Transaction Management capabilities that focus on monitoring business transactions rather than tiers. The guiding principle is to track all business transactions across all tiers all of the time providing customers with complete visibility and definitive data. In the same way that a school teacher finds out Billy started the class riot by super gluing Stephanie’s hair to the table you can find out why an individual business transaction ran slow because you know exactly how long that business transaction spent in each tier it flowed through. You can therefore identify and isolate business impact in seconds.
• Veeam Business View Released, Veeam Reporter Enterprise Updated – Veeam Business View automates the use of VMware’s native custom attributes to categorize VMs. Business View also allows editing the attributes manually for one or multiple VMs at a time, or automatically based on pre-defined rules. For example, VMware administrators can define an automated rule such as “if a VM has retail in its name, add it to the Retail Banking category.”
• Coradiant acquires the assets of Symphoniq – "Coradiant shares the vision that the best approach to Web application performance management is from the end-user perspective," said Hon Wong, CEO and co-founder of Symphoniq and previously a co-founder at NetIQ, in a statement. "The integration of the two organizations provides an exciting and powerful position to achieve continued leadership in the market, and to continue delivering cutting-edge management capabilities for Web applications."
• Strategy Map « Manage By Walking Around – Standard BSC strategy map with four perspectives
• Strategy shouldn’t be static « Manage By Walking Around – Strategy clearly dictates execution. Execution can influence strategy. This two-way street is why we have adjusted the phrase to “closing the gap between strategy and execution.”

Links that I have found interesting for July 6th:

• Why Business Transaction Management Is Hot in 2009 – From Chasing Fires to Chasing Value

  CIOs strive to play a strategic role in the business: driving the transformations that produce top and bottom line value. To do so, they need to move past just keeping the lights on, but it is hard to be proactive when you are overwhelmed chasing fires and trying to fix problems.

  How can IT grow from chasing fires to chasing value and enable the CIO to become more strategic?

  First, IT needs to operate and communicate in a business context, not just in a technology context. Second, IT management functions need to evolve from a component focus (end-users, applications and infrastructure) to a business transaction focus, so solving problems and planning is done efficiently and holistically.

  While these two points seem obvious, actually making them happen in a mission-critical, distributed, service-oriented environment that is constantly changing is quite tricky, but it can pay huge dividends.

• Application Performance Management Best Practices Video – In a new video, Peter Sevcik draws on findings from NetForecast's landmark APM best practices benchmarking study of more than 600 enterprises to show how APM best practices deliver performance excellence–and he identifies critical application performance management tool features required to support those best practices. Peter also explains how recent IT infrastructure and application delivery improvements change how application performance must be managed, and describes new APM approaches that address those changes.
• The BAM Blog » Blog Archive » But I’ve Already Got Monitoring – 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.

• alphaWorks : IBM Page Detailer : Overview – IBM Page Detailer is a graphical tool that enables Web site developers and editors to rapidly and accurately assess performance from the client's perspective. IBM Page Detailer provides details about the manner in which Web pages are delivered to Web browsers. These details include the timing, size, and identity of each item in a page. This information can help Web developers, designers, site operators, and IT specialists to isolate problems and improve performance and user satisfaction.

Meeting topic: WebSphere in the Clouds

Summary: Join us for a discussion around Cloud Computing and WebSphere’s place in the cloud.

WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance

Cloud computing is a popular trend in the IT industry today, and IBM WebSphere has several offerings helping users to leverage cloud solutions. For private enterprise clouds, WebSphere is offering both the WebSphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition and the WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance. The new offerings provide a virtual image edition of the WebSphere Application Server and a solution that helps users to create, deploy, and maintain WebSphere environments in a private cloud. In addition, WebSphere has also partnered with Amazon to make its software available on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). This partnership allows users to run WebSphere software on a cloud that is managed by Amazon.

Sign Up Here

Meeting Date: Jul 9th, 2009

Meeting time: 9:00 am – 12:00 pm

Meeting location: IBM 4111 Northside Parkway Atlanta, GA

These are my links for June 30th through July 6th:

• IT Reliability™ through Business Transaction Management – Business Transaction Management (BTM) has been getting a lot of attention lately as a powerful way to enable IT reliability by allowing organizations to collect and analyze the transactional data required to drive effective IT management processes and achieve IT reliability.

  Managing IT by the traditional siloed approach is no longer enough to enable IT reliability. A horizontal foundation that connects between the end-users, network, proxy servers, web servers, load balancers, application servers, message brokers, databases and mainframes is needed in order to provide IT reliability. As the common denominator of all of these silos, transactions are able to provide the foundation for IT reliability.

  SharePath's unique patent pending technology is able to automatically discover and correlate all of the transactions that flow through these numerous IT silos and store them in a Reliability Management Database (RMDB) in real time.

• IT Reliaility – Correlsense’s new spin on BTM – So what is IT Reliability? On principal, it is allowing IT staff to take control of their multi-tiered, distributed applications.

  The sole purpose of an IT organization is to make sure business transactions are processed as fast and as accurate as possible. For that they need to know what is going on right now, and be able to compare it to what happened last month. The need to be able to figure out who is misusing or corrupting the data, plan ahead in terms of physical resources and virtual resources (cloud), maintain a clear picture of dependencies between physical and logical components, make sure changes to applications and infrastructure don't create any unexpected results, and make the business departments pay for what they are using in practice rather than in theory.

• CA Expands Offerings for Unified Business Service Assurance and Automation for Next-Generation Virtualized Data Centers and Private Clouds – CA is broadening the scope of CA Spectrum(R) Infrastructure Manager, CA eHealth(R) Performance Manager and CA Spectrum Automation Manager to encompass in one fully-integrated, end-to-end management solution both physical and virtual server and network environments, as well as databases, voice and unified communications systems, and other networked applications. The products are being enhanced to support VMware vSphere 4 and the Cisco Nexus(R) 1000V distributed virtual software switch, which is an integrated option in VMware vSphere 4. The extensive solution will help enable customers to easily and coherently manage these environments through one user interface and within a powerful unified information model. This will help customers achieve Lean IT by speeding time to problem identification and resolution.
• Questions you should ask ANY IT Service Management Vendor « John Clark’s $.02 (or 1.25p) –
• Awe and Disbelief « OpTier’s Business Transaction Management Blog – Despite being one of the privileged few who witnessed BTM grow from a mere idea into a full-blown enterprise solution, I still find myself sometimes awed by this technology. It is, after all, an ambitious attempt to visualize complex, abstract business ideas, and manage them like any other assets of the organization. How is it possible? Does it really work? As my friend and colleague Andy previously noted, the “aha moment” for BTM typically doesn’t arrive until after the customer has already seen it live in their own environment. And that’s when the fun begins.

I firmly believe that the next generation of Business Service Management (BSM) will consolidate, integrate and leverage Business Transaction Management (BTM), End User Experience (EUE), Real User Experience (RUM) and Application Performance Management (APM) solutions and their respective domain data and information.

While the simplistic definitions of what BSM is still hold true, the value of understanding each of these domain areas is critical to the business and should be to emerging IT operations organizations who are maturing beyond resource management and IT silos to a true end-to-end service management methodology.

The ITCAM for Transactions v7.x product and broader ITCAM family provides industry leading depth and breadth across any large enterprise IT environment. I haven’t come across anyone’s portfolio that covers more than what Tivoli’s does today. The “manager of managers (MoM)” concept that we’ve had tremendous success with in the event management space is similarly replicated with the ITCAM for Transactions v7 product’s ability to consume, consolidate and stitch together complex transaction level information across a multitude of technology domains and IT organization silos. For more insight into BTM, check out some of the information and podcasts available here.

As part of ITCAM for Transactions v7.1 FP2, the ITCAM development team has developed an initial foundation for integration and data exchange between ITCAM and TBSM v4.2. This integration leverages all of the latest model and resource build capabilities of our DLA based integration as well as our new ITM Data Fetcher capability to bring in the relevant metrics and KPI’s from the backend ITCAM (ITM) systems. All of this is used to underpin and drive a basic example of an operations dashboard where business transaction information such as availability, performance, quality, etc. and the supporting IT infrastructure component relationships are displayed.

From this foundation, it would be very easy to build out follow on views, pages and portlets that would enable application support groups and LoB executives to see availability and performance information for transactions from any technology domain or IT silo within the service delivery chain.

I’ll try and get some examples built of what this could look like in the future. I’ve included a picture below of what the ITCAM development team has included in this integration package. This integration content is available via the ITCAM for Transactions v7.1 FP2 download site as an individual download component. See the FP2 release notes for more information. You can review the white paper detailing the integration on the TBSM Wiki here.

ITCAM for Transactions TBSM Integration

These are my links for June 17th through June 29th:

• Consolidated Event Management: Why It’s more Interesting than You Think – Once you begin to see event management in this light – cross-domain event consolidation and event management – it begins to take on a new face. Cross-domain event management can allow for networking, systems, database, and application managers to derive unique but consistent insights from multiple, established sources of information. By bringing insights from different data gathering and domain-specific sources together for collective analysis, it can begin to approximate the analytic equivalent of a CMS – supporting better collaborative processes and empowering more informed decision making. And when coupled with the disciplines and cohesion of a CMS, consolidated event management can profit from a whole new dimension of reflexive insight – coupling information on service interdependencies and change with dynamically changing performance and availability conditions across the infrastructure.
• Event Management – Old News? No Way! – People are talking more about consolidated event management. Think about that. What could be driving these discussions after 30 years? Isn’t event management old news?

  It depends on who you talk to. The people I work with live and breathe consolidated event and performance management or CEPM as we refer to it. So, we always talk about event management. Most customers I talk to politely ask what is new, but I suspect they really don’t expect us to have any real breakthroughs that will help them reduce the cost of managing events or streamline their operations. But others are starting to talk too.

• IT Security Training White Paper: Tough Love: When IT Security Hurts Your Business 5/20/2009 – Service Management concepts, like ITIL and Business Service Management best practices, can help mend the unraveling relationship. This ITIL and IT security white paper explores the challenges IT departments and their businesses are facing today, and provides examples of what these problems look like in real life.
• Simple Event Management Protocol (SEMP) – Simple Event Management Protocol

  Simple Event Management Protocol (SEMP) is an Event Management Protocol for Cloud Computing, IT Operations and Mobile Networks. SEMP is used in event management systems to monitor cloud computing networks, internet and mobile networks for autonomics ( self-healing ), corrective actions, and notification. It consists of a set of standards for event management, including an application layer protocol, a database schema, and a set of event based properties.

  SEMP delivers management data in the form of properties on the managed systems, networks, applications, transactions and databases, which describe the system configuration. These properties can then be requested by management applications through SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) or REST.

• TBSM 4.2 – Items the user has no permissions for are still visible. – Pages in a view or folder are still visible to users who have no permissions to access them.

  Cause

  The core view is overriding the default view.

  Resolving the problem

  From tipadmin, go to 'Console Preference Profiles' (Settings -> Console Preference Profiles ->
  <your profile>) and uncheck the 'Core views' CheckBox. Logout from tipadmin and Login with <your profile> user, then you should be seeing only the Default View.

Links that I have found interesting for June 16th:

• What we Learned Writing the Second Edition of the TP Book « Eric Newcomer’s Blog – And although we can reasonably claim that the .NET Framework and Java EE compliant application servers are the preeminent development and production environments for TP applications, it seems as if the three-tier application architecture around which we were able to structure the first edition has evolved into a multitier architecture.

  Another big change is represtented by the emergence of “scale out” designs that are replacing “scale up” designs for large Web sites. The scale out designs tend to rely on different mechanisms than the scale up designs for implementing transaction processing features and functions – the scale out designs tend to rely much more on stateless and asynchronous communications protocols, for example.

• BMC Configuration Automation for Networks v5.2 First Contact Demo — BMCtv – A sample demonstration of BMC Configuration Automation for Networks v5.2 to a customer who has not yet seen the product.
• IBM CloudBurst Offering – What are the IBM Cloudburst configuration details?

  Cloud Software Configuration:

  •IBM CloudBurst service management pack
  •IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager v7.1
  •IBM Tivoli Monitoring v6.2.1
  •IBM Systems Director 6.1.1 with Active Energy Manager; IBM ToolsCenter 1.0; IBM DS
  Storage Manager for DS4000 v10.36; LSI SMI-S provider for DS3400
  •VMware VirtualCenter 2.5 U4; VMware ESXi 3.5 U4 hypervisor

• Circos Table Viewer – Making Square Things Round – visualize tabular information

  create analytical art

  banish the spreadsheet

• Five Steps to Predictive Performance Management – ** Are we missing this boat wrt resource central predictive analystics (Netuitive, Integrien, Big4?) Shouldn't we learn/leverge what BI folks already have done? **

  Predictive performance management involves strategically applying analytics – a suite of statistical methods that sifts through vast amounts of data to discover meaningful correlations, patterns and trends. Analytic techniques for modeling, forecasting and simulating potential outcomes answer critical questions such as:

  * Which measures drive the business and which do not?

  * Why did these problems occur?

  * Where do I need to improve and by how much?

  * Are employees aligned with the strategy?

  * Which is the right course?

  * How should I adjust my strategy and modify initiatives?

  Organizations that take advantage of a wide range of analytics to support performance management will have confident answers to these key questions.

• IBM goes beyond just slapping ‘cloud’ label on old products – Network World – IBM's new CloudBurst appliance provides a 42U rack with blade servers; storage; the VMware hypervisor; various software components that help provision new services and manage energy use; and self-service portals for developers.
• YouTube – IBM CloudBurst: Simplifying the IT environment for better productivity – Chris O'Connor of IBM speaks about common IT challenges, and how cloud computing can help customers face these challenges and increase business productivity. Customers need to organize IT delivery to use IT effectively, but companies are hampered by the time consuming assembly of different IT components. With IBM CloudBurst, companies can consolidate multiple components to simplify their environment, allowing staff to be more efficient. CloudBurst offers a simple, cost-effective way for companies to streamline their IT and make IT easier to manage.
• IBM Software Support Tools – This STE will cover Electronic Support Strategy, eSupport Website, RSS Feeds, MyNotifications, Electronic Service Request, PMR Best Practices, Communities, Wikis, Fix Central, Software Support Toolbar, Support Assistant, Log Analyzer, Education Assistant, Assist On-Site, Resources & Demos, Q & A
• IBM – June, 2009 – IBM Tivoli Netcool Omnibus Customer Support Technical Information Update – Addendum to the Network Management Newsletter that provides technical information to customers for Tivoli Netcool Omnibus
• IBM – TIP: Recovering configuration from backup – How can I recover my original configuration if something becomes corrupted (e.g. pages become inaccessible)?
• IBM – Create monitor box view Webtop 2.2 – How do I create monitor boxes in Webtop 2.2 similar to the ones I had previous versions?

Links that I have found interesting for June 15th:

• OpTier and IBM Collaboration on BTM – With comprehensive technical help from IBM Innovation Center teams, OpTier was able to prove their application could scale, gain performance improvements, and help make it possible to expand to new markets.
• Straight Talk about the CMDB Imperative: Carlos Casanova, author and former MetLife IT Executive – In this podcast, www.enterpriseleadership.org asks Casanova to describe some of the key tasks associated with CMDB/CMS; the effect technologies, such as virtualization, service-oriented architecture, and cloud computing are having on the CMDB/CMS; and the various approaches CIOs can use in selling CMDB/CMS within their organization.
• ADM defined, CMDB confusion – JP Garbani, Forrester Research and Richard Muirhead offer thier explanation of application dependency mapping and how it relates to "CMDB". … application dependency mapping cmdb configuration management
• Does SAP’s Performance Fall Short? – "We heard customers anecdotally complain about performance problems and thought what better place to survey them than at an SAP user conference," he added.

  Sixty-two percent of survey respondents said they were unhappy with the way performance issues were resolved. Eight percent reported daily problems, and 68 percent reported 1-5 incidents each month.

  Thirty-nine percent of those who reported at least one incident per month said they have unresolved performance issues with SAP.

  Forty-six percent said they resolved issues in hours, 22 percent solved them in minutes, and 30 percent took days or even weeks to solve problems. The remaining 2 percent solved problems in seconds, according to the survey.

These are my links for June 12th through June 15th:

• IBM Smart Business Press Release (DRAFT) | CloudBzz – IBM today introduced the industry’s first set of “cloud” services and integrated products for the enterprise. This will give clients a reliable way to standardize IT functions that are rapidly becoming too costly or difficult to use.
• Tomorrow’s IBM “Smart Business” #CloudComputing Strategy – Today | Linux – The NY Times broke IBM’s embargo this morning by publishing their story on IBM’s new cloud computing initiatives. I’ve posted the full release here on CloudBzz.

  The diagram below gives a bit of insight into where IBM is today and where they are heading.

• With a Big Push, IBM Gives Cloud Computing Its Blessing – IBM’s approach to cloud computing: task-specific clouds. The company will offer business processes as cloud services, according to a company press release. Here are the highlights of IBM’s announcement:

  * Smart Business Test Cloud — A private cloud behind the client’s firewall
  * Smart Business Development & Test on the IBM Cloud
  * IBM CloudBurst — a pre-integrated set of hardware, storage,
  virtualization and networking.

• IBM Redbooks | Implementing the Poughkeepsie Green Data Center: Showcasing a Dynamic Infrastructure – The IBM® Design Center Data Center in Poughkeepsie, New York, was running out of cooling capacity and needed to address continuing IT growth requirements. Innovative change was required and transformation of this infrastructure was achieved through IBM’s smarter planet and dynamic infrastructure vision. Energy efficiency for data centers has become an imperative area of focus as the price of energy increases and systems grow beyond the capacity of current facilities to supply their power and cooling needs.

These are my links for June 10th through June 12th:

• Who’s Hot In Business Service Management – Enterprises continue to invest in BSM projects, even with the economy going into recession, and BSM has been the battle cry of IT management software vendors for several years now. As a technology, it is founded on the ability to map business services to infrastructure components: This should provide visibility into IT from a business standpoint and give IT the ability to become more efficient and better aligned with the needs of the business. The vendor landscape for BSM has changed dramatically since the last Forrester Wave™ in Q1 2007. Forrester therefore interviewed 20 vendors and their customers to document the current vendor landscape for enterprises planning a new BSM project. The right solution depends on the chosen enterprise route to BSM, the existing infrastructure resources to be monitored, and the reporting needs. Also, only one-third of the effort for BSM is technological. The rest is addressing organizational challenges and establishing BSM processes.
• IBM Tivoli Netcool Impact and Netcool Omnibus Training for Tivoli User Group Members – June 17th 9am-4pm
• Vantage for Business Service Management by Compuware – Vantage for Business Service Management correlates disparate data sources across multiple platforms and delivers real-time and historical business-relevant information.
• Knoa Drives Proactive Resolution of Application and End-User Performance Issues – “The focus of Version 5.5 is proactive resolution,” said Lori Wizdo, vice president of Marketing for Knoa Software. “Knoa EPM 5.5 introduces advanced end-user analytics, the most comprehensive alerting available in the performance management industry and enhanced correlation and analysis capabilities – all of which enable customers to quickly turn the Knoa end-user and application performance metrics into proactive remediation initiatives to both improve performance and reduce costs.”