The answer may seem obvious… of course they’re not mutually exclusive. However, our experience, working with both enterprise and MSP customers, is that often IT Service Management (ITSM) and Business Relationship Management (BRM) are unintentionally mutually exclusive. We’ve found that the disconnect between ITSM and BRM is often the result of a lack of clarity on the role of BRM within the organization and often indicative of overarching IT issues. Organizations that are effectively integrating the BRM process tend to also have clarity around several key areas including organizational structure, supply versus demand, and accountability.

Where does BRM fit within an IT organization?

While ITIL broadly defines the process of BRM as being the voice of the service provider to the customer and vice versa, how BRM fits within the organization depends on a number of factors. One such factor is organizational size and complexity. In large enterprises where IT service management encompasses numerous business units, the role of BRM may fit at or near the executive levels of the IT organization, with dotted line responsibility to the business unit. In a smaller organization the role may fit within systems management or program management. In any case, BRM acts as a partner to the service management team and should be aligned with the organization’s operating model, e.g., geographic based, market based etc.

Supply versus demand… who does what?

Typically, IT service management is responsible for supply—the IT services and infrastructure that already exist. Part of supply responsibility is ensuring appropriate resources to deliver on existing supply. BRM is typically responsible for demand management—the IT services and infrastructure that don’t exist, but customer need or business need is driving demand. This is where is a little clarity goes a long way. In the true sense of the meaning, the BRM function ensures that the business has what it needs to remain competitive, makes the business case for updates and prioritizes what’s needed/requested. BRM works closely with service and program management to agree on deliverables budget and ensure a smooth transition. For a more in depth discussion, read CIO’s A New Model for IT Demand Management by Michael Gentle.

IT accountability… who’s responsible?

In a traditional account management role, say within a professional services firm, the account manager is responsible for all aspects of the relationship with the customer and ensures that the team behind her or him upholds their part of the service or support. We view the BRM similarly. They are the outward face of the services management team and responsible for cultivating the relationship with the customer. Part of cultivating the relationship with the customer is cultivating partnerships within IT so that the hand-off from BRM to service management is clear. For example, the customer wants to implement sales force automation. Regardless of the tool or its implementation, the BRM is accountable to the customer for the implementation and post implementation support; and service management and project management are accountable to BRM for meeting the agreed upon deliverables. Is IT Organizational Confusion Exacerbated by the Role of Business Relationship Manager? by Vaughan Merlyn is a good read on the BRM.

BRM is an essential function of ensuring the business needs are aligned with IT service management priorities. When you consider all the roles that go into ITSM, having a business relationship manager gives the customer a single point of contact, which is easier for the customer. However, such a relationship can only be successful when there is clarity within the organization backing the BRM.

Learn how CA Nimsoft can help you leverage service management to provide a clear interface between the business and IT.

For many years, Service Management solutions were designed to provide as much information as possible for analysts-letting them determine how to best use this data and what course of action should be applied to resolve an end users problem.

But something has changed in the past 10 years that seems to have been overlooked by service management solution developers. Sure, providing service to end users is still as critical as ever, but service desk analysts have changed. Today’s service desk users are used to intuitive SaaS-based applications like Facebook and LinkedIn designed with a totally different kind of user in mind.

We’ve been busy developing a new release of CA Nimsoft Service Desk that keeps this new end user clearly in mind. Our new release of CA NSD, which we’re previewing at FUSION, was built with this consumer- centric design approach. We’ve added this design on top of CA Nimsoft Service Desk’s action driven workflow that directs analysts down proven resolution paths-all to provide faster resolutions to end users and a familiar user experience for analysts.

In this short YouTube video you’ll see the CA Nimsoft Service Desk user experience and see for yourself how it makes a service desk something to be liked.

This post was originally published in the CA Community blog by Robert Stroud.

Certain information in this publication may outline CA’s general product direction. However, CA may make modifications to any CA product, software program, method or procedure described herein at any time without notice, and the development, release and timing of any features or functionality described herein remain at CA’s sole discretion. This publication shall not under any existing or future written license agreement or services agreement relating to any CA software product: (i) constitute or amend product documentation or specifications, or be subject to any warranty set forth in any such written agreement; or (ii) serve to affect the rights and/or obligations of CA or its licensees. This document is for your informational purposes only and CA assumes no responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of the information contained herein.

In a July ZDNet article by Phil LeClare for Forrester Research, Forrester’s Eveline Oehrlich discusses why IT Service Management organizations should replace the “IT” in ITSM with “Automation.” CA Nimsoft experts were particularly intrigued by the article’s focus on customer service and what Forrester refers to as Service Management Automation (SMA)—the evolution of ITSM. We like the fact that “SM”—service management—comes first, and implies greater emphasis on the customer.

So we started thinking about automation in terms of service management and came up with the following recommendations relative to the IT service desk. Our belief is that information technology can be an enabler of automation, which, in turn, can deliver higher customer satisfaction. We took a look at some of the underlying technology that supports SMA. Keep in mind that our recommendations are no substitute for strategic SMA planning, but offer support to a well-thought plan—the “Plan,” “Act,” and “Optimize” elements the article discusses.

• BYOD and Automation

  IT teams have some groundwork to do in the BYOD area, including laying the initial foundation and implementing the necessary governance. By automating discovery of devices, customers can obtain greater satisfaction and IT teams increased protection of the IT infrastructure.

• Virtualization and Automation

  Similar to BYOD, automatic discovery of virtual environments is an essential tool as SaaS and IaaS models proliferate. Such automation eases the monitoring burden on IT and service desk staff, while automatically updating the CMDB. Tie it back to customer service, and automatic discovery helps enable more proactive IT support—what we believe to be a key tenet of SMA.

• Service Desk and Automation

  Whether you’ve formally adopted the ITIL governance framework or similar approach, automated service desk workflows based on ITIL guidance can improve customer service. We’ve seen automated workflows benefit customers in two key areas: (1) ensure that incidents are managed efficiently and effectively, thus reducing costs, while improving service delivery; and (2) implement more effective change management that makes business requirements and minimal disruption to customers a priority.

So when it comes to dropping the “IT” in ITSM, we’d like to pose the question a bit differently. Are you offering a commodity or a service backed by a trusted business partnership? In the former, ITSM has been commoditized to the management of technologies from Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) to applications. What typically happens with commodities is that price/cost drives decisions. So all things being equal in terms of what you offer and how it’s offered, price is highly influential in a company’s decision to outsource parts of ITSM or a company’s decision to switch outsource providers.

On the contrary, if what you’re offering is a service backed by a trusted business partner, then your offering tends to bring greater business value. That’s where IT service management should be—adding real value and also being able to measure that value in terms of business information not just ITSM metrics.

Learn how a CA Nimsoft IT service desk solution can take you further into the future of ITSM and service management automation.

According to Gartner Inc.’s 2012 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, another two to five years and the cloud computing hype will be behind us. Then, as the Gartner Hype Cycle puts it, various aspects of cloud computing will enter the “Plateau of Productivity” – that means they will become mainstream. No matter how you dissect it, the cloud will provide opportunity for both MSPs and enterprises alike.

We agree with Forbes contributor, Louis Columbus in his bottom line summary, that cloud-based platforms must be aligned with business objectives and strategy (Forbes, “Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing Shows Enterprises Finding Value in Big Data, Virtualization“).

So what does all of this mean to MSPs and enterprises? It means that hype is almost over and now is the time to develop your own objectives and strategy based on the reality of cloud support. I think we can all agree that the cloud didn’t exactly live up to the hype concerning security and humongous cost savings. However, the business value of as-a-service models is being proven every day by MSPs and enterprises that focused beyond the hype. They took a long hard look at their business objectives and how the cloud supports and enables them.

Shift from IT- to business-driven cloud computing

Amidst all the hype of cloud computing, neither IT nor business owners saw the shift in who would drive cloud initiatives. IT teams certainly felt the pressure to get on board with the cloud as the business learned of the cloud’s flexibility and cost effectiveness. The good news is that although the hype masked some of the downside of the cloud, business and IT teams are collaborating more closely to ensure that business strategy and IT strategy are aligned. This is particularly important when it comes to data security and regulatory compliance.

Level the playing field

One area that’s more hypothesis than hype is it the cloud’s ability to level the playing field for small and mid-size businesses (SMBs). Many of our MSP customers have enabled the performance and capability that, in the past, was cost prohibitive for SMBs. The hype was in the size and scope of cost reductions compared to traditional server-infrastructure models. It turns out that cost is a factor in migrating to the cloud; however, it’s less of an incentive than better leveraging IT resources, for example.

Focus on service

Whether you’re a buyer or provider of cloud services, cloud support relies on maintaining service levels. Much of the hype surrounding service levels wasn’t really hype at all. Service levels can improve and with better economies of scales than traditional models. However, the onus is on the MSPs to prove they can deliver the service levels expected in a cloud environment relative to availability, transaction time, performance and storage. Proving the value of the service requires effective monitoring, which in a cloud environment, often extends beyond average uptime and availability metrics.

Focus on monitoring

In proving the value of the cloud and the service provider, visibility plays a significant role. Monitoring capabilities within the cloud should provide visibility into service level management, performance management and other services that may be running on the MSP’s platform. As more businesses increasingly rely on the cloud for business critical applications and services, there’s less tolerance for delays and downtime. Monitoring at more granular levels will help pre-empt service issues and contain issues that do impact the operation.

Focus on flexibility

If there’s one cloud support area that’s lived up to the hype it’s the flexibility it offers both MSPs and the MSP customer. Thanks to multi-tenancy, MSPs can achieve greater economies of scale by running multiple customers on a homogenous infrastructure or application. With greater efficiency comes greater flexibility in pricing and billing, such as “pay as you grow” models. Businesses can invest in the services they need now without overbuying capacity or licenses to handle future growth.

While we think certain aspects of the cloud have been hyped, the cloud will continue to exist as part of the IT mix. The better aligned your IT and business strategies, the more adept you’ll be at determining the right IT mix for your business, which will likely include some aspect of cloud computing.

We can help you monitor and manage infrastructure in the cloud and traditional data center. Learn how CA Nimsoft Monitor brings total visibility into your public or private cloud environment.

As more organizations shift from an “information technology” focus to a “business technology” focus, application monitoring becomes more critical. After all, the stakes are getting higher in application performance, given the high costs of downtime in many industries, including financial services. The CA Nimsoft application monitoring experts have identified several key challenges and opportunities that business technology teams should consider to keep business applications running smoothly.

Monitoring applications in a distributed environment

With numerous applications, operating systems and hardware, we advise delving deeper into the transactions that occur across these systems. By applying more granular metrics, systems administrators can set thresholds and alarms that address specific underlying issues in more complex distributed environments. Let’s say a business application on the JBoss platform is running slow. More granular metrics, that identify where in the transaction flow delays occur, help pinpoint the root cause. For example, is JVM performance affecting the transaction or is a specific customized MBean the culprit? This granularity, as opposed to applying average response metrics, also puts the issue into perspective relative to user experience—is the issue affecting a few users or is it a systematic problem. More importantly, this granular level of monitoring applications enables systems administrators to find issues before they impact the SLA or user experience. We advise using native communication protocols to more accurately simulate end user activity, e.g., Citrix ICA communication protocol.

Overcoming the challenge of applications monitoring in dynamic environments

Perhaps one of the most challenging aspects of application monitoring is the dynamic environment in which applications run. You’re shooting at a moving target. A systems administrator can hardly monitor the application effectively without also considering infrastructure dynamics and user experience. We’ve found automation to be an indispensable tool to maintain service levels and a positive user experience. Automation in the areas of discovery, configuration and historical performance enable the speed at which today’s systems administrators must work to preempt and resolve issues from affecting service levels and user experience.

For example, auto discovery of hardware or virtual environments can apply appropriate monitoring profiles and update the configuration management database (CMDB). In a dynamic environment, automation of this type gives system administrators greater visibility to the interdependencies of the infrastructure, without sacrificing time to manually configure. Likewise, user experience monitoring is another indispensable tool that’s helped numerous enterprises pinpoint root cause and quickly isolate faults— vis-a-vis application performance or user error.

Some of the more effective application monitoring we’ve seen in the enterprise leverages historical performance data to establish baseline metrics. We suggest the use of a performance manage database to capture historical performance data and rule out anomalies versus cyclical workloads. For example, a month-end financial close would be apparent in an historical performance monitoring report instead of showing up as an anomaly in a typical point monitoring solution.

Simplifying applications monitoring

Simplification is possible when systems administrators have greater visibility to the entire application and infrastructure. We refer to this as “single-pane-of-glass” visibility. It’s a comprehensive picture of critical applications and systems regardless of location and whether real or virtual. Of course a consolidated view requires integration with multiple interoperable systems and the capability to monitor key infrastructure elements—applications, servers and services.

A built-in KPI library, including threshold recommendations, is good practice for driving effective application monitoring. We strongly suggest the use of threshold recommendations within the KPI library. They not only improve set up, but also operating efficiency. Applying recommended thresholds helps avoid a barrage of unnecessary alarms, and enables system administrators to better focus on resolving real application issues.

Thanks to automation and a number of built-in monitoring dashboards and KPIs, application performance monitoring is more effective from an overall cost standpoint as well as an application performance perspective. How effective is your team at monitoring applications? Learn how CA Nimsoft monitor can boost application performance.

Today, CA Technologies announced the latest release of the flagship monitoring solution, CA Nimsoft Monitor. The new release, version 6, offers a number of powerful new features, and perhaps the most significant is the addition of capabilities for network and application flow analysis, commonly referred to as NetFlow.

CA Nimsoft Monitor for Flow Analysis provides the critical insights that network and application owners are looking for. For example, anyone that supports a critical application would want to know whether their application is getting enough bandwidth to support the end user. Imagine if your sales force was unable to make outbound calls during the last day of the quarter because your VoIP-based phone system wasn’t getting the network resources it needed—all because someone in the office was downloading content from iTunes. With CA Nimsoft Monitor, a VoIP administrator could find out immediately that this was happening—and even figure out who was downloading season four of “Breaking Bad” while sales was trying to close business.

CA Nimsoft Monitor for Flow Analysis recently helped our engineering team. By reviewing the output generated from our new toy, our developers found a couple interesting issues occurring on the network. First, they noticed some slow performance on their virtual machines. Looking at flow data, they found that a single box was using 32GB of bandwidth within a 15 minute interval on the network. That’s about 36MBps, which, at the time, was 50-70% of all network traffic across one of the main routers for the office.

By catching this when they did, they were able to prevent any loss of productivity. The data exposed the need to apply some QoS (quality of service) configurations to that network. Once these configurations were in place, utilization went down to a more reasonable 250MB/15 minutes, and performance improved.

Flow analysis solved another problem for our engineers that week as well, this time at the application level. A developer noticed that a VM was performing very slowly, to the point where you couldn’t even rename a file without the system hanging. Upon reviewing the flow data, we saw that this host was receiving a large amount of inbound traffic. By drilling down into more detail, we saw that one of our engineers was pushing a large amount of data over, which really shouldn’t have caused the system to perform as slowly as it was. After the inbound traffic was stopped, the developer found out the system had a bunch of unnecessary processes running, which were consuming too many resources. In this case, the flow data gave the developer the clues he needed to detect the root cause.

We’re excited to deliver these flow analysis capabilities to our enterprise and service provider customers, so they can start realizing some of these same benefits. To learn more about CA Nimsoft Monitor for Flow Analysis, be sure to see the recent press release or product page.

How does your organization go with the flow? Check out this typical IT help desk flow chart from Nimsoft for escalating issues. This is just one example: IT help desk flow charts can vary greatly in complexity.

How does yours differ? What would you add or subtract?

The availability and uptime requirements of today’s applications is increasingly more demanding as IT environments grow more complex and businesses grow more dependent on applications to drive business results.

Application monitoring is all about the end-user experience.  While it’s important to monitor the underlying metrics such as fault, performance and configuration management; at the end of the day when it comes to assessing how well business critical applications are performing, the user’s perspective on application performance is what really matters.  For example, availability and response time are essential to most business users.  Are you monitoring the metrics that are relevant to user and business requirements?

Application monitoring begins with the user

Organizations that follow best practice application monitoring establish baseline metrics that help them prioritize applications based on performance requirements.   When you understand the needs of the business and its users, you’re in a better position to operate from a proactive application monitoring stance; for example, setting performance targets for latency that alert system administrators before users experience a degradation of service.

Studies show that organizations which excel at application monitoring, possess effective monitoring tools—tools that are capable of monitoring complex environments including physical, virtual, on- or off-premise applications.  These tools also provide the end-to-end visibility that’s often lacking in today’s complex environments.  Tools such as a CMDB can help systems administrators understand dependencies and identify the potential for bottlenecks. A Performance Management Database (PMDB) in another useful tool that leverages performance data to help better predict issues before they occur. Understanding the user base, how it’s distributed geographically and how each location logs in can help system administrators identify issues that not only degrade application performance, but also help IT teams better plan for future upgrades.

Application monitoring facilitates better IT planning

A key aspect of user experience is knowing the criticality of the applications. What applications can tolerate some latency versus other applications that may be important, though less critical?  An effective application monitoring solution enables systems administrators to prove or disprove whether or not critical applications are running slowly in the first place, or compare response times from various user locations to determine the scope of an issue.  The use of application monitoring can also help administrators better manage timing issues caused by calendar-based business events, such as a month-end close.  Aligning application monitoring to end-user requirements helps establish a set of meaningful metrics.

A common complaint of business users is the time involved in rolling out a much needed business application or upgrade.  Application monitoring provides agility to respond quickly to changing business requirements and roll out applications that meet the business requirements.  For example, mobile users have high expectations when it comes to availability.  Automatic discovery and user-experience simulations help speed detection of issues and monitor performance trends while ensuring performance levels based on both baseline metrics and user experience.

Most IT professionals know there’s a disparity between test and production environments.  With application monitoring from a user perspective, issues that arise in the production environment can be simulated, tested and the root causes identified and addressed more quickly and effectively before causing a major service level issue.

Application monitoring in a modern IT environment goes beyond the application servers and CPU usage.  Understanding the user base, size, location and how the application is deployed and accessed are essential to establishing and tracking the metrics that can help you optimize application performance and meet service levels.

Contact the application monitoring experts at Nimsoft to learn how our solutions can optimize application performance and user experience.

It’s the call in the middle of the night that every system administrator dreads… “Server down.” It’s not that server monitoring is completely neglected, but with today’s server monitoring technologies, we can get a lot more life out of our hard-working servers with fewer issues and higher service levels if it were utilized more effectively.

Obviously, you’ll want to monitor the basics that tell you your servers are up and running—CPU, disk and memory usage. But what about the working condition or overall health of the servers? How well are they performing? Are they meeting the response and availability required by demanding business users? And how much monitoring is enough? To answer these questions we need to monitor our networks a little deeper, being mindful of our resource constraints.

Establish a server monitoring baseline

First you need to plan your server monitoring strategy and prioritize server criticality based on the resources you have available. Then, establish baseline metrics for the basics including availability, bandwidth, and usage along with what server events you’ll be tracking and recording to performance logs. Baseline server metrics will help you automate the process by setting effective thresholds and receiving alerts when needed. A good baseline also helps you better utilize your system administrators’ time.

Automate server monitoring

Where possible, automate. Effective server monitoring software should ease the burden of monitoring and eliminate “firefighting.” For example, automatic discovery features can reduce or even eliminate many server performance issues that result from new environments coming online. Whether physical or virtual, infrastructure changes that are automatically discovered give system administrators more visibility to the impact of changes in the network. Look for server monitoring systems that can automatically extract data from log files so your system administrators can immediately act on the data instead of manually analyzing it.

Monitor virtualized environments

Virtualized server monitoring can still be performed even though agents are not permitted. With an agent-less IT monitoring system, it’s important that your system includes deep integration with the management interfaces for these environments. When it comes to server monitoring, where your server is located or in what environment—physical or virtual—shouldn’t matter. A sysadmin should have visibility to the performance of all servers regardless of environment or agent.

Stop working your servers to death… and your sysadmins

In depth server monitoring, particularly of your more critical servers, can help you identify underlying issues that are placing heavier than normal loads on the CPU. For example, monitoring bandwidth can pinpoint application issues that are bottlenecking performance and can eventually affect users or worse yet, shut down a server. Monitoring a failing router or switch can also prevent an outage when detected early. Modern IT server monitoring makes more granular monitoring of CIs possible and does so without burdening already burdened sysadmins.

Servers underpin our networks. We work them 24/7. It’s far easier and less costly to prevent major issues than to just keep working our servers to death. Request a server monitoring free trial and see if we can help you better utilize your IT monitoring resources.