I have yet to meet a satisfied customer with a CMDB. It’s not like I go looking everyday but somehow the subject always seems to arise and people tend to get quite touchy on the subject. It wasn’t so long ago I worked for a company who spent a fortune acquiring an application discovery and mapping solution. It promised auto-discovery in real-time and all those wonderful things yet it seemed to die a cold death months after the acquisition closed. I listened to the sales pitches around “When applications go down the first question asked is ‘What changed’?” and the famous “75% of application outages are related to change”. To me that’s like stating the bloody obvious, of course something changed, if nothing changed the application would be still running.
The problem these early discovery & mapping solutions lacked is business context. They were inherently built to track IT interactions from server to server and technology to technology. They’d scan server ports, executables and protocols to try and piece together the relationships between IT assets within a data centre. Or they’d do it by listening to the actual interactions. They’d paint pretty little diagrams like the London Tube Map and then give you all the technology, versions and patch levels these assets were running. Some solutions were priced per cpu which can be highly lucrative when vendors told customers to put an agent on every server in their data centre. Unfortunately the one thing they didn’t discover or understand was the business services that ran across these IT assets. Applications and Business Services these days don’t just relate to 4 apache web servers, 8 weblogic servers and 1 Oracle database. The pervasiveness of SOA and mashups these days means a single IT asset can serve one or more business services. Applications and IT Assets no longer have a 1 to many relationship, an application isn’t simply a collection of segmented IT assets.
I did a search on Wikipedia for CMDB and found the quote “A key success factor in implementing a CMDB is the ability to automatically discover information about the CIs (auto-discovery) and track changes as they happen.”. If a business service is a CI then that’s a pretty tough proposition to auto-discover and track change on. How do you discover business context from IT assets? For starters you can stop looking at the IT assets for answers, you’ll get your versions and patch levels of Linux but you won’t get a description of your business services that flow through them.
I’ll put my head on a lance and state that Business Transaction Management (BTM) can add significant value to any CMDB project. When you start to monitor business transactions you start to acquire lots of key intelligence on how your business runs and maps to IT. You auto-discover transaction flows and the IT assets they interact with, all in real-time. It also gets better, you can store all this data historically so that you can report and compare business services and their CI’s before and after a change. You can even visualise how the business and IT asset dependencies change over time using transaction flow/topology diagrams as key evidence. When a change occurs on an IT asset you can instantly report whether this change had a positive or negative impact on your business services or transactions by reviewing related latency and SLA. I’m not claiming BTM is the answer to all CMDB pain but it solves some of the most basic and common challenges:
- Auto-discovers business services and their IT dependencies in real-time
- Stores information historically so you can track, report and quantify change when it occurs
Maybe BTM is the pain relief CMDB projects need right now.
Lindsay Diamond
Assaf Amit
Andy Wetzel
Stephen Burton
Russell Rothstein
Motti Tal
Marie-Pierre Belanger
cpennoptier
I think that you forgot to mention the pain that it takes to implement BTM and the amount of effort it takes to keep it updated.
Real-time auto-discovery of business services and IT dependencies. You are now sounding as bad as the CMDB vendors …..
Give me a break !!!!!!!!
By: Jacob on November 20, 2009
at 6:17 am
Thanks Jacob for your constructive feedback. Pretty much all enterprise software these days requires investment to implement/maintain in order to make it successful, even salesforce.com which I use everyday so nothing is easy in that regard. BTM is not just about monitoring an application, its about changing the fundamental way you manage IT using business transactions as the key source of information, which in the context I was referring to in this post being used to update CMDB’s.
Regarding “Real-time auto-discovery of business services & IT dependencies”, that’s what BTM is about and why many BTM vendors have lots of happy successful customers who see beyond traditional IT management monitoring solutions. If BTM wasn’t compelling then I wouldn’t be writing this blog in the position I’m in. Customers validate vendors claims so the only talking I do is based on what I hear from customers week in week out (as I mentioned in the first paragraph of my post).
By: Stephen Burton on November 24, 2009
at 1:35 pm
Let me get this right.
You are claiming that BTM provides DYNAMIC and AUTOMATIC discovery of not just transactions but APPLICATIONS and INFRASTRUCTURE and RELATIONSHIPS between them.
If this is the case then could you please enlighten me with some details or point me in the right direction to understand the approach that you take for this discovery.
i.e. do you require agents installed on application servers, probes on the network, etc….
By: Jacob on November 26, 2009
at 1:29 am
[...] BTM – the pain relief for CMDB? « Business Transaction Management Blog – I’ll put my head on a lance and state that Business Transaction Management (BTM) can add significant value to any CMDB project. When you start to monitor business transactions you start to acquire lots of key intelligence on how your business runs and maps to IT. You auto-discover transaction flows and the IT assets they interact with, all in real-time. It also gets better, you can store all this data historically so that you can report and compare business services and their CI’s before and after a change. You can even visualise how the business and IT asset dependencies change over time using transaction flow/topology diagrams as key evidence. When a change occurs on an IT asset you can instantly report whether this change had a positive or negative impact on your business services or transactions by reviewing related latency and SLA. I’m not claiming BTM is the answer to all CMDB pain but it solves some of the most basic and common challenges: [...]
By: Interesting Links for November 25th on November 26, 2009
at 9:02 pm
Here is some scoop on our technology: http://www.optier.com/products_technology.aspx
For every business transaction that executes we keep a profile of its topology, latency, resource & SLA breakdown across IT. In short, we use both agent and agentless approaches where it makes sense. I’m not going to reveal our secret sauce on the internet. All I’ll say is that our technology is proven in the enterprise and runs in some of the worlds largest mission critical applications (some of which have transaction volumes of close to 50 million transactions per day). A few of these customers are listed here: http://www.optier.com/featured_customers.aspx
The blog post & claims above originated from discussions I had with several customers. In my world the customer is the best source of information and ideas you can get.
By: Stephen Burton on November 26, 2009
at 1:52 pm