Comments on: BTM – the pain relief for CMDB?

By: Interesting Links for November 25th

Interesting Links for November 25th — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 21:02:33 +0000

[...] 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: Stephen Burton

Stephen Burton — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 13:52:07 +0000

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: Jacob

Jacob — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 01:29:13 +0000

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: Stephen Burton

Stephen Burton — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 13:35:34 +0000

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: Jacob

Jacob — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 06:17:03 +0000

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 !!!!!!!!