Posts Tagged Business Service Management
Building a next generation BTM UI
by Stephen Burton, 20th April 2010.
It’s the day after we put the finishing touches to a brand new BTM UI and I feel like I’ve gone 12 rounds with Mike Tyson. It’s true what they say though, No Pain No Gain. I’ve been on the ropes, been knocked down several times but like Elton John says “I’m still standing”. A new baby is born and its certainly not an ugly one. I am expecting a few tears though when our field organization and customers gets their hands on it and start to shake it for the first time.
To be precise or wily it’s taken 18 months, 125 pages, 50+ detailed designs, 65 flights (most to Tel Aviv), 50+ customer meetings/webex’s, thousands of emails, hundreds of arguments, thousands of beers (5 beers per argument) and a good few hundred bugs. All for the sake of Business Transaction Management. Has it been worth it? Absolutely.
About 18 months ago OpTier made a decision to build a next generation BTM user interface. It was becoming increasingly clear from customers and prospects that the value of BTM touched many stakeholders in the business and IT. Our previous GUI was more focused towards the technical audience being application support teams and application developers. When you track all transactions across all tiers all of the time and provide response time, SLA and resource consumption metrics by Application, Transaction, User, Location and Tiers you end up collecting a lot of valuable information. The problem is how do you show all this information to the right user in the right context? What is relevant for an application owner isn’t always relevant for an application support team or a capacity planner. Showing a technical view to a business stakeholder is like an English person receiving an Hebrew menu in an Israeli restaurant (not good when you’re hungry). Therefore one of the first decisions we made was to make our BTM GUI role based so we could support a variety of users and use cases. Simply put, a user logs in and is presented with a series of “activities” relevant to their role. Each activity (e.g. problem isolation) has a series of tailored views which allows the user to perform that activity using information which is only relevant to that user. For example, a business user is typically interested in business transaction volume, activity and SLA compliance – they don’t really care about CPU usage, tier chattiness or how many I/O operations happen when a business transaction is executed.
The second key decision we made was to make the GUI extensible from both an architecture and user perspective. It’s obviously good to provide out of the box roles, activities and views for our customers. However, the needs of every customer and user is different no matter how hard you try to support every use case. Therefore users can simply create their own roles, activities and views to make BTM information more relevant to them incorporating their own context, terminology and processes. With 13 dimensions (application, transaction, users, locations, tiers, …), 100+ available metrics, 3 working modes, 10 different visualizations (table, charts, clouds, GoogleMaps, …) and a slick graphic design built on top of Flex technology the possibilities to our users are now endless. In the current beta release we support 10 BTM activities with over 75 different BTM views, if users want something different they can go right ahead and create whatever activity and view they wish. Over the next 18 months we’ll be adding more dimensions, metrics and visualization that will help customers truly manage IT from a business perspective, the future is bright.
The last key decision was to outsource the whole usability and graphic design aspects of our GUI. OpTier specializes in tracking transactions across tiers, it does not specialize in designing user interfaces. BTM is our business, usability is someone else’s business (Puzzlehead in this case). I can tell you right now though usability is a political hot potato. Get 2 people in the same room and you’ll get two different opinions on what is intuitive, get 25 people in the room and you’ll get 25 different opinions. You’d be surprised how many times I heard the words “When I used to develop GUI we did it like this…”. As Einstein once said “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. When you work with a usability company you’re implicitly trusting them to do the right thing based on your inputs and feedback. Unless your open minded with usability experts you’ll always look to the past instead of looking into the future. What was relevant 10 years ago in GUI might not be relevant in 2010. GUI from my perspective is more art than science, it has to capture the imagination and invite the user to play. Larry Ellison once said “When you innovate you’ve got to be prepared for people to tell you you’re crazy.”
Like anything which is brand new though, we’ll have our issues. I’m not naïve enough to think that our new GUI will be perfect from day one, it’s a significant improvement and departure from our existing GUI. We’ll be able to show more value than we could have possibly imagined 18 months ago with our previous GUI. Our users can access BTM value in a single click depending on what they are trying to accomplish. You want to see your application CPU consumption over time? Click on this view. You want to understand the business impact of the release you’ve just released to production? Click on this view. You want to see the individual transactions user X executed? Click on this view.
I see this GUI as the start of something new and exciting rather than the end of just another GUI project. GUI’s should evolve and provide users with something fresh, unique and exciting. Innovation isn’t about standing back and admiring what you’ve delivered in the past, it’s about constantly listening to what your customers want and coming up with killer ideas so you can deliver that competitive edge to your business and your customers business.
Add comment April 20, 2010
Gartner, Forrester, et al: IT Spending and BTM
It’s no secret that the business transaction management (BTM) market has taken off big time. Whereas just a couple of years ago, OpTier was single-handedly pioneering and educating the market about BTM, today just about every application performance management (APM) vendor is pitching some type of transaction profiling capabilities. The marketing barrage and hype are reaching fever pitch, oftentimes confusing enterprises about what truly constitutes BTM. In a market with inflated expectations, a good industry analyst will help end-user organizations separate the wheat from the chafe and identify the vendors that can deliver the goods. (Whereas the less proficient analyst will focus on creating snazzy yet vapid infographics.)
The good analysts aren’t afraid to ask tough questions and dig down deep into the details of technology, strategy and vision to get to their conclusions. So it’s not without a bit of amusement that we find that the major analyst firms are themselves out of sync in their predictions about the size of overall IT budgets in 2010. Gartner predicts that IT spending will remain flat in 2010, Forrester says IT spending will rebound strongly in 2010, and to round things out, Ovum sees that IT spending will grow only slightly.
And while the analyst groups differ regarding 2010 IT budgets, they all agree about one thing – BTM is growing fast and consuming a larger part of the IT software budget. Forrester has reclassified the APM market to include both APM and BTM, reflecting the increasing role that BTM is playing in managing application performance. And Gartner says that BTM is fundamental because it is the very center of application management.
So it’s no surprise that OpTier closed out Q1 with another blow-out quarter, penetrating into new geographies and vertical markets. Go no further than recent tweets by our SVP of worldwide sales replete with CAPS and lots and lots of exclamation points:
Stay tuned for public announcements of new customer wins and exciting news – we promise to keep the punctuation marks to the bare necessity… (!!!)
Add comment April 19, 2010
Transaction Madness
This article will compare the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament with BSM challenges that are met by Business Transaction Management (BTM).
Continue Reading 2 comments March 22, 2010
The Oscars of Private Cloud Management
It was fun to watch the Academy Awards this year – a glitzy evening replete with glamorous movie stars, stylish attire, and most importantly to those of us from the software industry, totally cool computer-generated characters. (Unless you preferred to spend the evening watching your favorite Super Bowl commercial for the umpteenth time or the latest OK Go video instead.) It’s a night where aspiring actors and screenwriters silently wish that next year they’ll get that break to make it to the Oscars, and we wish we had taken that extra course in computer graphics in college, observing the box-office proceeds from Avatar and Alice in Wonderland.
And while OpTier won’t be releasing a 3-D feature film any time soon, we do believe a multi-dimensional approach is critical to that new genre of enterprise IT service management – managing private clouds. Private clouds are becoming more pervasive – according to Gartner, by 2012 enterprises will spend more than half of their cloud dollars on private cloud services because of improvements in cost and management efficiency.
OpTier BTM provides performance management, resource management, and cost-based accounting for private clouds
That’s where the 3-D approach comes in. Some enterprises erroneously assume that since virtualization is the enabling technology for clouds, then virtualization-centric management systems are sufficient for managing cloud-based services. In effect, they are extending the flawed silo-based APM approach to IT management by applying another one-dimensional toolset to manage virtual hosts and guests in the cloud. (It’s no surprise that in these cases, when a performance issue occurs in the cloud – everyone first blames the “VM guy”.)
OpTier takes a multi-dimensional approach to the cloud. In order to provide true end-to-end service management in the cloud, you need to include visibility into both virtual and physical metrics. Only with a business transactional-based approach do you have 3-D visibility to cover the three key dimensions of transactions that flow through the cloud:
- Time per transaction (i.e. cloud performance management)
- Resource utilization per transaction (i.e. cloud capacity management)
- Cost per transaction (i.e. chargeback and activity-based costing for the cloud)
Frost and Sullivan found that two of the top three concerns about cloud are loss of control and availability. OpTier’s business transaction management approach to private clouds is the most efficient manner to address these concerns – enabling organizations to take control and assure 24/7 availability of services in the cloud.
So the OpTier 3-D feature film may be off in the future, but for some time already, OpTier customers have been using OpTier BTM’s 3-dimensional approach to manage services in the cloud on a daily basis. Now that’s worth an Oscar speech.
Add comment March 7, 2010
Virtualized in Vancouver
We’re fascinated by what’s going on in Vancouver this month. Sure, there’s a lot of drama, action and suspense going on over at the Winter Olympics (such as the valiant efforts of the Jamaican Freestyle Skier to be the first to restore the pride of winter sports to his homeland since the 1988 Jamaican Bobsled team) but we’re even more intrigued by the less mesomorphic young singles cross-town in Vancouver engaging their social skills in a flittering party – flirting virtually with one another through the twitter platform.
For those of you not previously familiar with flittering, it means sending a flirtatious tweet to someone that interests you in the room. And while having the option of flirting online is generally a good thing as it provides a new way for people to find their match, it presents a management challenge – keeping up with the fast pace of the tweets and achieving the visibility to link the virtual (witty tweets) with the physical (cute guy or gal – hopefully).
We find these issues remarkably similar to the management challenges companies face when deploying virtualization. While virtualization presents huge benefits in efficiency gains, it also creates three application management challenges:
- Lost Visibility: Applications become more difficult to manage because virtualization masks the underlying infrastructure layers. It becomes difficult to isolate the problematic tier when a problem occurs, or even understand that a problem is starting to occur before users are impacted. Likewise, it is difficult to determine the impact of VM changes on performance.
- Dynamic Environment: If becomes difficult to keep up with speed of changes in virtual infrastructure. As the folks at EMC call it – “VMotion Sickness”. Then when application performance begins to degrade, people tend to first blame the VM administrator, even if the problem lies elsewhere.
- Overprovisioning: Due to lack of visibility, enterprises often overprovision infrastructure in order to assure performance. Overprovisioning physical hosts (e.g. extra CPU) reduces the cost savings of virtualization.
Virtualization-aware Business Transaction Management addresses these challenges. With OpTier BTM you can regain the visibility lost from virtualization, keep up with changing VMs, and rightsize to maximize cost efficiencies. And while that last sentence would fit into a 140-character tweet, we’re not sure it would get us any dates at the next flittering party.
Add comment February 22, 2010
The Top Ten List of the Decade We Didn’t See on the Net
During the final week of our still-nameless decade (if it won’t be called “the zeros” or “the double-naughts”, we’ll vote for the “pre-teens” or the “naughties”) we spent too much time perusing through a plethora of Top 10 lists of the decade. And while we found much to learn from the fact that the top athlete of the decade is off the endorsement circuit thanks to a poorly placed fire hydrant, our attention was piqued by the selection for the top business application of the decade by CIO magazine senior editor Thomas Wailgum.
As a company that is focused on assuring the performance and availability of business applications, we spend a lot of time thinking about the critical applications that drive business for our customers. So we were intrigued to read that the top business application of the decade was not SAP, not salesforce.com, and not event something bought by Oracle. The winner for business application of the decade was Microsoft Excel. This came to us as an epiphany a few days early this year as Wailgum nailed it on the head by identifying that Excel delivers value in every nook and cranny of an organization. The ongoing success of the application is due not only to its feature set but also to its high availability and performance (as long as your PC is working fine ). As more and more applications, including business productivity applications, get served in the cloud, availability and performance become a greater IT challenge.
What’s even more significant to us is that Excel is one of the few applications that is used on a regular basis to share information (e.g. metrics, KPIs, costs) between IT and the business and enable collaboration between these two groups. Which brings us to the Top 10 list of the decade that we didn’t come across. If we had found a list of the decade’s top unfulfilled strategic IT initiatives, near the top would surely be Business/IT alignment. In fact, alignment with business goals has been at the top of the CIO’s New Year’s resolution list since well before the third millennium began.
Ever since Henderson and Venkatraman’s seminal article in the 1970’s, B/I alignment has been recognized as the holy grail in the IT management industry. We here at OpTier believe that our new decade (“the tens?”, “the teens?”, “the aughts?”) will see huge progress in this area thanks to business transaction management. OpTier pioneered BTM back in 2004 and in the past year we have seen IT managers and industry analysts acknowledge the central role that BTM plays in enabling management of services from a business perspective. At the start of this new year, we are well positioned to extend our technological and market share leadership in the BTM market, and we are committed to enable enterprises in the coming decade to fully align IT with their overall business goals.
Happy 2010!
Add comment January 4, 2010
You can only see what you can see.
by Stephen Burton, 6th December 2009.
I read a discussion last week on the internet where a person asked a simple question “How can I get an End to End latency breakdown of my business transactions”. Before I’d even had chance to comment I noticed that two software vendors had already replied with links to their website claiming that they deliver exactly what the original poster was asking for (imagine the odds of that eh? 
).
End to End beyond J2EE and .NET
1 comment December 6, 2009
BTM – the pain relief for CMDB?
by Stephen Burton, 2nd November 2009.
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.
5 comments November 2, 2009
BTM what is it for me?… really
While on my spinning bicycle in class this early morning on a cool New York day, I was cycling and grooving alon
g on Diana Ross “if there’s a cure for THIS, i don’t want it”….. Being thankful I have time to do things I love. It reminded me of discussion I had with people working in IT multiple times; we IT have it though there is very little time for personal life:
we know our users are complaining, we know we are losing business, we have been trying to identify the issue for days, I am losing credibility, I missed several friends dinner, I work every weekends, I have to leave the office now because I have to jump on a change management conference call while driving with the kids screaming in the back of the car. I have other things on my plate, like launching our new private banking services, budgeting for new servers to address our merger with ABC company, I need to grow my business, we can’t even have a feel on how our services behave nor identifying simple problem such as one out of five times the browser hangs when entering employee badge number. The assumption I made last week on where the problem might have been are now wrong, the change management team applied a patch against that specific application and the problem didn’t go away. I am stress and tired…. I am stress and tired…. I am stress and tired…. I am stress and tired….
IT experts would say: “I have tools several, several, several, several tools, and it is true after triaging all the alerts, the tools were able to isolate issues but I really just care about what impacted my users in company ABC. What is the behavior of my most revenue generating transactions today and what will it be after we merge the two companies’ systems next week, how would I know if it improves or degrades the overall business service?”Familiar with THIS? What if you would take a peek at introducing Business Transaction Management (BTM) into your IT process?
You would finally see at this moment the IT consumers and IT producers of business transaction information, knowing whom and what is impacted, focusing only on the most important services. What if you knew the exact flow of the information and the behavior of your special revenue generating credit card application transactions? BTM is a source of rich IT information. It is much more than incident management, you can not only understand the current behavior and plan for growing your business you can see the impact on your services of an unplanned or planned change.
This is the cure to resolve the “THIS”, today, tomorrow, next week, on a constantly changing fluid IT environment. Really who could have predicted that you would transact business via text messages? With this information on hand feel free to use those specialized tools and apply them appropriately to isolate granular application components issues but change the way you think about managing IT, It is not always about technical components. Now, I won’t cure all your stress and fatigue as there always be screaming kids, traffic, lines at the coffee shop but one less thing to worry about, getting a little more of your personal life back, one more thing to proudly walk to your management and really feeling good that you know the “THIS” at every moment of the day and I guarantee you will be grooving along a Disco song….
Add comment October 22, 2009
Another “Less is More” Blog for ITSM and BSM Solutions
I’m jealous and in denial with several of my colleagues at work. It may have the “compare the meerkat” ring tone but my mobile phone was replaced last week with a new model of berry and I have to report I still feel inferior. It’s like I just traded a Porsche Boxster for a Boxster S, sure it’s a nice upgrade but everything is relative and unfortunately everyone around me is driving a 911 Turbo at the moment in the form of an iPhone.
Still, I’m not bitter. I think the introduction and innovation of the iPhone was exactly the kick up the ass that the mobile phone market needed. Think different is what Apple did and I think many IT vendors today should be following the same type of attitude for IT service management solutions. If I rewind the clock back just 5 years I owned a Sony Ericsson phone to make calls, a canon 2MegaPixel camera to take photos, an iPod “brick edition” to listen to music and a Dell laptop (also Brick Edition) to surf the web and do email. Today, I can get all that from an iPhone. The good news according to all my smug friends is that this iPhone thing actually works and is also quite sexy or something. The fact the camera, ipod, phone and browser are all integrated into the handset with an intuitive user interface is what is most impressive. If I owned an iPhone I wouldn’t need to buy 4 products from 4 different vendors.
ITSM & BSM - Lots of pieces integrated but not the picture you expected.
Now try comparing with what I just said against the IT service management landscape today. Customers are buying ten to twenty point products to manage the different functions and components of IT. Most of which were never intended to work with each other from day one and have so many customisations that migrating to new versions is like moving house rather than redecorating the one you already own. Customers buy separate tools to manage end users, networks, servers, JVM’s, CLR’s, databases, storage and that is just a short list. That’s a lot of GUI, in fact that’s a lot of user logins and products to physically deploy, train and support across your IT organisation. And yet so often we hear the words “Less is More” used in conversation and sales pitches despite many vendors being responsible for most of this huge complexity in the first place. The key issue isn’t so much the number of products, it’s the way in which real users can navigate and perform real use cases to exploit the information across multiple products so they can manage IT more effectively. Dashboards in my opinion do not solve this issue, they provide a quick fix and band aid which is often used by a sales team to try and promote “single pane of glass” views and “OOTB integration” yet in reality dashboards often limit navigation and task orientated use cases where you need to go from high level to low level data using a common context.
We announced a new product at OpTier last week which helps customers understand and manage their end user experience. Rather than create a new standalone product we listened to customers right from the start and did what they asked. We built the new product using the same framework we used to build our first product CoreFirst. Customers get all the benefits and features of a new product but they get it without all the drawbacks of buying yet another product to manage their IT services and components. They have a single GUI, a single data repository and a single user login to access both our products. Customers now get visibility of their end user experience with a complete profile of the business transactions that constructed those experiences all in a single click. We hid the technical complexity just like Apple did with the iPhone and on top of the integration we also decided to make the GUI more sexy in the process.
I may not own an iPhone but that doesn’t stop me appreciating what can be learnt from such innovation.
Add comment October 5, 2009
Lindsay Diamond
Assaf Amit
Andy Wetzel
Stephen Burton
Russell Rothstein
Motti Tal
Marie-Pierre Belanger
cpennoptier
Linh C. Ho