Posts Tagged CMDB
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
CMDB Dead on Arrival?
You know those weeks when ten different people happen to talk about the very same thing from five different angles? Well last week was CMDB week for me, and this week already started with the same topic on three different calls and five email threads.
Every customer, integrator, vendor and analyst with whom I spoke had a similarly sad story to tell. Projects that start with great expectations, ranging from pre-change impact assessment to post change operational business impact analysis and from business architecture mapping to technical application component dependency insight. Then varying degrees of positive experiences using the automated discovery tools to populate the CIs and their technical dependencies. And then a frustrating disillusionment. It becomes clear that these maps are not going to provide more than marginal value that hardly justifies the effort, and the great leap into real business service mapping must be taken.
Some take a “boil the ocean” approach. They spend the next three months with several people trying to map one business service such as “Online client support” top to bottom down to the granular service as consumed by users. All this time and effort is spent only to discover that the maps are incomplete due to reasons such as “it would take months just to reverse-engineer that old piece of black box we kept from the legacy system”. They are inaccurate due to reliance on “hard data” such as “I think we that for time deposit services we use the TXMP CICS transaction to do interest rate calculations, but not really sure, need to look at the programs…” And the worst of all, even the best maps no longer describe reality three months into the project because the application has already changed twice and the infrastructure setup once!
Others take the “let’s start with some high level maps” approach. Good on paper, and somewhat easier to implement, these approaches end up creating high level maps that are as good as telling you a tornado is impacting the state of Ohio now! Well it’s a pretty big state to go looking for the impacted communities and by the time you start the search based on this “mapping” 911 will already tell you who’s been impacted. The common response from management to status updates on these projects is ”want to tell me we invested all of this effort and money to uncover issues we already knew about?”
Bottom line: People with the best intentions to put CMDBs in the center of their IT alignment initiatives and power effective configuration, and problem change management processes that truly put them on a path to better service quality and improved operation efficiencies, are finding themselves in a tough spot. Projects are being scrapped, put on hold, and alternatives are being desperately sought.
It was gratifying to be able to share with these folks the experiences of organizations that enjoy truly automated business to IT mapping. As described in a previous post “Does change management impact your infrastructure or your business? – BTM adds tremendous value to the mapping of services to CIs. It not only provides these benefits standalone, which is a great approach to justifying CMDB projects if you have not engaged in one yet, but can also salvage failing and stalled CMDB initiatives and resurrect the confidence in their value to the business.
While clinically dead on arrival, a shot of BTM can definitely revive CMDB.
Add comment September 3, 2009
Lindsay Diamond
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