Posts tagged ‘OpTier’
How Clouds will change Business Transaction Management
by Anonymous, January 2011.
I hate clouds, they generally deliver cold weather and make life dull. I especially hate them even more because they’ve recently made my job more difficult (and working in product management it’s not exactly plain sailing at the best of times). I did try my best to avoid Cloud Computing by simply pretending it was all madness. Sadly, this naive approach didn’t work and here I am writing a blog on the subject.
For anyone whose tried to decipher cloud computing I will hereby explain what the Mary Poppins is going on and how it’s going to impact IT management and specifically BTM over the next few years. I will start by saying that things are going to get more complex and significant challenges are ahead for vendors who are looking to provide next generation IT management software. There are several acronyms you need to understand as well so I’ll get cracking:
Private Clouds – think of these as on-premise utility/grid computing with the virtualization of OS and application run-time environments across the enterprise. An example might be a grid of 500 J2EE servers which are virtualized and shared across hundreds of different applications within an enterprise.
Public Clouds – this is simply off-premise utility computing provided by a 3rd party vendor. For example, Amazon EC2 or Rackspace where businesses can buy computing resource on-demand which are accessed remotely across the internet (hence it being public).
SaaS – Software As A Service. Enterprise Applications that are hosted on the internet by a 3rd party vendor. For example, Salesforce.com, Success Factors or GoogleMail where businesses log into a website that provides them with specific services that aid their business.
PaaS – Platform As A Service. Application Run-time platforms that are provided by 3rd party vendors across the internet. For example, Google App Engine or Salesforce.com’s AppExchange. The ability for business to build new applications using 3rd party frameworks or run-time environments. For example, many businesses will store their customer data within Salesforce.com, using AppExchange they can build new applications on top of this data.
IaaS – Infrastructure As A Service. Essentially the same as Public clouds where businesses can buy servers or computing power on demand from a 3rd party hosting provider.
Hybrid Cloud – combination of all of the above.
- More complexity on the way
Some of the above is probably common knowledge and I’m betting someone will comment on this blog telling me the above descriptions are not entirely accurate. The key problem with the above is that enterprise applications are going to become more fragmented and distributed across multiple deployment platforms which are not all controlled by the customer. To add to this we’ve just had a decade of SOA projects which essentially increased the number of dependencies between applications so when a user executes a business transaction these days it’s likely to pass through several application architectures. Why is this important? It multiples the complexity and demands of IT management software which up until now has still struggled to monitor and manage single applications let alone multiple connected applications. In summary a blackbox application becomes a blackbox of blackboxes with multiple points of failure and dependencies. Visibility of how the business (transactions) executes across these blackboxes therefore becomes key to effectively managing the business and IT. Business Transaction Management solutions will be key to providing this much needed visibility across the many types of blackboxes regardless of whether they’re in a data centre, in a cloud or being managed by a 3rd party vendor. You can only manage and control what you can see, as many enterprise applications move to the cloud its critical customers maintain their visibility of how their business executes across IT.
iBTM – Business Transaction Management for the iPhone
By Anonymous, 28th October 2010.
Those of you who read my “Another less is more blog for ITSM and BSM solutions” blog back in October of last year will remember my bitterness around owning a BlackBerry whilst the entire nation around me was stroking their iPhones. Well in the last twelve months I finally managed to come up with a cunning way of acquiring an iPhone. My plan was simple, build an iPhone application for my company’s Business Transaction Management solution and then kindly request an iPhone from my company to perform user acceptance testing on. This plan sounds all very simple but there is a catch, I would have to write the PRD for this iPhone application along with finding a developer to help me build it (my developer days faded back in 2005). Bearing in mind I’ve never used iOS or stroked an iPhone I set out to do some market research to help me define a set of requirements and screen designs.
So where did you think I looked first? www.formula1.com . Yes, I’m mental and obsessed with cars but believe it or not this turned out to be the best bit of research I’ve done. Three hours after visiting the Formula1 website and downloading their application from the AppStore I had the iBTM PRD nailed with use cases, requirements and screen designs. The thing that struck me the most with the F1 app was how easy and simple it was to find the information I was looking for. In a stroke and two clicks I could go from a race to a session to live timing on track, the information was presented so clearly even a goldfish could keep up with what was happening in the race. So my initial thoughts for iBTM were “wouldn’t it be cool to go from an Application to a Business Transaction to its Tiers in two clicks”. In the same way Formula1 delivers timing of drivers lap times and sectors I could do the same with Applications, Transactions and Tier timing along with their SLA status. A user could view a list of their applications, spot an SLA breach, click on an application and view its business transactions, check which business transaction was breaching and click again to view the Tier latency/SLA management to see what was causing those breaches. I could also allow a user to start from an alert so they could go Alert > Application > Transaction > Tiers and understand what caused the alert in seconds. Here is my screen PRD mock-ups for the App:
So how does it work? Simply put, we built the app using the iPhone SDK (thanks to our superstar developer Mark Berner!), then we built a web services API for our BTM management servers (we allow federation) that allows iBTM to communicate so it can query information from OpTier BTM. Connectivity wise iPhone’s now come with comprehensive VPN capabilities that allow iPhones to connect to corporate networks either through 3G or WiFi. We’ve been testing connectivity and response times from all over the world and iBTM is super fast no matter where your accessing it from (it actually doesn’t retrieve that much data). With the recent hype around iPads life got sweeter as iBTM runs just fine with the standard x2 zoom you get for native iPhone applications. Here is a photo of an iPad working with iBTM connecting to one of our test BTM management servers:
iBTM works on the iPad and iPhone
Feedback from analysts, customers and prospects has been very encouraging. We’ve seen several executives get really hyped over a simple application that provides them with powerful visibility and intelligence into their business transactions, infrastructure and application performance. In two clicks an Executive or Application Owner can determine business impact and isolate which part of IT is causing SLA breaches all from the comfort of their iPhone or iPad. We’re already working on v2 of iBTM so stay tuned! Watch my youtube overview of iBTM:
You can download OpTier iBTM from the Apple AppStore.
Building a next generation BTM UI
by Anonymous, 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.
The Oscars of Private Cloud Management
By Russell Rothstein
March 7, 2010
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.
Virtualized in Vancouver
By Russell Rothstein
February 22, 2010
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.
February 22, 2010 at 2:14 pm Russell Rothstein Leave a comment
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.
OpTier
Assaf Amit
Andy Wetzel
Russell Rothstein
Motti Tal
Linh C. Ho
Diego Lomanto
