Visualizing Business Services Using Live Status 1

Focus on Value

Visualizing Your Business Services

Using Live Status ®

Today’s business services require a complex collection of applications,

servers, and network interconnections that must work together to support
the bottom line. When problems begin, delays and outages can block the
services that matter most to your revenue. Problems in one area often affect
other areas. Alarm notifications and event logs aren’t enough; they can’t
show the correlation between problems and the overall impact to a
business.
Imagine the power of a live display showing all business resources and
their status: a visualization that shows when problems begin, where the
trouble is located and the severity of the problems. The IT staff can see the
impact of a slow Web server or application on the response time of the
users. Business managers can correlate symptoms to understand the under-
lying cause and direct troubleshooting teams to the source of the problems.
Visualization is the key to business
And as IT staff resolve the problems, managers can see resources returning
service management. With Live
to normal operation—proof that the business is running smoothly again.
Status, managers have an
A business service visualization should reflect how the business is orga-
immediate, at-a-glance picture of
nized. Businesses rely upon thousands of resources that can be organized by
current business performance in a
geographical locations, by the type of resources in the business, or by vari-
graphical display. They can identify
ous functional divisions or services. The visualization works best when it
problems as they begin, understand
matches how the managers “see” their business and when it includes all the
severity, prioritize troubleshooting
resources they care about.
efforts, and determine the impact to
the business.

Pictures Worth a Thousand Words

Using Concord’s Live Status application, business managers
can visualize all of their resources and watch for service problems.
They can use pattern recognition to quickly assess the impact.
As a live window to the business activity, Live Status can help
business managers to:
• Correlate all their infrastructure and application problems
together in one picture.
• Organize applications and infrastructure to create a picture
that reflects how they want to see their resources.
• Quickly see the performance of key business services and
resources in a broad business environment—graphically.
• Identify problems as they happen and recognize which
groups or organizations are impacted, which are not, and the
severity of the problem.
 Visualizing Business Services Using Live Status
A Closer Look at Live Status
The Live Status diagram is a fishbone-style visualiza-
tion. The horizontal “spine” in the center is the highest
order view of resources (a group list). Each rib off the spine
is a set of related resources (a group). Each rib has one or
more icons that represent an element. The icon’s color rep-
resents the operational status of the element.
A group list can show you the business infrastructure
for the company, a region, an office, a business unit, an
application—anything you want to monitor.
Groups make it easy to visualize and organize specific
business applications or IT resources. You can see where
trouble is starting and how severely services are impaired.
Figure 1 shows IT resources above the spine and user
response below. Live Status leverages the power of eHealth
and Live Exceptions to provide a continuously updated sta-
tus of the resources in each view. For example, you can cus-
tomize the service thresholds and rules for your individual
services to ensure that the status reflects the service level
agreement (SLA) for your business.
The Right View. Knowing which Live Status view is right
for you makes an enormous difference. Since you can create
tailored views, Live Status can show individual managers
and IT staff exactly what they need to see, just the way they
need to see it. There are three types of Live Status views: a
location view, a business/organization view, and a resource-
type view.
You create and tailor each view—its organization,
groups, and elements—to make it more helpful and intui-
Figure 1. The Live Status Layout
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tive for your users. The views differ only in how they group
and organize the elements. They can contain the exact same
elements, and they provide users with the same capability
to identify problems, correlate problems, and troubleshoot.
A Location View lets you monitor business resources
organized by location (resources are grouped by region,
city, or individual facilities). This view shows how problems
affect productivity for specific locations as well as each loca-
tion’s status.
A Business/Organization View shows resources
grouped by the business units or departments that they
support, such as the Aviation and Energy division or the
Manufacturing and Sales departments. This view shows the
status of each business and whether problems within one
might affect the productivity for other businesses.
A Resource-Type View shows resources grouped by
type, such as LAN/WAN, router, server, application, and
response. This view shows which types of resources are hav-
ing problems and whether problems in one type (such as
servers) might be affecting another type (applications).
Pattern Recognition. With a dense graphical display,
users will learn to recognize patterns that can point quickly
to what is causing a problem. This makes assessing business
impact much easier. Experienced Live Status users learn to
see which alarms are likely to be related to a specific prob-
lem and which ones are extraneous. In addition, managers
can correlate application and infrastructure problems to
determine the likely cause, which helps direct efforts faster
to the source of the problem.
Drill Down to Details. When
problems occur—or whenever
you want to take a closer look at
a resource—Live Status pro-
vides links to eHealth At-a-
Group list
Glance and Trend reports and
(a group of detailed alarm information.
groups) Users can start Live Status from
any workstation or laptop to
view their critical resources,
even when they’re away from
the office.
Group
Element
 Visualizing Business Services Using Live Status
Case Study: Location Views
A large retail company1 uses the eHealth Suite® and
Live Status® to manage a regional chain of stores, manufac-
turing plants, and warehouses. The business managers and
IT teams use a Live Status location view (Figure 2) to mon-
itor the real-time operation and health of each location.
With this view, they can see the status of the systems, appli-
cations, and networks that support cash registers, shipping/
receiving, inventory control, payroll, billing systems, the
online store, and Web site.
When a hurricane crossed the southeastern region of
the United States, it caused power outages and damages.
The storm shut down business services supporting many of
the company’s stores, warehouses, and manufacturing
plants, including the corporate Web site and online sales.
Managing a Major Network Outage
Business and IT managers used Live Status to visualize
exactly which business locations and business services were
being affected and which were still operational.
The location view below shows infrastructure groups
for each location on top and application response times for
each location on the bottom. The IT resources and response
are arranged so that all of the resources for each city are
grouped together (infrastructure above, user response
below). Any status change for a location is obvious immedi-
ately. The view clearly shows that the Miami, Clearwater,
and Pensacola offices are down but Savannah and Charles-
ton are operational.
Savannah and
Charleston are still
operational.
Figure 2. Location View
1. The “companies” used in this document are composites. Any resemblance or similarities to actual companies or businesses is unintentional.
3
With this information, the business and IT managers
could see exactly which stores, plants, and warehouses were
down and could determine the best ways to respond until
those business units were functioning normally again. They
were also able to determine the potential revenue losses
incurred at each location by knowing which stores were
down and for how long.
The Help Desk team could redirect callers promptly to
locations that were still operational in Georgia and South
Carolina.
The IT team could bring backup systems online to
restore the operation of databases, e-commerce, email, bill-
ing, and payroll systems. They relocated corporate Web ser-
vices temporarily to the Charleston office and rerouted Web
traffic there. They could assess whether the backups were
working and see the impact to response time.
Shipping/receiving teams quickly identified shipments
that were enroute to closed locations and rerouted them to
the stores and warehouses that Live Status showed as opera-
tional.
As each affected location recovered, IT staff and busi-
ness managers continued to check Live Status for the latest
status. As resources came back online, business managers
could see alarm conditions dropping in severity, and busi-
ness on its way back to normal.
Clearwater, Miami,
and Pensacola
show vast outages.
 Visualizing Business Services Using Live Status
Case Study: Business/Organization Views
When Oracle® released an upgrade to its financial soft-
ware package, the IT staff at a manufacturing company
wanted to evaluate the impact of the Oracle upgrade on
each department’s transaction response times to ensure at
least the same performance levels after the upgrade. They
planned to do an initial upgrade for the Finance depart-
ment before rolling out the upgrade to all departments. If a
problem started, they wanted to see if it was isolated to
Finance or had broader effects.
They monitored the upgrade deployment with Live Sta-
tus using a business/organization view (Figure 3). The dis-
play showed their key business resources by department.
The view grouped the key infrastructure elements for each
business organization on top. The Finance department’s
LAN/WAN devices, routers and switches, and servers (sys-
tems) are organized in groups. The same types of resources
are grouped for Manufacturing, Marketing, and so on. Sim-
ilarly, the bottom half of the Live Status screen has business
response time for applications grouped by business unit.
If business performance status changed on the Live Sta-
tus screen, they could see which organizations had prob-
lems and which did not. This made isolating the cause of
the problem much faster and more efficient.
Figure 3. Business Services/Organization View
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Starting the Upgrade. The IT team upgraded a Finance
application server during the night, when demand on the
server was much lower. They watched for problems on the
Oracle server and on the response paths to the Oracle
server; no problems appeared.
As more users in Finance arrived at work, Live Status
showed an alarm for the Oracle server in the Finance system
group and response time alarms in the Finance_Oracle
response group. The IT team recognized the correlation
between the problems with the Finance server and the
Finance response problems. They ran an At-a-Glance
report for a Finance response path and saw that server
response time had increased since the upgrade.
The IT staff also used the Live Status Alarm Occur-
rences window to learn more about the Finance server
alarms. The window showed that the server was having vir-
tual memory allocation and CPU usage performance prob-
lems. They drilled down to a server At-a-Glance report and
saw that the problems began when Finance users started to
run the transactions that used the Finance server.
After a small change to the server virtual memory con-
figuration, the team watched as the alarms for the Oracle
server and the Finance response paths began to disappear.
Live Status helped the team fix an application slowdown
before there was a larger business impact.
Response time
problems for
Finance due to a
server problem.
 Visualizing Business Services Using Live Status
Case Study: Resource-Type Views
A service provider with offices in several U.S. cities
relies heavily on call center performance and response time.
The call center’s effectiveness is critical to customer satisfac-
tion and, thus, to corporate revenue. The company needs to
know immediately about any change in performance levels.
The company uses a resource-type view (Figure 4) to
see a high-level panorama of all IT resources and key busi-
ness applications. It shows corporate IT resources grouped
according to type, making it easy to know what type of
resources are having trouble. IT resources are grouped in
the top half of the view; critical business applications (such
as Siebel CallCenter) below.
To prevent performance slowdowns from impeding
service effectiveness, the support team developed a Rapid
Response plan. They defined an SLA, developed jointly by
IT and call center managers. It specified four response time
thresholds with escalating levels of severity:
• Warning—response time over 2.0 seconds
• Minor alarm—response time over 2.5 seconds
• Major alarm—response time over 3.0 seconds
• Critical alarm—response time over 3.5 seconds
The color of an icon indicates how response times have
degraded (minor, major, or critical). Mousing over the icon
displays more information about the name of the resource
and the number of problems it has.
When a problem with a Call Center application in Dal-
Problems with
Siebel response
time and a server
at the Dallas call
center.
Figure 4. Resource-Type View
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las began, Live Health sent e-mail and pager alerts to on-call
IT staff. The Live Status indicator changed from green to
yellow, indicating a warning status.
Moving the mouse cursor over that status indicator
showed immediately that the problem was isolated in Dal-
las. The same application was running normally at all other
call centers.
Live Status also shows an orange (major) status warn-
ing in the system group. Mousing over that alarm showed
that the problem was for the Dallas office server. The next
step was to try to see if the two alarm areas were related.
Double-clicking on the server alarm displayed an alarm
table showing a list of the alarms, the server name, and a
brief description of the problem for the server alarm
(“CPUs too busy”). IT staff checked the server. After
reviewing a list of the processes running on that server, they
found that a nightly backup job was still running during the
day. The log file showed that the backup job had failed and
restarted itself the next morning. The backup process
caused a load on one of the Dallas servers, resulting in
minor Siebel response time delays for the Dallas Siebel Call-
Center application.
The IT manager stopped the backup and Siebel
response times returned immediately to normal levels. The
IT manager also ensured that backup jobs did not restart
themselves during working hours when they might inter-
fere with user productivity.
 Visualizing Business Services Using Live Status 6

Application Views for Tailored Perspectives

If you use eHealth Application Response to manage the Transaction-By-Region View
response of your critical business applications, you can use If you want to see the region-by-region performance of
Live Status to see tailored views of the application perfor- a specific application for all its transactions, you can cus-
mance for your regions and users. tomize the Live Status view to show a branch for each trans-
action.
High-Level Region View For example, using the same
If you organize your AR agents into client sets, you can group list (Company), and by
use those client sets to obtain an overall status of the perfor- changing the response options
mance of the users within each region of users. For exam- to show only the transactions
ple, if your company has three regions such as Boston, for a specific application, you
Dallas, and Seattle, you could organize the AR agents for can create a view similar to the
each region into client sets named after the regions. You can one in Figure 7. This view
then configure Live Status to show you a high-level view of shows the status of transac-
each user region, as shown in Figure 5. tions across the regions. When
This is a handy view problems occur, you can
Problems in
to keep running in a quickly see if one or more
Boston.
Seattle corner of your desk- transactions or regions are
Dallas top. You can see the affected. In this case, the prob-
Boston current status of each Figure 7. Transaction View
lems are limited to the Boston
user region, which by Region users and the Outlook-Send
Figure 5. Regions View transaction. This makes it easy
could span thousands
of client users, for all the applications they use. For exam- to target troubleshooting resources to investigate the prob-
ple, the Boston region has a minor alarm, which indicates a lems.
problem with one or more applications. You could then
drill-down to Live Exceptions to identify the problem. User-Specific Views
If you would prefer to see status on a user-by-user basis,
Application-By-Region View you can group of all your AR agents. You can then show
If you want to know how each region is performing for their overall performance using the same three views of
one or more specific applications, you can tailor the Live high-level (all applications), application-specific, and trans-
Status view to show branches for specific applications. In action-specific views. Each icon represents one AR agent
eHealth Release 5.7, showing application-specific branches (one user system) rather than all the users in a region.
is simple—just customize the response display options of
the Live Status diagram. Wide Range of Live Status Benefits
For example, using the same group list (Company) Just as Live Status can help you to ensure an SLA, man-
which contains the one group (Regions) of three client sets, age an upgrade carefully, or respond better to the fallout
you can change the response display options to show the from a power outage, it can also help to control the damage
applications used by those regions. resulting from other unanticipated events—such as a com-
Figure 6 shows the puter virus, an intrusion, or a network failure. These events
same Live Status all affect the response time, availability, and performance of
chart as Figure 5, but your business resources. When they strike, IT staff and
with four application managers are usually inundated with email and pager alerts,
Seattle branches. This view resulting in an array of disjointed information that may not
Dallas shows you whether a help to identify the root cause or the scope of the impacted
Boston
problem spans services.
Boston
regions as well as Live Status reduces the noise to a live display of your
Dallas applications. In this resources and applications. You can see trouble as it begins
Seattle example, you can see to happen and quickly take steps to resolve the problem and
that the problems are return your business to normal. While a picture is worth a
Figure 6. Application View by Region localized to the Bos- thousand words, a live view of your business operations can
ton region and the save a lot more than that in lost revenue, frustration, and
Outlook application. The other regions and users are run- troubleshooting time.
ning normally.