I D C

T E C H N O L O G Y

S P O T L I G H T

Streamlining IT Operations with Business Service Management Softw are

November 2011
Adapted from NetIQ Outlines Novell Infrastructure Management and Security Integration Strategy by Mary Johnston Turner and Sally Hudson, IDC #lcUS22894511

Sponsored by NetIQ
As IT environments become more dynamic and complex due to the increased use of virtualization, cloud, SOA, and n-tier application architectures, IT organizations face a number of challenges in understanding how IT performance issues impact end users and critical business processes. At the same time, business stakeholders have more options than ever available to address their computing and communications requirements. Whether it be public cloud services, outsourcing, or internal IT resources, business leaders need to have confidence that promised application service levels will be delivered and that changes to infrastructure and application environments will take place quickly when business requirements expand or shrink. For corporate IT organizations and business stakeholders to collaborate effectively, both groups need a common, up-to-date view of business service definitions, configurations, costs, and SLA compliance. This information needs to be available to a wide range of business and IT decision makers and staff in real time, with appropriate business context. This Technology Spotlight examines the benefits of business service management software and looks at the role that NetIQ plays in today's IT environments.

Virtualization and Cloud Focus IT Management on Business Services

IDC estimates that the market for systems and application performance and event management software will total approximately $5.4 billion worldwide in 2011. Traditionally, most of this investment has been focused on monitoring the health and availability of individual IT hardware and software components. These solutions frequently rely on a wide range of probes and agents to be deployed into monitored systems. Typically, management consoles and dashboards are used to aggregate and report performance data, filter alerts, and help IT administrators determine the root cause of problems. Service-level reporting has traditionally focused on reporting about the health of the individual system or application components rather than tracking the end-to-end user experience and the health and availability of the complete business service. To resolve problems affecting service, the IT staff often resorts to manual inspection of logs and human analysis of information located in different management tools. While this approach was adequate when applications, middleware, and infrastructure were tightly integrated, today's dynamic n-tier, SOA, virtual, and cloud environments make it much more challenging to assess the impact of a single incident or failure on the end-to-end business service experience. Business stakeholders become frustrated when IT organizations are unable to anticipate and prevent critical service outages, and IT teams lose credibility when they scramble to address problems after they occur. As public cloud services become more widely available, some business stakeholders are shifting critical applications to software-as-a-service (SaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) subscription services where they can see a clear connection between the money they spend and the
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service levels delivered. In response, IT organizations act more like business service providers to their organizations and are making investments in business service management tools to help them with that transformation. As shown in Figure 1, the major service management priorities identified by organizations that have implemented or plan to implement cloud environments by 2013 include the ability to monitor business-oriented SLAs, auto-discovery of configurations and dependencies, simplified service modeling, and integrated service management across public and private cloud environments. The decision makers recognize that effective cloud management depends on a holistic end-to-end services view to drive decisions about workload provisioning and ongoing performance optimization.

Figure 1 Service Management Functional Priorities for Cloud

Business-oriented SLAs and service catalogs Auto-discovery and CMDB population
83.5

81.7

Easy-to-use service modeling tools

Service catalog and SLA management across public and private clouds

80.9

80.9

Service catalogs linked to self -service provisioning portals ITIL-based workf lows
0
n = 115 Base = organizations planning production use of service management in private cloud by 2013 Source: IDC's Private Cloud Management Survey, 4Q10

80.0

78.3

10

20

30 40 50 60 70 (% of respondents)

80

90

Virtualization and cloud architectures heighten the need for IT to take a business-led approach to service management. By starting with an end-to end-services view of IT and application performance rather than a bottom-up component view, IT decision makers are better positioned to respond to problems that have the greatest impact on the business and to maintain consistent service levels across the board.

End-to-End Services View Improves Service Levels and Compliance

Effective business service management software solutions typically integrate and streamline many formerly manual and disconnected monitoring, reporting, and troubleshooting activities. The solutions provide a central place for IT and business stakeholders to monitor the end-to-end health of business services and to report on the health of these services using consoles and dashboards that are relevant to both IT and business stakeholders.

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The most effective service monitoring solutions have the following attributes: Highly scalable architectures able to handle large volumes of data and transactions The ability to filter and prioritize events so that IT teams are not overwhelmed by conflicting alerts and to help quickly identify root cause and dependencies Easy integrations with existing agents, probes, and system and application performance and availability monitoring tools Out-of-the box integrations with asset management and configuration management databases and monitoring tools to enable streamlined IT operations and faster root cause identification and remediation Ability to automatically generate service models in the context of business KPIs Integration with existing service catalogs and service desks using open APIs Role-based, configurable consoles and reporting frameworks Seamless integrations across monitoring and management tools, business data, analytics, and dashboard visualization Process automation to support ongoing configuration compliance with gold standards and best practice change management processes and policies

IT teams enabled with business service monitoring and analytics become much more aware of the business impact of outages and downtime and can better prioritize their activities to maintain service levels and keep end users and customers productive. Additional benefits include: Improved IT staff productivity due to faster problem detection and remediation Improved customer satisfaction and retention due to improved business productivity and service levels Improved IT credibility with business stakeholders who can track service-level compliance and performance on an ongoing basis Improved end-user business productivity due to improved service-level availability and less unplanned downtime

By selecting products that can quickly and seamlessly integrate with existing performance and availability monitoring and management products and processes, IT teams can more quickly introduce business service management across their environment and engage proactively with business stakeholders.

Considering NetIQ Operations Center

As part of the Attachmate acquisition of Novell, Attachmate subsidiary NetIQ became home to Novell's PlateSpin, Operations Center, and Cloud Manager products, as well as Novell's identity, security, and compliance products. The Operations Center product is based on technology Novell acquired from Managed Objects. Prior to the acquisition, Novell and NetIQ had actively collaborated on integrations between Operations Center's dashboard, analytics, and configuration management capabilities and performance data collected by NetIQ AppManager using an integration module created by Managed Objects well in advance of these acquisitions. Improved service impact visibility has been a
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high-priority request by NetIQ service provider customers that are operating highly virtualized environments and by both NetIQ and Novell enterprise customers. Operations Center is designed to help IT organizations that are struggling with too much data but not enough business insight. For IT teams that have already invested in the instrumentation and monitoring of individual infrastructure, middleware, and application components, Operations Center pulls the data together, sorts through the dependencies, and displays easy-to-understand status reports and health checks in a context that is meaningful to the business. As shown in Figure 2, the Operations Center dashboard can be configured to provide updates on the status of critical business services in terms of geographical impacts, specific business service status, or individual component status. Using an API provided out of the box, customers can configure role-based dashboards to provide additional views into the current status of a business service as well as the recent history and the business context.

Figure 2 Operations Center Dashboard Using Out-of-the Box APIs

Source: NetIQ, 2011

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Operations Center is a single solution with a modular, phased deployment approach that delivers important business service management capabilities, including: Out-of-the box integration support for a wide range of system and application performance and availability monitoring products and agents spanning infrastructure, application, and middleware components Out-of-the box integration support for asset management, service desk, service catalog, and configuration management databases and service models Configurable role-based dashboards that represent business servicelevel status and compliance in terms of business impact and priority and business KPIs (Out-of-the box portlets for events, service levels, and other types of reports help streamline the configuration process.) Visual mapping of end-to-end cross-tier service dependencies and indications of service status, health, and historic trends Vendor-neutral scalability that enables expansion and integration with increasing range of component management and monitoring tools as environments grow in complexity without changing or impacting the business service view as management tools change or grow

Customers can opt to implement specific capabilities initially and add other functions over time or implement the complete profile and grow a service view at a time. The core Service View engine, included in the Service Monitoring capability, provides integrations with existing monitoring products, builds the initial service models, supports root cause and impact analysis, and provides the baseline console for use by IT staff and the business. Synthetic transactions are used to measure end-user response times from Web-based applications. This base capability can set alarms and thresholds for business-impacting events and prioritize IT responses and remediation actions based on business relevance. Another capability option is Service Measuring, which provides out-of-the box portlets with a rules engine and interface to support customized, business friendly service-level dashboards for both real-time and historical service performance. It also supplies the ability to radically integrate and streamline service-level reporting activities while providing more formal business SLAs, business context, and historical trending information. Live analytics help IT anticipate business impacts before they occur and enable IT to take proactive action to avoid problems rather than reporting the score after the reporting period is over. The Service Mapping capability provides an interface specific to the configuration management and asset management functions and enables detailed configuration, topology, and dependency mapping using information from a number of network monitoring and transaction tracing systems. It monitors and automates the maintenance of service and configuration models and provides the process automation needed to keep actual configurations in compliance with gold standards. The interface employs social media concepts including the ability to search with natural language, to update via community-based additions, and to subscribe to communities of interest with live feeds as updates and transactions of interest occur. Operations Center takes advantage of existing monitoring products that provide infrastructure, middleware, and application component-level performance data and analysis. It also integrates asset and configuration management solutions. The out-of-the-box integrations available enable customers to quickly deploy Operations Center and produce initial top-down business services views, historical context, and trend analysis. API and out-of-the box portlets enable customers to configure the dashboards and reports needed to deliver as much value as possible to the business, aligned with common objectives.

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Challenges
Effective use of service-level management and automation technology depends on IT organizations and business stakeholders who are mature enough to value an end-to-end view of IT delivered as business services. Historically, the effort required to build, maintain, and publish service models and related performance data has been challenging for all but the largest IT organizations. Even then, most IT teams monitored only a limited number of critical business services. The increased use of public and private cloud services is driving more and more IT organizations and business decision makers to adopt a business services view and to seek better information on endto-end service availability, performance, and business impact. To be successful, vendors need to establish themselves as providers of easy-to-integrate and quick time-to-value solutions in what has traditionally been a complex and cumbersome market.

Conclusion
SOA, n-tier architectures, virtualization, and cloud computing are collectively disrupting traditional applications associated with IT performance and availability management. While traditional environments, dominated by coupled infrastructure, middleware, and application silos, could be managed using component-level probes and analysis, these new architectures require IT teams to take an end-to-end business services view. Today's complex environments can make it difficult to identify the root cause of a problem or to know which problem is having the biggest negative impact on the business and end-user productivity. Business service management solutions analyze and correlate the data collected by individual performance, availability, and configuration management tools and interpret it in an actionable, business-relevant context. IDC believes that performance and availability management software solutions that provide an endto-end view and business context will continue to increase in importance as more and more organizations embrace cloud computing and IT teams seek to transform themselves into business service providers. To the extent that NetIQ can deliver an easy-to-integrate and quick time-to-value solution, it will be successful in helping customers improve the business relevance and impact of IT in today's increasingly complex environments.

A B O U T

T H I S

P U B L I C A T I O N

This publication was produced by IDC Go-to-Market Services. The opinion, analysis, and research results presented herein are drawn from more detailed research and analysis independently conducted and published by IDC, unless specific vendor sponsorship is noted. IDC Go-to-Market Services makes IDC content available in a wide range of formats for distribution by various companies. A license to distribute IDC content does not imply endorsement of or opinion about the licensee.
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