BSM can help tie traditionally disparate IT processes and solutions that span areas such as change, configuration, problem, and incident management to form service-centric, rather than component-centric, visualization and problem-solving capabilities. Some BSM solutions, such as SL’s RTView™, are further capable of driving service visibility as well as agreed-upon actions designed to resolve potential application downtime.
Fundamentally, BSM helps organizations:
- Understand the business impact of IT problems
- Productively fix problems before they impact users and the business
- Prioritize IT efforts based on business risk
SL’s RTView is a new entrant into the BSM arena, but is built upon 25 years of experience in delivering process control systems to the likes of Honeywell, the Kennedy Space Station, and ABB. Most of SL’s customers who are leveraging RTView for BSM – including Orbitz, Merrill-Lynch, Smart & Final, and Southwest Airlines – are doing so to achieve single-pane-of-glass visibility in real time across their IT infrastructure. For these companies, their IT infrastructure is so intrinsically and inseparably tied to their business operations, the health of their business ties directly to the health of the underlying machines, databases, applications, messaging systems, and processes that drive it.
What Does SL’s BSM solution Provide?
RTView provides:
- Monitoring of IT performance and availability with ties to business-driven SLAs
- Real-time, in-memory, analytics
- The ability to present state and alert information regarding machines, databases, applications, messages, and processes along side business-centric KPIs to deliver a comprehensive status of business services via a single dashboard, or single pane of glass
- Visibility
- Meaningful, customizable dashboards
- Drill-down capabilities to facilitate troubleshooting
- Customizable alerts and reports in a variety of formats
- Integration with infrastructure software to speed problem-solving
- Predefined corrective actions
How It Works
BSM requirements can span a spectrum of complexity, ranging from simple data streams to complex event analysis. For applications where complex event processing and correlation are not required, RTView can access data directly, apply real-time in-memory analytics, and provide customized visualization. For more complex applications, RTView can be used in conjunction with a number of partner CEP and middleware solutions and will provide a high performance, interactive visualization layer with flexible client-side analytic capability.
BSM vs. BAM
For SL, the delineation between BSM and BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) is becoming increasingly blurred. BAM, in its purest definition, monitors and provides visibility into business metrics such as KPIs or SLAs, whereas BSM monitors the IT services and process that support the business. However, for many companies, IT infrastructure is so critical to their business, IT SLAs are business SLAs. And increasingly, business analysts are as concerned about IT performance as they are with their KPIs. As such, while many see these as separate categories, we at SL believe they will merge into a broader category that is indifferent to the classification of either the data coming in, nor the information being presented and acted upon.
Summary of RTView BSM Capabilities
- Real-time in-memory analytics provide support for more than 60 functions and aggregations
- Interface to build custom analytics and functions
- Pre-built monitoring applications for TIBCO and JMS Messaging Oriented Middleware (MOM), JMX, and Oracle Coherence Data Grid Monitoring
- A Data Historian which enables the persistence of real-time data and events to any relational database. This supports the presentation of real-time information with historical context.
- Complementary fit with CEP applications, providing interactive visualization and user-parameterized analytics
- Delivery of actionable information in the form of real-time dashboards, reports, and alerts
- Integration with a number of enterprise datasources including:
- XML streams and files
- Complex Event Processing (CEP) and Event Stream Processing (ESP) engines
- Messaging Oriented Middleware (MOM)
- JMX
- Relational databases
- Log files
- RRD
- Splunk
- Oracle Coherence
- Radware InFlight
- Custom Datasources via a Custom Data Source API
- JMS
- OLAP
- Excel
