Tonight we’re gonna manage like it’s 1999.  I was introduced to a prospect today that made me feel like I was in a timewarp.  I was given of of those old school 400 question RFPs  which called for in-depth answers about Event Management – and I mean everything about it, correlation, rules, weighting, etc.  I had two reactions: isn’t this a “done” topic? Hasn’t Netcool been doing this so long that IBM bought them years ago to replace that dreadful T/EC? Couldn’t you have used the time and resources to put together this treatise to just download open source Zenoss and give it a try?

I know I shouldn’t be snarky about customers, but imagine you are a car dealer and someone comes in and wants to know every minute detail about the workings of a seatbelt. Wouldn’t you say “it’s a seatbelt, you click it and it holds you in”?  My next reaction was, “what does this have to do with Business Service Management (BSM)?” and the answer I got was “well, we want the events to be on a dashboard, that’s the BSM part”.  So now BSM = webpage front end?

We asked about managing from a business perspective, for example, if they are an insurance company perhaps managing the availability of claims processing, as opposed to servers and network segments and then spoke of setting service levels based on the business process as opposed to a server being up 99.xxx% of the time?  Actually, my point is that many of us that live and breathe BSM take if for granted that IT shops are up-to-date simply because we strive to stay ahead of the curve with BSM.

Here’s a quick definition, courtesy of Wikipedia.  “Business service management (BSM) is a methodology for monitoring and measuring information technology (IT) services from a business perspective; in other words, BSM is a set of management software tools, processes and methods to manage a data center via a business-centered approach.” Oh, and here’s a link to download open source Zenoss for monitoring, it might save you from having to write a 400 question monitoring rfp:  http://community.zenoss.org/community/download

I find more and more customers taking advantage of the open source technologies and consolidating at the monitoring level to remove costs in order to invest in the business service view.  The dynamic and distributed nature of the environment makes it nearly impossible to understand the monitoring events in terms of business impact without technology to map and present it as a single-pane-of-glass view.

I hope you enjoy my little humor for the week.

Phil