IT gets some smarts
Intelligence techniques uncover the business value of information systems
By Bob Violino, contributing editor -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 6/1/2005 12:00:00 AM
Suppliers of systems and network management software believe they've discovered a reliable way of verifying the business value of information technology. The answer, it seems, is to employ some of the same analytical capabilities that business intelligence (BI) software vendors use to measure the efficiency of business processes.
Systems and network management products ensure uptime for computers, storage systems, networks, and other IT components. But that's no longer sufficient in an era in which all expenditures—especially those involving IT—must be justified; thus the movement to equip system and network management applications with analytic capabilities.
Hewlett-Packard(HP) considers the addition of analytic tools to its OpenView systems and network management suite an extension of the adaptive enterprise strategy it adopted a couple of years ago, according to Bill Emmett, chief solutions manager of HP's Management Software Business.
The adaptive enterprise strategy, Emmett explains, is a method for ensuring a company has the right IT infrastructure to support its business processes, and that the infrastructure can adapt quickly when business processes change.
Emmett says OpenView Performance Manager supports this concept by giving IT managers a set of graphical tools for measuring how well IT resources are performing in specific areas of the business, and making projections about how resources should be deployed in the future.
OpenView Performance Insight is a tool for creating IT performance reports; and OpenView Route Analytics Manager monitors Internet protocol (IP) routing in real time, making ongoing assessments of network health, and whether changes in routing are due to network failure or other issues.
Real value
George Hamilton, a senior analyst at Yankee Group, a Boston-based IT research and consulting firm, says IT shops definitely can benefit from these analytic capabilities.
"Tools that can help you map the IT infrastructure to the business services it supports represent the real value in network and systems management," says Hamilton. "Responding to red-light alerts without the business context is just chasing red lights. With analysis tools, you can prioritize alerts on the network and deal with business-critical applications first."
Emmett says that prospect has manufacturers evaluating IT analytic solutions.
"Manufacturing companies are looking to vendors to help them identify and improve bottlenecks in a lot of their business processes," he says. "Analytic tools can help them understand if the systems that support specific business processes, such as order entry or supply chain management, are working properly. And if they're not working properly, they can pinpoint why."
Emmett says analytic tools also allow IT managers to rank the order in which issues should be addressed. "IT organizations can focus on fixing those problems that most directly contribute to the bottom line of the organization," he says.
While industry experts agree that analytic tools are a potentially valuable addition to an IT manager's arsenal, they point out that few companies have actually adopted these tools so far.
Still, Hamilton says, vendors are adding analytic capabilities to their systems and network management products because they believe their customers see value in understanding the impact of IT availability on business performance.
Hamilton says a desire to better manage the heterogeneous computing environments that exist in many companies will fuel demand for IT analytics. He says many organizations invested in server capacity, network bandwidth, enterprise applications, and multiple operating systems when technology spending was less restricted, creating multivendor infrastructures that are difficult to manage and not always easy to link to business goals and performance.
A clearer picture
"Management becomes a burden in these complex environments," says Hamilton. "You've got different operating systems and software licenses. And now, regulatory compliance issues have created a whole new set of problems to worry about."
Emmett says Le Mars, Iowa-based Wells Dairyis beginning to see the value of IT analytics. Wells recently adopted OpenView Performance Manager to attain a clearer picture of what is happening within an IT infrastructure that includes 100 servers scattered across multiple manufacturing, sales, and distribution facilities throughout the U.S.
The management system gives Wells a precise view of IT operations, enabling the company's IT department to provide the best level of service at each location, says Mark Johnson, manager of systems engineering. Detailed information from the system tells managers about CPU performance, activity levels, resource utilization, disk memory status, and other functions.
Another company that has deployed a management system—outsourcing services provider Hughes Software Systems,Bangalore, India—uses Unicenter Network and Systems Management from Computer Associates (CA) to oversee IT components at six sites. The system monitors network devices, business applications, and database systems, says Rajeev Seoni, assistant VP and head of IT at Hughes.
Monitoring IT performance is critical to Hughes because the failure of one development server for one day could result in up to 150 developers sitting idle, which could have direct impact on the business. The management system provides predictive and historic analysis for capacity planning, root cause analysis, and advanced event correlation that helps users link specific events to business impact.
Computer Associates says Unicenter NSM Release 3.1 features a technology that CA introduced in September 2004 called Smart Business Process View, or SmartBPV. The technology automatically creates and dynamically updates management views of IT infrastructure elements that support definable business processes.
Through passive monitoring and analysis of network traffic, SmartBPV can identify infrastructure elements that support an application. The technology enables managers to quickly determine the value of a given component and resolve problems such as network outages.
Map business performance
SmartBPV collects network traffic data and identifies its associated application by its communication protocol and port. The software's built-in intelligence can identify more than 1,550 protocols and services, and can be extended to recognize custom applications using settings that can be configured by end users.
Administrators using SmartBPV can build views automatically, which are focused only on elements of interest within the infrastructure—such as those for an application, a business process, a type of server, or a location. A manufacturer could use the technology to collect statistics on a Voice over Internet Protocol network or a piece of equipment that's used in a factory, says Gale Persil, a product management director for Computer Associates.
SmartBPV would know that an inventory application relies on a particular server and printer. "Then you can monitor that application to see if it's meeting service goals," Persil says. The ultimate business gain in this case would be improved inventory management.
Since many organizations use an array of IT systems and networks from multiple vendors, it's important that analytic tools be equipped to collect data from various systems. "You have to be able to collect data from disparate systems, and the technology has [developed] to the point where you can do this," says Persil, adding that much of the data for SmartBPV is gathered manually, but the latest products are beginning to automate much of the process.
Persil says vendors will begin developing analytical tools that link IT performance to financial models. "We can start applying this to financials, so we could say you are now losing this amount of dollars if this application is not available," Persil says. "That's really where [these systems] are going. When you add the financials, that's very much leading edge."
Behavioral analysis
IBMalso is in the IT analytics tools game. "If you look at the role of IT in automating business processes today, it's becoming absolutely essential that people be able to align underlying systems performance with business performance," says David Caddis, director of market management for IBM Tivoli. "We're seeing more requirements for that from our customers."
But mapping IT performance and business needs is no small feat. "If you look at applications today, IT typically spans multiple, heterogeneous environments," says Caddis. "Data resides in multiple devices and operating systems. It's not just about monolithic applications in one place."
IBM addresses this challenge through technology offerings that track end-to-end network performance and determine exactly where problems are—and understand the relationships between systems.
Tivoli Business Systems Manager relates problems in the IT infrastructure to the business processes they support. It enables IT staffs to prioritize their activities according to business objectives so that the most important services get preferential treatment.
Another product, Tivoli Service Level Advisor, analyzes trends and predicts changes in metrics such as availability and performance of key applications over periods of time. It can show when IT capacity thresholds are being approached for particular business services or processes, allowing IT to add capacity before limits are reached.
A third offering from IBM, Tivoli Monitoring for Transaction Performance, tracks the responsiveness of business services to demonstrate response time to users. The software identifies changes in performance across the IT infrastructure, and isolates a problem to a particular area.
Finally, Tivoli Enterprise Console correlates all of the IT problems in an enterprise to find the root cause of related alarms. This reduces "noise" and helps IT fix the systems that support key services.
Another vendor, BMC Software, Houston, recently introduced self-learning behavioral analysis software, called PATROL Analytics, which automatically generates real-time alert thresholds. The vendor says the software, based on technology licensed from Netuitive, is a key component of its Business Service Management strategy, which enables customers to manage IT from a business perspective.
PATROL Analytics correlates real-time system metrics from dozens of enterprise resources to determine typical behavioral patterns, then automatically determines the appropriate associated alerting thresholds. The software minimizes false alerts, enabling IT departments to more efficiently react to alarms or abnormal system behavior.
"If you had too many alerts generated, it would lead to slow problem diagnoses or missed alerts," says Sean Duclaux, director of product management at BMC Software. "You need to be able to automate that threshold, so it's not set too high or too low," Duclaux says.
The intelligence provided by PATROL Analytics can allow a company to more closely align systems availability with business service objectives, and assure availability of resources needed to meet business goals.
Yankee Group's Hamilton says vendors will continue to make enhancements in their analytic capabilities, including automating much of the process of gathering data. One key area of future development will be making the data more presentable to many different users via dashboards—another idea borrowed from the BI software space.
"How well they can evaluate data and present it in easy formats is a major vendor [focus]," says Hamilton. "It will be the same data, but with different views for different users."
