IT infrastructure Library (ITIL) has been around since 1989. Since v2 was released at the beginning of the millennium, there has been a shift in the perspective with which IT is viewed. Adopting ITIL 2 has cut the total cost of ownership (TCO) for billion dollar corporations by up to 48% according to internet.com.
While ITIL 2 has helped organizations who have implemented it apply the principles of process change management to their IT operations, it still stops short in providing guidance on how to integrate IT functions into the business. This has made it easy for management to overlook the very real benefits contributed to the business by IT.
ITIL 3 helps resolves this issue. Rather than focusing on process, ITIL 3 focuses on service. It’s designed to incorporate the best practices of change management. A side benefit is that ITIL problem management process flow also becomes much more business centered in its scope.
The challenge many businesses face as they seek to implement ITIL 3 is how to approach IT problem management. What tools provide the 360 situational awareness necessary to implement this important process in ITIL 3? What products in the market deliver on the promise to facilitate the move towards ITIL and service oriented IT management strategies?
Business Transaction Monitoring
Gartner in the 2010 APM Magic Quadrant report and Forrester Research in its Competitive Analysis: Application Performance Management and Business Transaction Monitoring report have both identified these two technologies as key components of developing a service focused technology approach to business needs as contrasted to a function-based approach.
To borrow a term from design-form has roughly followed function. The form has struggled to provide dependable service. For too many years, form has preceded function. Multiple functional pieces (applications) have been developed in separate silos each dealing with its own business process. Each of these applications are supposed to be serving the business yet the design of the system, if form, makes consistent service impossible without outside help.
Problem management in a world of silos is very ineffective. This why business transaction monitoring is an important component for implementing either ITIL 2 or ITIL 3. It helps in the successful implementation of ITIL Problem Management as it enables the reconfiguring of IT operation structure from one where individual silos operate independently of each other, to one where many disparate processes and tools work interdependently.
Before the advent of business transaction monitoring (BTM), IT departments were so busy trying to discover where problems were occurring and then patching the problems up that providing dependable service was a nightmare. Business transaction monitoring changes this. BTM makes it possible to track a business transaction through its path of execution-which may include many Java,.NET, messaging middleware, CICS and database applications. Each IT transaction that comprises the business transaction must execute correctly and complete within the time allocated by the service level agreement (SLA).
BTM provides deep visibility into the application stack, enabling IT operations to readily see how a small IT issue can cause a large business impact. Testing application performance in QA can assess service impacts before new releases are deployed into production. It also provides the essential visibility to detect potential problems in transaction flow long before they have a chance to cascade into problems that impact customers.
Application Performance Management
Application performance management (APM) incorporates BTM but can do more. The right APM solution should employ an embrace-until-you-can-replace design. This means that an APM with a library of technology solutions designed to work with the leading IT technology lines: IBM WebSphere MQ, IBM WebSphere ESB, IBM WAS, IBM WBI, J2EE, TIBCO EMS, TIBCO RV, BEA WebLogic, Oracle Database, SQL Server, JMX, JBoss, and WMQ SPI for HP Operations Center, etc. will enable the implementation of ITIL all that easier.
Complex Event Processing
An application performance management solution must also have the ability to handle huge volumes of diverse data. In order to do this effectively, a complex event processing (CEP) engine needs to filter, correlate, contextualize, and analyze data captured from disparate live data sources (RSS feeds, internal IT technology, cloud-based technology, etc.). Then the CEP needs to respond to the information automatically with warning alerts and possibly automated repairs.
Because ITIL 3 focuses on problem management from a service orientation, IT managers need to understand the existing complexity of the IT structure before they can begin developing an IT enterprise that is service focused. Application performance management with complex event processing and business transaction monitoring enables problem management within the existing IT enterprise while enabling the development of solutions that dovetail into the business’ goals.
Denise Rutledge has been researching the topic of application performance management (APM) and complex event processing (CEP) since 2009. In the course of her research, she discovered an interesting smaller APM provider, Nastel Technologies. The company’s AutoPilot software line has been using CEP to assist IT managers with implementing ITIL since it was first introduced. Forrester Research recognizes AutoPilot as one of the most successful integrations of CEP and application performance management in the market.
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