What's New in Mercury Business Availability Center 6.3

Last revised: July 31, 2006

Mercury Business Availability Center 6.3 contains bug fixes, updated documentation, and all the features from version 6.2, listed below.

Highlights

  • Service Level Management On-boarding via Mercury IT Governance (ITG) integration
  • My BAC portal
  • Better triage via Business Process Monitor and Real User Monitor reports
  • Service Level Management for real-user experience
  • New Mercury Business Availability Center for Siebel application
  • Improved integration with Mercury Diagnostics

Applications

Dashboard and Reporting

  • My BAC
    • My BAC is a personal portal customized to display all Dashboard views and Mercury Business Availability Center reports as portlets. Users can easily define a layout with their favorite views and reports side by side. They can even define external feeds into Mercury Business Availability Center. In addition, users can have multiple layouts saved as favorites and simply switch between them as needed.
  • Drill down to Mercury Diagnostics application
    • Now you can follow a specific problem from Dashboard (for example, a faulty transaction from one of the locations) by drilling down to Mercury Diagnostics for further analysis.
  • Improved custom query interface for Mercury Business Availability Center data
    • Many improvements to the ability to create customized reports over Mercury Business Availability Center monitors and KPIs. Examples include:

      • * Coloring fields of a KPI that exceed a defined threshold

      * Various tabular and graphical presentation options

      * Sort and change order of columns

  • Improved Desktop Ticker and tray icon
    • The Desktop Ticker provides quick visibility into the status of Mercury Business Availability Center Key Performance Indicators. The improved ticker can be configured to alert on status changes of high and low level elements in the services (for example, Business Process or Transaction). The tooltip is now identical to the Dashboard tooltip, so managers can get the information they need without ever launching Mercury Business Availability Center.

Service Level Management

  • Service Level Management on-boarding: Mercury Business Availability Center-ITG Integration
    • Service Level Management on-boarding provides a unique Business Technology Optimization (BTO) solution that integrates the management and workflow capabilities of Mercury IT Governance (ITG) and the Service Level Management capabilities of Mercury Business Availability Center. Guided by ITIL-based practices, a service level manager can define a business service and follow it through its lifecycle: Define properties, negotiate and agree on service levels, and publish it to the lines of business. Services and SLAs are automatically imported from ITG into Mercury Business Availability Center, where monitors are applied and SLA reports are created and published. Reports can be sent back to ITG for validation and annotations.
  • SLA Management
    • Complementing the Service Level Management on-boarding process is a new feature in, intended for service level managers, that enables tracking services as well as the customers and providers of those services, and their key attributes. In addition, key SLA reports can be filtered to show SLAs for a specific customer or by a specific provider.
  • Service Level Management for real-user experience
    • In conjunction with the Real User Monitor application, Service Level Management can now measure the performance and availability of the service as experienced by real end users. The service level manager can now create reports which can show the true business impact of service disruptions.

End User Management

  • Business Process Monitor
    • Enhanced triage report allows quick problem isolation by providing all relevant data in a single report. The improved report includes script and collector health, transaction breakdown, error summary, and raw data over time.
    • Correlation to Mercury Diagnostics application: Business Process Monitor can color transactions of any Web application and send the data to Mercury Diagnostics for drill-down analysis.
  • Real User Monitor
    • Advanced transaction tracing: Drill down from Real User Monitor for further transaction analysis
    • Predefined templates translate obscure URLs to meaningful business names. Templates can be enhanced by the customer.
    • Frame unification: Combine several frames into a single page.
    • Offline Session Browser: Allows sharing of user sessions for offline replay of user transactions, enabling easier escalation to third-tier support.
    • Real User Monitor health watchdog in Self-Alert Monitor

System Availability Management

  • Mercury Business Availability Center can now display the status of SiteScope monitor metrics rather than just the monitor status. For example, instead of displaying only the overall status of the Memory monitor, you can now see the status of each metric within the Memory monitor (such as "megabytes free" and "percent used"). This tells you which specific metric caused the breach.

Mercury Application Mapping

  • New Discovery packages for Web Services (UDDI), Oracle 10G, and Oracle RAC
  • New Discovery methods for Mainframe and Netflow
  • Improvements for Change Detection in J2EE, Siebel, SAP
  • Ad hoc reporting for CI history

Mercury Business Availability Center for Siebel

  • Mercury Business Availability Center for Siebel is new and improved. Built on top of the CMDB model, it is an integral part of the Mercury Business Availability Center platform. It contains all the original functionality, including the diagnostics tools, and embedded, out-of-the-box Siebel expertise in areas such as Business Process Monitor and Real User Monitor end-user-experience monitoring, Siebel infrastructure monitoring, and Siebel diagnostics (SARM, database breakdown). In addition, it supports the following new functionality:
    • Automatic discovery and mapping of Siebel infrastructure including applications, servers, component/component groups, and configuration files
    • Works with Monitor Deployment Wizard
    • Unique Dashboard view
    • Separate Siebel UNIX solution templates for SiteScope
    • Scalable SARM analysis solution via load balancing
    • Siebel 7.8 support

Platform

  • Solaris platform support
  • SOAP API for CMDB: Provides the ability to query Mercury Business Availability Center CMDB from external applications.
  • CMDB Administration usability improvements
  • Nested groups in Permissions Manager
  • Enhanced system health console
  • Automatic failover for all key Data Processing Services

General

  • Support for upgrade from Mercury Application Mapping 3.0