What's New in Business Availability Center 6.6

Last revised: March 12, 2007

Business Availability Center 6.6 contains the new features listed below, bug fixes (including all bug fixes from versions 6.5, 6.4, and 6.3), and all the features from versions 6.5 and 6.2.

Highlights

  • Problem Isolation Application
  • Real User Management
  • Cross Center Capabilities

Problem Isolation

Problem Isolation is a significant improvement to and rebranding of the Problem Management application released in October 2006. The Problem Isolation application enables users to more quickly isolate the causes of problems and incidents occurring throughout their services, applications, and infrastructure to shorten mean time to resolution:

  • Guided process for quickly finding the source of the problem
  • Automated problem validation
    • Rerun multiple monitors and scripts in parallel to assess the current state
    • Easy grouping and sorting to quickly understand which items are in need of attention
    • Intelligent selection of the critical items based on the Universal Configuration Management Database (UCMDB)
  • Impact analysis to quickly understand which service level agreements are or might be impacted
  • Intelligent analysis
    • Summarizes large amounts of data
    • Quickly triages problems
    • Offers intelligent recommendation of next steps
  • Layer analysis
    • Offers breakdown of what infrastructure layers are problematic
    • Shows deviation from normal operation
    • Drill down into deeper tier-specific data
  • Suspect lists
    • Provides most likely suspects based on a holistic view of availability, performance, change and relationships
    • On-demand diagnostic monitors to gather more information
  • Easy-to-use administration and configuration
  • Ticketing integration with HP ServiceCenter software (formerly Peregrine)

Real User Management

Real User Management 6.6 improves on the existing Real User Monitor solution by providing a much richer user session replay interface and adding new alerting capabilities:

  • Provides a real browser look and feel
    • Automatic recognition and assembly of multiple frames and iframes into a single page
    • Handling of dynamic content such as JavaScript and CSS
  • Fills in form fields with the user's selection
  • Highlights where a user clicked or modified fields
  • Enhanced alert support

Cross Center Capabilities

Business Availability Center 6.6 introduces the first of many cross-Center capabilities and features that enable customers to get more out of their existing HP investments:

  • HP OpenView Operations Center Phase 1 integrations
    • Pre-filtered message browser
    • Out-of-the-box integration administration tools
    • Connecting HP OV events to CMDB discovered hosts
    • Correlating events to accountability groups
  • Link to HP ServiceCenter (formerly Peregrine) for opening a ticket
  • Business Process Monitor Target Licensing for OpenView Internet Services Customers

What's New in Business Availability Center 6.5

Highlights

  • New Problem Management Application
  • New Business Availability Center for SOA application
  • Application Mapping enhancements
  • SiteScope 8.5

Applications

Problem Management

The Problem Management application is a new offering in Business Availability Center 6.5. The application provides users with a faster and more methodical way of working through problem isolation and resolution. Key features of this application include:

    • Problem creation from the real-time dashboard
    • Problem listing with prioritization, ownership, age, CI type, and annotations, which focuses users on solving the right things and avoiding duplicated effort
    • Problem summary, which reveals a complete roll-up of KPIs over time with drill-down into underlying components
    • Auto-selected troubleshooting reports, which provide the relevant Business Process Monitor, Real User Monitor, and SiteScope data without requiring prior knowledge or input from operators
    • Selection by the application model of only the right information at the right time across various data collectors, eliminating the need for users to possess detailed profile information
    • Suspects list, which scores the most likely system suspects, minimizing time required to sift through alerts and changes
    • Diagnostic monitors, which select the right systems on which to perform more investigation, enable deeper collection of information in real-time, and validate existing data, all without requiring contacting system owners
    • Service desk integration, enabling service ticket generation directly from Problem Management

Business Availability Center for SOA

Building on existing Business Availability Center SOA management features such as Web service discovery, active alerting, UDDI health, Dashboard views and SLM support, Business Availability Center 6.5 adds a new application called Business Availability Center for SOA with the following new functionality:

  • New centralized health views that show detailed SOA environment performance and availability information in one consolidated view
  • Passive monitoring with new throughput metrics, SOAP fault monitoring, and SOAP call tracking
  • Consumer analysis with ability to track and show performance from consumer IP addresses
  • Detection and tracking of changes to Web services supporting impact analysis in the Business Availability Center Dashboard
  • Direct navigational linkages to Systinet2, providing the ability to:
    • View service metadata such as owner, WSDL details, and so forth
    • View service contract information as a part of the SLA configuration process
  • Discovery support for IIS Web services
  • Discovery support for business services and correlation to Web services

Application Mapping

Several new enhancements to Application Mapping are introduced in the 6.5 release. Notable additions include the following:

  • New Discovery for .Net web services
  • SNMP version 3 support
  • Enhancements to the following clustering/virtualization packages:
    • Microsoft SQL Clustering
    • Windows
    • VMware
    • Oracle
    • WebLogic

End User Management

The following enhancement in the End User Management application was added to Business Availability Center 6.5:

  • Business Process Monitor (BPM) now supports LoadRunner replay 8.1 FP3 including the Web GUI protocol

System Availability Management/SiteScope

Released at the same time as Business Availability Center 6.5, SiteScope 8.5 adds new functionality and capabilities in the many areas, the highlights of which are listed below. For a complete list of what's new in SiteScope, see the SiteScope Release Notes.

  • New global search and replace wizard with support for categories, browsable counters and dependencies
  • User interface performance improvements in tree navigation, adding/deleting objects, and other operations
  • New monitor history view which provides the ability to see monitor runs and status back in time
  • Improved security including:
    • True password encryption
    • New audit log for all user actions
  • Alerts can now be configured on "not available" status
  • Dependencies now support the "not available" status
  • The Web Service monitor now supports multi-port and multi-service Web services (contains a number of ports and a number of services) as well as nested WSDLs
  • Remote UNIX and NT servers can be added to templates to allow automatic creation of remote preferences as part of template deployment
  • New dashboard columns: description, triggered alerts, type, and target
  • Internationalization enhancements: SiteScope now supports the Multi-Lingual User Interface (MLU) with all translated languages (Simplified Chinese, Korean and Japanese) and supporting resource files integrated into the SiteScope core installation

Platform

  • Enterprise scalability improvements
  • CMDB capacity improvements

Others

  • My BAC - New CMDB breakdown portlets offer customers an understanding of their servers, applications, and database inventory.

What's New in Business Availability Center 6.2

Highlights

  • Service Level Management On-boarding via 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 Business Availability Center for Siebel application
  • Improved integration with Diagnostics

Applications

Dashboard and Reporting

  • My BAC
    • My BAC is a personal portal customized to display all Dashboard views and 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 Business Availability Center. In addition, users can have multiple layouts saved as favorites and simply switch between them as needed.
  • Drill down to 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 Diagnostics for further analysis.
  • Improved custom query interface for Business Availability Center data
    • Many improvements to the ability to create customized reports over 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 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 Business Availability Center.

Service Level Management

  • Service Level Management on-boarding: 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 IT Governance (ITG) and the Service Level Management capabilities of 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 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 Diagnostics application: Business Process Monitor can color transactions of any Web application and send the data to 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

  • 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.

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

Business Availability Center for Siebel

  • Business Availability Center for Siebel is new and improved. Built on top of the CMDB model, it is an integral part of the 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 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 Application Mapping 3.0