Understanding BSM: Measurements

BSM 9.20 includes the following measurement components:

Health Indicators (HIs)

Data collectors such as Operations Manager, RUM, SiteScope, and so forth, send event or metric samples to the BSM servers, containing information about your monitored applications and business services. Each sample is mapped in BSM to its relevant health indicator (HI), and the event or metric in the sample is used to set the HI's status.

HIs provide fine-grained measurements on the CIs that represent your monitored applications and business services. Some HIs provide business metrics such as backlog and volume, while others monitor specific aspects of performance and availability such as CPU load or disk space.

There are two types of data sources that can contribute to an HI's status and value: events and metrics. Some data collectors send event samples to BSM (for example, CPU load has exceeded a threshold), while other send samples containing metrics (for example, response time = 6 milliseconds). A sample is translated to HI status as follows:

After an HI's status is set, the key performance indicator (KPI) that is associated with the HI is calculated based on the KPI's definitions.

For details, see "Health Indicators and KPIs" and "Event Type Indicators" in the BSM User Guide.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

In the Service Health application, you can monitor status for your CIs using key performance indicators (KPIs). KPIs are high-level indicators of a CI's performance and availability. Each KPI represents an aspect of domain health such as System Performance, System Availability, Application Performance, Application Availability, and so on.

KPIs are calculated using statuses of health indicators (HIs), KPIs, or a combination of both. For example, you can specify a business rule that sets the severity of a KPI on a CI to the worst status of all the HIs assigned to that CI.

The resulting measurement for the KPI is translated into a color-coded status indicator displayed in Service Health, where the color represents a more desirable or less desirable condition for the KPI. A KPI's severity can be normal, warning, minor, major, or critical.

KPIs and HIs are also used to calculate SLA performance within Service Level Management.

You can define a KPI to only use specific HIs that are of interest to you. For example, the BPI Backlog KPI has two HIs: Backlog Value and Backlog Count. If you are interested only in the financial aspects, you can set the KPI to only include the Backlog Value HI in its calculation.

For details, see "Health Indicators and KPI" in the BSM User Guide.

Measurement Management