Introducing BSM: Overview of the BSM Solution

HP Business Service Management (BSM) provides a suite of monitoring products that offer a comprehensive methodology for monitoring and measuring IT services from a business perspective. BSM tools enable you to identify problems, understand their business impact, and prioritize the triage and remediation process. BSM thus enables your IT organization to optimize the performance and availability of applications in production, and proactively resolve problems when they arise, thus assisting your organization to deliver more effective business results with lower IT costs.

BSM contains an integrated set of applications for real-time performance and availability monitoring, providing capabilities that include Service Level Management, End User Management, System Availability Management, event handling, early-warning events, and custom reporting and alerting. These applications combine top-down, user experience management with bottom-up insight into infrastructure events and performance, by linking infrastructure to business processes, transactions, and the end-user experience. BSM is based on a common foundation of shared workflow, administration and reporting services, shared assets, and expertise.

This unified top-down and bottom-up methodology enables BSM to provide consolidated and automated service operations management for your business, reducing MTTR and helping you to more effectively honor your SLAs.

BSM's consolidated service operations approach is driven by the following processes:

Detect

BSM detects problems before they impact the business. BSM monitoring tools discover, detect, monitor, and measure across the IT environment, reporting events and sending alerts and metrics back to the BSM applications. You configure the monitoring requirements and thresholds for the measurements to define what is a problem.

In order to create a model of what your IT environment looks like, BSM is able to discover your IT environment automatically, using monitoring tools, and using discovery techniques provided by Discovery and Dependency Mapping. BSM then helps you model your business processes and services, using the management tools provided in the Run-time Service Model (RTSM) Administration application; these tools map the complex and dynamic dependencies between applications and their supporting infrastructure.

The BSM solution monitoring options include:

Consolidate

BSM consolidates topology, events, and performance and availability metrics from across domains and monitoring systems into the BSM management centers, enabling consolidated event and service health management for IT operations. Events and metrics from third-party integrations can be included in this "single pane of glass" approach. Cross-domain events are automatically correlated by the event-based correlation engine, to correlate a symptom with its cause.

These processes help to identify the probable cause of the events and to reduce the number of escalated incidents.

The core component for this consolidated operations approach is the embedded CMDB, the Run-time Service Model (RTSM). The RTSM defines the relationships between the infrastructure components, IT services, applications, and corresponding business services, and provides a topological configuration item (CI) storage repository that is used throughout BSM.

Prioritize

BSM prioritizes events based on their business impact, and whether the associated CI is included in an SLA, enabling IT to focus on those issues first. This prioritization is achieved using the comprehensive dependency map created in the RTSM, which gives visibility into the impact of events on business services, and on how real users are being impacted by issues.

In addition, Service Level Management capabilities allow you to compare actual application availability and performance with business goals, so that you can see the remaining time until SLAs are breached, and to prioritize problem resolution based on service level compliance.

You can define role-defined dashboards in MyBSM that track KPIs specific to a high-priority business service, to help deliver the relevant information to the right people.

Isolate

BSM provides processes to help isolate the root cause of problems, speeding up resolution time. A problem can occur at any stage of the user experience; it could be infrastructure or network related, an application issue, a transaction implementation issue, a security issue, and so forth. To manage this, BSM tracks transactions in an end-to-end manner, regardless of the technologies used to complete them. The RTSM then provides a unified service health view of the relationships and dependencies between the CIs that represent your business services and IT infrastructure.

This combination provides a complete and up-to-date picture of the managed environment, and enables the impact analysis needed to quickly isolate the problem. In the Service Health application, you can identify the impacted CI, and drill down to the domain BSM applications such as End User Management, System Availability Management, and Transaction Management to determine the root cause.

In addition, Service Health Analyzer provides predictive events, so that issues can be identified and processed before the full impact is felt by the business.

The IT teams can identify and understand the technical issues at the root of events, and the impact on customers and the overall business. IT is able to trace the problem back to the physical infrastructure or virtual application environment, or trace an event back to third-party cloud service providers.

Diagnose

The BSM platform includes tools to help diagnose anomalies across the IT environment and pinpoint bottlenecks, and provides solutions for different IT teams. For example:

Repair

BSM provides integrated run book automation (RBA) though an out-of-the-box integration with HP Operations Orchestration. This enables an isolation flow to collect additional information on the problem, and the running of automated script actions to try and remedy the problem. BSM can also integrate with other run book automation tools

In addition, BSM integrates with service desks and ticketing systems. You can set up a closed-loop bi-directional integration with HP Service Manager, so that events are transmitted and transformed into incidents, and both events and incidents are closed automatically once the problem is resolved.