Understanding BSM: Measurements
BSM 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:
- Event-based HIs. An event sample contains an event type indicator (ETI), which is a categorization of events according to the type of occurrence (for example, CPU load passing a threshold).
In the above example, when the CPU load threshold is breached on a server, an event sample is sent to BSM. Based on the text string in the event sample, it is assigned an ETI of CPU Load. This ETI is mapped to the CPU Load HI, and the status of this HI is updated accordingly.
- Metric-based HIs. Metric-based HIs apply calculation rules to the samples generated by the data collectors, to create a calculated HI value. For example, if a data collector collects several response time samples over a 15 minute period, Service Health calculates the average response time and sets the HI's status (for example: Minor) and value (for example: 11 ms).
You can also configure HIs within the indicator repository so that when the status of a specific metric-based HI changes, an event is generated in BSM. This event then appears in the Event Browser, showing you that the HI's status has changed.
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
- KPI and HI assignments. When a new CI is added to your monitored system, the assignment mechanism automatically assigns the appropriate KPIs and HIs to the CI. For details about modifying KPI and HI assignments, see "Indicator Assignments and Propagation" in the BSM Application Administration Guide.
- Configuring indicator and rule templates. You can view and modify the templates used to define KPIs, HIs, ETIs, and business rules, using the indicator repositories available from Service Health, SLM, and Operations Management.
The business rules associated with HIs and KPIs define how the HIs and KPIs are calculated. Some business rules are based on sample data, and are used to calculate HIs. Other rules calculate KPIs based on the status or value of HIs and of other KPIs.
For details, see "Repositories Overview" in the BSM Application Administration Guide.