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© Copyright 2013 RightITnow • The IT Operations Management Solution

Service-Centric IT Operations Management in The Enterprise:

Challenges and Requirements

The IT Operations Management Solution


A RightITnow WhitepaperService-Centric IT Operations Management in The Enterprise: Challenges and Requirements

IT Operations Management in FluxOver the last few years, innovation in service delivery technologies has increased the complexity of IT Operations

Management for organizations of all sizes. This is particularly acute for small and medium enterprises (SME’s) – which have traditionally operated with a lean staff, and simpler silo-based management systems. As long as the technologies they managed were relatively isolated and did not change, this management and monitoring structure worked fine.

However, with the rapid advent of new technologies and the increased pressure to do more with less – the SME management status quo is failing.

For example, converged communication services carry both data and latency-sensitive voice and video packets,

requiring considerable systems and application processing. And virtualized systems have completely overturned the conservative “one application per server” rule that was a costly, but safe choice for many IT managers. Expectations on utilization rates of virtualized servers are now pegged at more than fifty percent, instead of single digit rates. Return on investment expectations have also increased, and now focus on end-to-end service delivery (like say web

apps, voice or video) rather than individual infrastructure availability. Lastly, cloud based architectures are making resource allocation and monitoring even more dynamic and distributed.

While all of these changes have helped reduce IT budgets and required organizations to do more with less, they also

have introduced more specialized service components that are more complex to manage and monitor. Many of these components are dynamic and can be easily moved or reallocated – for example the movement of virtual machines across a server farm or entire applications from the enterprise premises to the cloud. Interestingly enough, while the

first adopters of virtualization were large enterprises, recent analyst reports predict that x86 virtualization adoption in mid-market organizations will outstrip large enterprise penetration levels in the next few years. More than 50% of small enterprise systems are expected to be virtualized by 2013.

This shift in the nature of service delivery technologies and management, means that SME’s will have to contend with

different kinds of operational challenges moving forward.

Challenge # 1: Rise in the Volume and Complexity of IT Operation Events

As the IT infrastructure and related applications and services become real-time, dynamic, componentized, and specialized - the volume and complexity of operational events increases, even for the mid-size enterprise. IT operations teams cannot handle this volume of events without adequate intelligence and correlation capabilities, like de-duplicating related events to a manageable number of root cause alerts. For the correlation to happen, these

events must be imported into a centralized IT operations management platform with comprehensive view of the service delivery infrastructure across the enterprise.

Challenge # 2: Moving from Infrastructure Operations to Service-Centric Operations

Ensuring service availability and performance also means that event streams be comprised of alerts from across the infrastructure silos (networks, systems and applications). The IT operations management system must assimilate and analyze the relationships between the events – managing the end-to-end service and not just the infrastructure.

Contextual data on these events needs to be centrally correlated to provide a complete picture and enable prioritized action.

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Examples of contextual data would include service classes, configuration and dependency information, customer information (for e.g. in the case of a managed service provider), or quality of service targets linked to operational

hours.

FIGURE 1: Silo-Based IT Operations Management

Challenge # 3: Diverse Technologies Require Multiple Monitoring Systems

With the componentization and specialization of service delivery technologies, IT operations now require multiple monitoring and management systems to track availability, performance, etc. Yet for many organizations, there is no centralized IT operations management console, making any kind of cross-system correlation impossible.

For example, many organizations use their equipment vendor management systems (e.g. CiscoWorks or Microsoft SCOM). Introducing a virtualization layer adds another new management system – like VMWare vCenter. Windows and Unix applications may require varied kinds of instrumentation with their separate monitoring solutions. Converged services like IP telephony or video have multiple sub-components that may require dedicated monitoring – with many

proprietary alternatives. Cloud systems add another wrinkle by requiring specialized capabilities and integrations based on new protocols – which are not yet supported by existing tools.



Challenge # 4: Lack of Enterprise wide, Centralized IT Operations Management

IT teams from business units, departments, regions, or country operations may use their own set of management platforms – adding to the veritable zoo of monitoring systems. All of these systems send out events and information that require the attention of the IT operations staff.

As long as the infrastructure was self-contained within a management unit, this architecture may have been adequate. However, with the introduction of Web services and distributed networks and systems – there is an interdependency among enterprise components. Without a centralized management platform that can correlate, prioritize and

troubleshoot enterprise wide issues, IT operations teams simply don’t have the means to carry out effective triage and deliver the service levels demanded by their customers. The result of a fragmented IT management approach is that when problems arise, organizational IT groups are prone to finger point causing friction and slowing down problem

response. As a result, setting up a large triage team with representatives from all groups becomes necessary for tackling any problem. This is a typical, but wasteful process enacted daily in silo-based IT organizations.

Challenge # 5: The Demand for Scalable Real Time Operations Another major shift in the nature of enterprise services is real-time technologies. As small and medium enterprise organizations strive for business agility, services that facilitate real-time communication, collaboration and transaction become very important. The use of web and video conferencing, IP telephony and even social media communication

embedded into traditional enterprise applications are but a few of the examples of such services. To ensure their delivery, IT operations teams need new tools that can help them analyze, prioritize and troubleshoot high volume events in real-time.

Event Correlation and Management (ECM) Systems With the change in the nature of service delivery, small and medium enterprises face the same challenges as large ones. The sheer volume of events and disparate monitoring and management systems, demand a centralized, coordinated triage process, without which costs, downtime, and service degradation can easily spiral out of control.

The need to streamline operational processes and manage costs has organization’s investing in new systems that can consolidate, correlate and manage enterprise wide events, all within a single console. Event Correlation and Management (ECM) systems – sometimes referred to as Manager of Managers (MoM’s), have long been the staple of

large enterprises.

What are Event Correlation and Management Systems?ECM systems are higher layer management platforms that collect, consolidate and correlate IT event and alert

information across multiple management systems, devices, services and applications. Once events are collected, they are normalized, categorized and correlated for automated as well as operator-led problem resolution or incident escalation to the Service Desk. This centralized event management capability is captured in IT Service Management

(ITSM) and Business Service Management (BSM) best practices.



FIGURE 2: Event Correlation Supported IT Operations Management

ECM systems have complex integration and configuration activities, as they bring together event and performance alert data streams from disparate sources into a single management point. To bring intelligence to IT operations while

filtering out the background noise, ECM events are often subject to a set of conditions and actions determined by complex, programmable business rules.

In legacy Event Management solutions, the business logic is often dispersed across multiple products, each using a

different programming language. This complexity in the configuration of business logic makes it costly and difficult to keep management systems in sync – especially when they need to keep up with infrastructure change. They also make the execution of common operational process flows relating to event, alert, and incident triage overly

complicated. Together, these make the cost of purchasing and maintaining legacy Event Management systems prohibitively high.

Despite a unified operations process, ECM’s use has been mostly restricted to large enterprise organizations. SME’s were slower to deploy the new technologies involving distributed web services and virtualization compared to larger

enterprises. With expensive legacy Event Management systems well beyond reach – SME organizations bypassed the trend in a large measure. With smaller and simpler service delivery requirements, they continued to rely on siloed monitoring and management



systems. Even for those SME’s that did acquire ECM systems, they often remained partially deployed or underutilized, locking up investment and operational expenses, and providing low investment returns.

Why Mid-Market Organizations Need an Event Correlation System Today

As SME’s move towards service-centric IT operations management, an ECM system is now a necessity. Without the

level of event consolidation, correlation and automation that ECM’s provide, operational triage costs will rise with the increasing complexity of services delivered. As a result, end user service levels could be compromised and business operation interrupted. Historically, cost was the barrier to mid-market ECM adoption, but today’s new platform technologies and purchase options have begun to make ECM systems more affordable. These next-generation ECM

systems feature a massive simplification in the architecture, usability, ease of deployment, and maintainability - all of which make them attractive to SME’s.

Top 10 Requirements for Next Generation ECM Systems

1. Centralized, Service-Centric IT Operations Console An ECM system should be able to consolidate events from disparate management systems, data sources and cross-silo (spanning network, servers and applications) infrastructures. It should offer an intuitive ‘single pane of glass’ view

that IT operations teams can rely on to effectively manage their business services.

2. Quick Installation and Deployment Ensuring Rapid Time to Value

An ECM system must be easy to install (within minutes) and rapid to deploy (within hours), to meet the expectations of small and medium enterprises. Unlike large service providers or large enterprises, small to midsize organizations

cannot afford lengthy configuration and deployment cycles. To meet the needs of the SME, an ECM system must provide out-of-the-box support for standard equipment, management applications and services so that customers can achieve rapid time to value.

3. Simplified Operation and Process Automation

Complex management systems are expensive to acquire and maintain. To be attractive to SME’s, an ECM system must be simple to manage and operate, and provide automated management processes from event to alert to the incident lifecycle.

4. Flexible Web 2.0 Interface

Businesses today expect the simplicity and flexibility of Web 2.0 applications. An ECM system should utilize the latest

technologies like drag and drop interfaces; intuitive and accessible dashboards; and dynamic charting. SME IT operations staff want a solution that they can use to build personalized views and configure new business rules with no programming requirements.



5. Dynamic infrastructure support

ECM systems need automated support for dynamic infrastructures, so that they can adapt to frequent changes and reconfigurations of virtual machines. This requires that ECM systems be able to natively connect with virtualization

management components, detect and update power on/off, moves or configuration changes in specific virtual instances, and apply automated rules for correlation without any manual intervention. As a comparison, using expensive hosted proprietary agents which take time to deploy and manually configure, is no longer sustainable.

6. Support for Scalable, Real Time Event Processing

With a high volume of events and multiple levels of dependencies, ECM system architectures must support scalable, real-time processing. Legacy monitoring systems perform poorly in this regard as they were not designed as real-time event processing engines.

7. Standards based integration for cost effective deployment

ECM systems need to support the latest Web service and industry standard communication protocols like HTTP/XML, WSMAN, Windows Event logs etc. to integrate effectively with other management systems. This would enable closed loop resolution of processed alarms in concert with Help Desk systems – with automatic incident creation when new alarms are escalated and, in turn, alarm removal when its related trouble ticket is closed. Support for standard

protocols would also eliminate a common failing in legacy Event Management architectures which support mostly proprietary mechanisms - making integrations difficult and costly.

8. Open Architecture for Event Enrichment

While ECM systems may be a central consolidation point for availability and performance information, they cannot

contain all contextual information within their database. Therefore, it is important for ECM systems to enrich event and alert information from other management systems or CMDB’s. An ECM system with an open architecture can easily integrate with a federated management system and external databases that provide contextual technology and

business data. This is a vital requirement in the dynamic business architectures where contextual information can change rapidly.

9. Role based Access

To meet the privacy and security requirements of government regulations, shared service infrastructures and customers, ECM systems should be able to support role-based access. Console views should limit operator and

customer visibility on an as needed basis only.

10. Affordability

Pricing and total cost of ownership of ECM systems must meet the expectations of SME organizations. They need to be less expensive to purchase and more affordable to use and maintain. To capture the interest of small and medium

enterprises the overall cost of ownership of an ECM system would need to drop down to one-fifth to one-tenth the cost of a legacy Event Management system. New business models like subscription-based pricing can also facilitate budgeting for operational expenses, rather than locking in capital investments in expensive software.



About RightITnowRightITnow delivers real-time, cross-domain event correlation software that enables enterprises to optimize IT Operations processes so they can drive down costs, resolve problems faster and assure end user services. It achieves this by automating the event to alert to incident life cycle and bridging the gap between IT Operations center and the Service Desk – driving higher productivity and effectiveness. For more information, please visit www.RightITnow.com.

Contact us at [email protected] US Office 112 bandol court , San Ramon , CA 94582 USA +33 (1) 415 992 6390UK Office TechHub @ Campus 4-5 Bonhill street, London, EC2A 4BX UK +44 (0) 208 133 3755

4. RightITnow ECMRightITnow ECM is a powerful event correlation and process automation platform for optimizing IT operations in a business of any size. Built on a scalable architecture with broad event collection and processing capabilities it is

designed from the ground up to comprehensively manage dynamic and fast changing IT infrastructures.

With a flexible and configurable Web 2.0 interface and event-to-alert-to-incident process automation, RightITnow ECM provides substantial value at an affordable price. With RightITnow ECM, SMEs can consolidate their management tool

information, automate workflows between IT Operations and Service Desk processes, and streamline incident and problem resolution efforts.

FIGURE 3: The RightITnow ECM Dashboard



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