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Beyond Unified Monitoring: The Case For Application Service Management

This document discusses unified monitoring and application service management. It defines unified monitoring as combining monitoring tools from different domains into a single system. It then argues that application service management goes a step further by modeling relationships and dependencies between components to understand how services are delivered to end users. The paper outlines some challenges to application service management, like keeping models up to date and integrating legacy tools.

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Anca Kosman
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55 views6 pages

Beyond Unified Monitoring: The Case For Application Service Management

This document discusses unified monitoring and application service management. It defines unified monitoring as combining monitoring tools from different domains into a single system. It then argues that application service management goes a step further by modeling relationships and dependencies between components to understand how services are delivered to end users. The paper outlines some challenges to application service management, like keeping models up to date and integrating legacy tools.

Uploaded by

Anca Kosman
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Beyond Unified Monitoring:

The Case for Application


Service Management
Extract

This paper discusses the Best Practice approach for monitoring infrastructure and
applications and the services that, by working together, these components deliver to
end-users.

It starts by exploring the term Unified Monitoring, which is quickly emerging as a


suggested best practice by both analysts and market leading vendors in the Service
Assurance Industry.

It then builds upon this theory to discuss the next logical step; “Application Service
Management” and its benefits.

The paper is informed by industry research, in-house surveys and anecdotal evidence
from real use cases.

Call us on 01782 752 369


www.servicevisual.com
IT Service Performance Dashboards
Why is Everyone Talking
About Unified Monitoring?
Historically, the various teams within a larger IT department have selected the tools
and systems that they use for Fault and Performance management of their particular
domains of IT (Server, Network, App, DB, Storage)

This has resulted in the need to consult many sources of “truth” when trying to
establish root-cause when an issue affects an internal or external customer-facing
service.

Technically, this is challenging, as there is no correlation between the management


tools when reviewing an incident, and from a business perspective, it can be argued
that both the capital and operational cost of running many systems doesn’t stack up
– especially if answers are not being found quickly enough.

What is Unified Monitoring?


Unified Monitoring is one strategy to address this challenge.

Unified monitoring is the ability to monitor the multiple domains of IT that are
involved in delivering total IT or Business Services within one system and one
database (a CMDB for monitoring).

The benefits of this are that one source of truth is created, events are correlated
between IT Domains, alerts are reduced and logical groups can be created according
to service, roles or infrastructure.

Unified Monitoring can be achieved in 2 main ways:

1. A Single Vendor Solution that provides solution for the end-to-end IT Service.
2. Configure isolated domain tools to feed into a correlation engine and
reporting platform – sometimes referred to as a Manager of Managers (MoM)

Call us on 01782 752 369


www.servicevisual.com
IT Service Performance Dashboards
Going beyond Unified
Monitoring: Application
Service Management
Once fault and performance data is all in one place, then it should be possible to
organise the alerting and reporting of that data, in a way that the business sees the
IT Department function – the Application Services that IT delivers to end-users and
customers.

Several Unified Monitoring platforms go some way to deliver this, by understanding


what is connected to what and then providing some level of dependency information.

Application Service Management (ASM) however requires that there is a deeper


knowledge of the dependencies, including visibility of end-user experience of the
performance of the top-level application services, the key services by which end-
users recognize IT (email, web, CRM etc).

When performance falls below SLA, ASM will provide an integrated understanding of
interdependencies between the supporting application processes, OS’s, VM’s, hosts,
network components, connectivity, databases and storage components.

“Application Service Management is more than acknowledging a relationship


between objects and putting these into buckets or groups, (as in most Unified
Monitoring Platforms) but instead defining the relationship between the objects in

the context of how the service is delivered to your end-users.”

Call us on 01782 752 369


www.servicevisual.com
IT Service Performance Dashboards
The Ingredients of
Successful ASM
To achieve this goal, a sophisticated mix of technology and process is required.

This includes:

• Service Availability Definition – In order to define whether an Application


Service is available or not, it is necessary to define a reliable logic that
accurately represents whether users can access that service within the
requirements of the SLA’s defined by the business.
Many vendors would suggest a single method for doing this, however
the myriad of different application configurations mean that picking one
technique is not always practical. For example web-based applications would
require an entirely different approach to a fat-client application.

• Configuration Discovery – Where knowledge of service configuration


is not available within the business, then a combination of advanced
discovery techniques and technologies will need to be applied to the target
environment.
• Service Modeling – The ability to interpret dependencies, routes and
continuity paths that are involved in delivering the services from technology
to every type of user accessing them. In other words accurate and useable
definition of the Service Configuration.
• Data Visualization – Defining, modeling and discovering service
configurations is sometimes complex, however in order for that work to have
value, then it is essential that the visual representation of the data, through
dashboards, reports and alerting is simple.

The entire motivation for viewing “Service’ is to simplify the management of IT


Operations. This is achieved by providing the ability to quickly establish whether or
not a fault is service affecting, what the problem root cause is and who within in the
business is affected.

Call us on 01782 752 369


www.servicevisual.com
IT Service Performance Dashboards
Challenges to Overcome
The concept described in this document will no doubt seem both logical and
appealing to most IT Operational Professionals. So why is this approach not yet more
adopted?

The below lists the most common reasons stated in our recent client surveys:

Process and Knowledge - Companies don’t have access to a framework to develop


their own in-house processes around, which would allow them to capture the
required information about their services and record it in useable way.

Intelligent Technology – With the mix of the physical and logical configuration items
making up a service, the challenge is often finding a monitoring platform that can
firstly take data from ALL the required components AND also then discover, model
and visualise them in the right way.

Keeping the System up to Date – Application Service environments are dynamic,


devices are added or changed, software versions are updated or patched and
some in some environments application servers move round dynamically according
to resource demand. As changes are made, ASM systems and the processes that
support them need to keep up.

SaaS Applications – Although the introduction of these applications can introduce a


monitoring blind-spot that often can’t be avoided, a strategy needs to be defined to
bring visibility of their performance into the main monitoring system.

This may for example involve; integrating via service provider API’s, synthetic
transactions recording performance client side performance or monitoring the
infrastructure and connectivity, providing access to the application to discount your
own network causing the delays.

Resistance to Changing Legacy Tools – It can be difficult to convince the IT


department heads that there is a need to change the tools that they trust and know
for the greater good of the IT. These people have spent time and money developing
their management systems so that they provide them with an effective platform to
manage their own IT domain resource.

Change should be gradual or even better provided as a complimentary add-on to


what they are already doing.

Call us on 01782 752 369


www.servicevisual.com
IT Service Performance Dashboards
Summary
Application Service Management is not another “buzz word” invented by a software
vendor to create a new niche in the IT market. It is term to describe functionality
that offers real and tangible benefits for IT Operations working in large and complex
network environments.

The term is required to provide a distinction between similar related fields such as
APM, Network Management, Unified Monitoring, Business Service Management and
IT Service Management.

In fact, ASM takes a little bit from each of these disciplines to provide something
altogether more pragmatic for organisations that rely on their application services to
run their business.

About ServiceVisual
ServiceVisual provides Enterprise, Government and Educational organisations a unique
proposition in the Application Service Management / Unified Monitoring market space.

Key Features:

• Delivered as A Managed Service from our Secure Data Centre.


• Key Services discovered and modeled by our experts, using our unique
technology and process.
• Visibility Provided via our easy to understand Stunning Dashboard technology
– from your NOC or on your mobile device.
• Intelligent alerts and service centric reports managed and delivered to your
inbox.
• No need to integrate with or replace your existing monitoring tools – we
compliment them.
• Service perspective from your DC and from regional end-users.
• Keeps up with changes to service configuration – we managed the system for
you!
• Designed for IT Operations

Call us on 01782 752 369


www.servicevisual.com
IT Service Performance Dashboards

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