All business computer systems are for is doing things, not just for being super-fast or state-of-the-vendor’s-art. They also represent a significant investment for almost all businesses, often slightly out of proportion to real current needs when making that investment because of the genuine need to try to look to future requirements and avoid false economies in the short term. And, there is little point of investing in IT unless you intend to get the best return from your investment, not least in terms of maintaining maximum uptime and performance, and exploiting their capabilities to the full.
Ensuring this consistently requires expensive and expert manpower, so clearly the more assistance you can get from monitoring and diagnostic systems the better. Better still is to have as much of this function automated as possible. Finally, and best of all, is to have this done from the most suitable place — centrally at HQ or the IT department — rather than at numerous individual sites.
So we are talking a potentially magic combination of remote and automated monitoring. Today, there are systems to cover servers and networks, smaller devices like PCs, switches/routers/hubs and even printers and other peripherals. Since maintaining all of these remotely is not a problem, there is then the choice of whether you should conduct this in-house or engage the services of an external managed services provider.
Where this starts to get more complicated, but also potentially much more valuable, is when the remote monitoring extends to the software applications in use in the business and their deployment and support. It can even be extended to Web-based applications, from VPNs to staff teleworking to the on-line experience of visitors to websites. Now we are talking about a comprehensive IT service management function that serves users and business processes as well as the hardware systems infrastructure. What is emerging is a model in which IT is delivered as a business service, with metrics and service levels set and measured in business terms and specific to the applications and user groups.
Gartner Group suggests that this is the most mature stage of IT — managing the IT infrastructure as a business service. It extends all the way to having internal Service Level Agreements for departments and constituencies. It has some resemblance to the ‘utility computing’ notion much beloved of platform pundits in that the users and even senior management need neither know nor care how anything in ‘the system’ works. All they need is to define their business needs and processes accurately and sign up for the IT to provide the wherewithal to deliver on them — and the costs. In the meantime IT management is actually empowered and given the freedom to go with responsibility because it has much less necessity to explain or justify technical decisions to non-technical people. Once again, whether the solution is in-house, outsourced or a combination is irrelevant: whatever suits can work — and be modified without undue hassle when circumstances change.
Have you got the vision?
The vision is not only deliverable but starting to appear in various guises in organisations around the world and even here in Ireland. But it is always founded on the bedrock of solid, smart monitoring systems. IBM’s Tivoli suite has one of the longest pedigrees in this context, offering enterprise class systems to monitor and report on everything from network and server performance, to individual storage devices and drives, to the desktop PC.
‘Hardware maintenance was of course the first set of functions and is still the fundamental layer,’ says Tom Finn, manager of IBM Integrated Technology Services. ‘But in addition to alerts and so on there are tools for root cause analysis and resolution — either automatically or by notifying so that a human decision can be made.’ The next step up is remote control of the back-up and restore function, which is clearly the first step towards remote management of applications. Anti-virus software is a prime candidate because of its network and desktop level distribution. ‘But in fact almost any type of software can be rolled out remotely,’ Tom Finn points out, ‘as well as upgrades and fixes. An important consideration nowadays is that you can use the system for asset management and licensing compliance.’
Although not our topic in this article, the next step up is clearly the help desk function for users across an organisation which will utilise the resources of Tivoli or similar remote management suites to troubleshoot or anticipate problems.
All such systems these days will accept data (at least event notification) from third party software and will have the ability to take over control of individual PCs/servers remotely. Since networks are always going to be at the core, for example, the ability to interface with Cisco Systems products has become standard in many cases. Hewlett Packard is the other leading company that like IBM is at the leading edge of providing managed services as well as specific service management products to a huge international client base. The development of these software systems for remote support and management has in fact been driven faster in the last few years by the rapid growth in the managed services market.
‘We use our own OpenView set of products as well as tools from others, notably our strategic partner, Cisco,’ says Simon Newlyn, H-P head of managed networks in the EMEA region. ‘We have found software for special purposes like WebTrends, VitalNet from Lucent or Remedy from BMC Software that complement our other tools so that we can give a comprehensive service.’
On the premise that it is to the leading experts in service provision that we should look for both best practice and future trends, it is clear that automation is the key, whether a service provider or in-house team is in charge of the IT service management. ‘We recently did a study that showed that in a very large international client, 93 per cent of all IT issues were raised through the monitoring rather than by the users,’ says Simon Newlyn. ‘But of course the whole concept is more than fault detection. You have to be able to fix remotely — unless physical intervention is essential. But it is equally essential that your systems have a pro-active element, using statistics like CPU usage or network congestion patterns to contribute to investment or infrastructure planning decisions.’
Need help?
Whether for managed services or in-house professionals, help desk agents or not particularly technical managers, all of the vendors and experienced users stress the importance of clear simple graphical presentation. ‘It makes it much easier for people using the systems to see and comprehend what is or has been happening and to make good decisions about what should be done,’ says Brendan O’Reilly, country manager of specialists BMC Software, which has been developing monitoring systems since 1980.
‘Our new product Visualis is the culmination of a lot of development and the way market needs have evolved in recent years. It gives colourful, graphic 3D representations of whatever you are monitoring or analysing and can scroll back or forward like a videotape.’ This is a front end for the BMC Patrol range of products, a comprehensive set of solutions for all standard hardware platforms and major enterprise applications. They are used extensively around the world and by about 50 large Irish organisations, notably financial services such as AIB, BoI and Irish Life and utilities including ESB and Eircom. In addition to the wide range of performance monitoring functions, the Patrol series — and most of its rival products — can also be used very effectively for predictive purposes. What if we increased users by 25 per cent? What if traffic surged to 200 per cent?
‘For big companies, an undoubted attraction — apart from the effectiveness of the software, of course! — is that remote, automated systems monitoring offers the possibility of a reduced head count in IT,’ Brendan O’Reilly acknowledges. ‘Smaller organisations have held back from this whole area of IT service management until recently — definitely “nice to have” rather than “must have”. Their scale meant that savings would be unlikely to amount to a person less in a small IT team. But internationally we are now seeing those smaller outfits investing in our newer, entry level Patrol Express. They can make serious contributions to their business process effectiveness without having to invest in the technical skills set.’ One of the few vendors willing to talk about costs even in general terms, he suggests guideline figures of perhaps EUR400 per server and EUR200 per network element annually for entry level systems.
Another vendor that has been in the system management market for a long time is Computer Associates, notably through its renowned Unicenter product line. ‘This is a market that has evolved and matured, especially in the last three years,’ says Alastair McPherson, CA business technologist. ‘At this stage our approach is along the lines of “what is it exactly you want to do?” because the breadth and depth of the CA portfolio means we almost certainly have the technology to do it. But the client needs to identify what is required and see what is the true business value. Then the decisions on technology, outsourced or in-house and so on are fully aligned to the business strategy.’
Cost reduction
Alastair McPherson accepts that cost reduction is a major driver of automation and remote management but points also to risk management: ‘you can make the process more reliable by taking the people out of it until human decisions have to be made. There are also increasingly regulated industries like financial services, pharmachem, utilities and others where centralised monitoring and logging assists the disciplined management they require’. CA has also fully embraced inter-operability with other vendors’ systems and different platforms: ‘clients are naturally looking to leverage their existing investments and our target is to ensure they can do that with CA systems’.
Data Edge is a Dublin company with a firm base in the engineering of IT infrastructure, given its 1999 beginnings in test, measurement and diagnostics for telecomms carriers and other large networks. Data Edge has maintained its position of expertise while the whole IT monitoring and remote management concept has permeated up to enterprise business process level. ‘A full, firm grip of the infrastructure is what then has to be mapped to the business processes,’ says Paul Kelly, head of operations support systems. ‘It starts with faults monitoring, then system availability and up to performance measurement — and enhancement. We now look at these things from the user perspective and “quality of experience” is the user-view equivalent of the more technical “quality of service”.’ He points out that this concept is valuably applied for users in the organisation, customers and supply chain partners and even casual website visitors. ‘It is important to have a programme of active testing end to end — not just fault monitoring — and that includes transactions, observed or synthetic, which are after all the fundamental of real life business processes. Then you need the tools to drill down to fix or improve and also to predict potential causes of performance impairment.’
Data Edge is the Irish reseller for the very successful Concord solutions for automating technology management. More recently, it is working with Adlex, a US systems vendor that has developed extremely sophisticated tools for Internet business management (UserVisibility) that enables the user experience to be monitored right down at session level. The most obvious application is of course e-commerce and other websites, but it can work equally effectively with today’s VPNs for customer service, supply chain collaboration or staff teleworking. That whole area of monitoring the user Web experience is, in a real sense, completing the circle of IT service management in today’s business world. No single element of business stands alone, just as any piece of IT hardware or software is really only useful in direct proportion to how well it works with the total system. It is the total set of business processes, working on an ideally invisible infrastructure of electronic systems, that ensures success in real world terms of objectives, strategies — and profits.
12/09/2003
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