Managing Business Service Performance in Complex Distributed Environments

Managing Business Service
Performance in Complex
Distributed Environments
®An ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES (EMAT) White Paper Prepared for ASG Software Solutions May 2008
IT Management Research, Industry Analysis, and ConsultingManaging Business Service Performance
in Complex Distributed Environments
Table of Contents
Executive Summary..................................................................................................................................................... 1
Introduction.................................................................................................................................................................. 1
Managing Business Service Performance................................................................................................................ 2Performance Management in a Complex Distributed Service Environment............................................. 3Detection............................................................................................................................................................ 4Prevention........................................................................................................................................................... 4Resolution........................................................................................................................................................... 4
Choosing a Performance Management Solution................................................................................................... 4Achieving Results with Performance Management......................................................................................... 6
ASG and Performance Management....................................................................................................................... 6
EMA Perspective.......................................................................................................................................................... 9
About ASG..................................................................................................................................................................10
©2008 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. IT Management Research, Industry Analysis, and ConsultingManaging Business Service Performance
in Complex Distributed Environments
Executive SummaryBusinesses increasingly rely on IT to support internal operations and to deliver prod-ucts and services to their customers. However, instead of the traditional IT focus on technology, leading IT organizations now concentrate on delivering value through IT services. End users directly interact with these services, whether simple e-mail services or complex financial applications, rather than the underlying technologies that support those services.With the intention of lowering costs and speeding delivery of IT services, IT organiza-tions continually seek and adopt newer technology, including service oriented architec-tures (SOAs) and virtualization. However, the complexity of new technologies can also create IT management challenges including performance and availability problems, ser-vice downtime, security exposures, productivity losses, and drastically rising operational costs.In order to provide high quality, cost effective business services in complex, distributed environments, improved IT management strategies are required. Business service man-agement (BSM) is a strategic approach to managing IT services in support of improved business performance. Building performance management solutions around BSM helps IT maintain agility and deliver high levels of business service performance.Sound performance management solutions address the detection, prevention and resolu-tion of issues broadly across end-to-end services and deeply within technologies includ-ing operating systems, applications, databases, middleware, and servers. Additional capa-bilities may include end-user experience monitoring, service level management (SLM), trend analysis, integration with existing tools and repositories, single interface, pre-packaged reports, and dynamic, real-time dashboards.
Increased reliance on IT has been Proper tool selection can have a positive impact on IT productivity accompanied by greater technical and ef... [download for more]