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BSM and the Art of Discovery

Monitoring, Management and BSM: Discovery and Automation

Successfully implementing BSM in the daily operations of a data center brings into play a multitude of skills, tools, processes and personalities. Boundaries, responsibilities, authorities and accountabilities must be identified, negotiated and exercised in a complex, dynamic series of interactions. Properly done, the result will be a smooth, consistent and near problem-free operations environment where the goals of both IT and business partners are achieved with a minimum of effort.

OOPS! Someone has lost touch with the real world while chasing unicorns. The reality is that a successful implementation is merely the first step. Today’s data center and business service operations and delivery environments are, and will continue to be, highly dynamic. They require active, intelligent and increasingly automated oversight and control of available assets (including infrastructure, processes, etc.) for reliable service delivery.

Doing this requires active monitoring and management of the infrastructure, assets and processes involved in and impacting the delivery of a service. To assure reliable delivery at the level that meets business needs, services must be monitored and data made available to various business and operations staff.

The needed data includes:

- Performance and availability of the service

- The assets used by a service and their impact on service delivery

- Other assets in the environment – in-use/idle/available configurations and capabilities (bandwidth, size, speeds, etc.)

- Who/which service is using these assets

- What services assets can support

- Interdependencies between services

- The impact of re-assignment or change (priority to business, value received, cost of change, etc.)

Information based on this data must be available in a quickly comprehensible format to a wide list of consumers. This list will include operations staff, administration staff, service managers, line-of-business managers, as well as executives who want assurance that service SLAs are being met.

Getting accurate and timely data about the infrastructure and processes involved in service delivery doesn’t happen automatically. You need to assure that your monitoring solution will discover and report on process and infrastructure changes that will impact specific services. Typically, this involves building a model of the assets, infrastructure and processes used in service delivery and definition of dependencies.

Business requires change and adaptation to attract, service, and maintain customer (or user) satisfaction. New services must be developed and delivered. Infrastructure (both virtual and physical) will be altered, reassigned, and reconfigured as it adapts to evolving environmental, operational and business needs. Today’s highly dynamic data center operations will rapidly make a static model outdated and useless.

What is required is a monitoring solution with automated capabilities to build on and update the basic modeling engine. It must automatically discover and be able to integrate changes in these processes and infrastructure. It must be able to inform when such changes will affect service delivery.

Typically, infrastructure elements are part of the delivery of multiple, different services. Such elements can be manipulated by staff that are unaware of or don’t care about the impact on other services when changes are made. For example, one can imagine an infrastructure change that optimizes a delivery path for Service A under stress conditions. Service B shares infrastructure elements with Service A. The changes don’t normally affect B’s delivery, but will disrupt Service B when invoked. It is also possible to make changes that will benefit Service B (i.e. provide a redundant service path), but mask a failure in Service B primary resources. Only intelligent monitoring with an ability to create correlated service-oriented infrastructure views will provide the holistic visibility into infrastructure utilization needed to avoid such potential issues.

BSM requires dynamic, intelligent asset management able to provide a range of IT and business views that accurately represent service delivery and the operational environment (virtual and physical) that enables delivery. A critical element supporting that management is a monitoring solution that can automatically discover and dynamically adjust to changes in assets and infrastructure. And, that can detect and report on changes in shared assets that may affect service delivery.

About Rich Ptak

Rich Ptak, Managing Partner at Ptak, Noel & Associates LLC. has over 30 years experience in systems product management, working closely with Fortune 50 companies in developing product direction and strategies at a global level. Previously Ptak held positions as Senior Vice President at Hurwitz Group and D.H. Brown Associates. Earlier in his career he held engineering and marketing management positions with Western Electric’s Electronic Switch Manufacturing Division and Digital Equipment Corporation. He is frequently quoted in major business and trade press. Ptak holds a master’s in business administration from the University of Chicago and a master of science in engineering from Kansas State University.

Related Links:

www.ptaknoel.com

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BSM and the Art of Discovery

Monitoring, Management and BSM: Discovery and Automation

Successfully implementing BSM in the daily operations of a data center brings into play a multitude of skills, tools, processes and personalities. Boundaries, responsibilities, authorities and accountabilities must be identified, negotiated and exercised in a complex, dynamic series of interactions. Properly done, the result will be a smooth, consistent and near problem-free operations environment where the goals of both IT and business partners are achieved with a minimum of effort.

OOPS! Someone has lost touch with the real world while chasing unicorns. The reality is that a successful implementation is merely the first step. Today’s data center and business service operations and delivery environments are, and will continue to be, highly dynamic. They require active, intelligent and increasingly automated oversight and control of available assets (including infrastructure, processes, etc.) for reliable service delivery.

Doing this requires active monitoring and management of the infrastructure, assets and processes involved in and impacting the delivery of a service. To assure reliable delivery at the level that meets business needs, services must be monitored and data made available to various business and operations staff.

The needed data includes:

- Performance and availability of the service

- The assets used by a service and their impact on service delivery

- Other assets in the environment – in-use/idle/available configurations and capabilities (bandwidth, size, speeds, etc.)

- Who/which service is using these assets

- What services assets can support

- Interdependencies between services

- The impact of re-assignment or change (priority to business, value received, cost of change, etc.)

Information based on this data must be available in a quickly comprehensible format to a wide list of consumers. This list will include operations staff, administration staff, service managers, line-of-business managers, as well as executives who want assurance that service SLAs are being met.

Getting accurate and timely data about the infrastructure and processes involved in service delivery doesn’t happen automatically. You need to assure that your monitoring solution will discover and report on process and infrastructure changes that will impact specific services. Typically, this involves building a model of the assets, infrastructure and processes used in service delivery and definition of dependencies.

Business requires change and adaptation to attract, service, and maintain customer (or user) satisfaction. New services must be developed and delivered. Infrastructure (both virtual and physical) will be altered, reassigned, and reconfigured as it adapts to evolving environmental, operational and business needs. Today’s highly dynamic data center operations will rapidly make a static model outdated and useless.

What is required is a monitoring solution with automated capabilities to build on and update the basic modeling engine. It must automatically discover and be able to integrate changes in these processes and infrastructure. It must be able to inform when such changes will affect service delivery.

Typically, infrastructure elements are part of the delivery of multiple, different services. Such elements can be manipulated by staff that are unaware of or don’t care about the impact on other services when changes are made. For example, one can imagine an infrastructure change that optimizes a delivery path for Service A under stress conditions. Service B shares infrastructure elements with Service A. The changes don’t normally affect B’s delivery, but will disrupt Service B when invoked. It is also possible to make changes that will benefit Service B (i.e. provide a redundant service path), but mask a failure in Service B primary resources. Only intelligent monitoring with an ability to create correlated service-oriented infrastructure views will provide the holistic visibility into infrastructure utilization needed to avoid such potential issues.

BSM requires dynamic, intelligent asset management able to provide a range of IT and business views that accurately represent service delivery and the operational environment (virtual and physical) that enables delivery. A critical element supporting that management is a monitoring solution that can automatically discover and dynamically adjust to changes in assets and infrastructure. And, that can detect and report on changes in shared assets that may affect service delivery.

About Rich Ptak

Rich Ptak, Managing Partner at Ptak, Noel & Associates LLC. has over 30 years experience in systems product management, working closely with Fortune 50 companies in developing product direction and strategies at a global level. Previously Ptak held positions as Senior Vice President at Hurwitz Group and D.H. Brown Associates. Earlier in his career he held engineering and marketing management positions with Western Electric’s Electronic Switch Manufacturing Division and Digital Equipment Corporation. He is frequently quoted in major business and trade press. Ptak holds a master’s in business administration from the University of Chicago and a master of science in engineering from Kansas State University.

Related Links:

www.ptaknoel.com

Hot Topics

The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

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Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...