Building on BSM with an IT Performance System
June 22, 2011

Michael Procopio
Micro Focus

Share this

For a VP of operations, the cloud, virtualization and mobile communications are making BSM harder than ever. Unfortunately your business customers don’t care. They just want your services to work when, where and how they want them. And they don’t want them to cost too much either.

But here’s the issue: while effective, the tried and true approach to BSM—focusing on monitoring and measuring end-user experience—doesn’t provide the type of insight that a VP of operations needs. Today’s IT environment is just too complex. You need higher-level insights that are possible with an IT performance system.

The Solution: Make BSM the Foundation of an IT Performance System

IT performance systems help tame IT complexity and allow you to stay true to your BSM objectives. They can offer comprehensive, real-time visibility into everything underpinning your business services. You can monitor not only the end-user experience (BSM), but the entire IT environment impacting and surrounding that service. That includes your network, infrastructure, applications and all network-edge devices—computers, smart phones, tablets, etc.

Building on your BSM capabilities with an IT performance system allows you to gain broader and deeper insights into your organization’s performance. For example, do you know which service has the most emergency RFCs? Or, which service costs you the most in the number of IT staff to support? These insights can help you work on IT as opposed to just in IT, proving your value to the business. An IT performance system gives IT leaders a method for systematically managing IT, while also providing the means to demonstrate IT’s value and contribution to the business. To be more specific, imagine an automated, dashboard-driven system that monitors your entire IT environment and provides real-time performance reports in the form of key performance indicators (KPIs).

You Can’t Manage What You Can’t Measure

Accurate, timely and meaningful KPIs are critical to making a performance system work. Without them there’s no way to measure how your organization is performing. From an IT leader’s perspective, this means understanding the overall health of an IT organization, revealed through KPIs like:

- cost reduction
- operations versus innovation investment
- business strategy alignment
- customer satisfaction
- percent of SLAs not met
- percent of “healthy” versus “unhealthy” projects
- average cost of IT service per customer

Key Capabilities in an IT Performance System

In order for an IT performance system to complement your current BSM efforts, it’s important that it have the right mix of core capabilities.

Comprehensive—an IT performance system needs to monitor and measure your entire IT environment, from the data center and network to your applications and mobile devices. And that includes all service-delivery models—on-premise, cloud and hybrid.

Digital and automated—to use performance information (KPIs) effectively, you need the ability to access and understand that information quickly. You can’t do that with manually-created reports in spreadsheets. Your system needs to be automated and digital.

Real time— to maintain business service quality and reliability, you must be able to prevent problems before they occur. So Like BSM, an IT performance system needs to be real-time. You need to know how your systems are performing at any given moment.

Michael Procopio is Senior Product Marketing Manager at Micro Focus
Share this

The Latest

May 25, 2023

Developers need a tool that can be portable and vendor agnostic, given the advent of microservices. It may be clear an issue is occurring; what may not be clear is if it's part of a distributed system or the app itself. Enter OpenTelemetry, commonly referred to as OTel, an open-source framework that provides a standardized way of collecting and exporting telemetry data (logs, metrics, and traces) from cloud-native software ...

May 24, 2023

As SLOs grow in popularity their usage is becoming more mature. For example, 82% of respondents intend to increase their use of SLOs, and 96% have mapped SLOs directly to their business operations or already have a plan to, according to The State of Service Level Objectives 2023 from Nobl9 ...

May 23, 2023

Observability has matured beyond its early adopter position and is now foundational for modern enterprises to achieve full visibility into today's complex technology environments, according to The State of Observability 2023, a report released by Splunk in collaboration with Enterprise Strategy Group ...

May 22, 2023

Before network engineers even begin the automation process, they tend to start with preconceived notions that oftentimes, if acted upon, can hinder the process. To prevent that from happening, it's important to identify and dispel a few common misconceptions currently out there and how networking teams can overcome them. So, let's address the three most common network automation myths ...

May 18, 2023

Many IT organizations apply AI/ML and AIOps technology across domains, correlating insights from the various layers of IT infrastructure and operations. However, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) has observed significant interest in applying these AI technologies narrowly to network management, according to a new research report, titled AI-Driven Networks: Leveling Up Network Management with AI/ML and AIOps ...

May 17, 2023

When it comes to system outages, AIOps solutions with the right foundation can help reduce the blame game so the right teams can spend valuable time restoring the impacted services rather than improving their MTTI score (mean time to innocence). In fact, much of today's innovation around ChatGPT-style algorithms can be used to significantly improve the triage process and user experience ...

May 16, 2023

Gartner identified the top 10 data and analytics (D&A) trends for 2023 that can guide D&A leaders to create new sources of value by anticipating change and transforming extreme uncertainty into new business opportunities ...

May 15, 2023

The only way for companies to stay competitive is to modernize applications, yet there's no denying that bringing apps into the modern era can be challenging ... Let's look at a few ways to modernize applications and consider what new obstacles and opportunities 2023 presents ...

May 11, 2023
Applications can be subjected to high traffic on certain days, which, if not taken into account, can lead to unpredictable outcomes and customer dissatisfaction. These may include slow loading speeds, downtime, and unpredictable outcomes, among others ... Hence, applications must be tested for load thresholds to improve performance. Businesses that ignore load performance testing and fail to continually scale these applications leave themselves open to service outages, customer dissatisfaction, and monetary losses ...
May 10, 2023

As online penetration grows, retailers' profits are shrinking — with the cost of serving customers anytime, anywhere, at any speed not bringing in enough topline growth to best monetize even existing investments in technology, systems, infrastructure, and people, let alone new investments, according to Digital-First Retail: Turning Profit Destruction into Customer and Shareholder Value, a new report from AlixPartners and World Retail Congress ...