Q&A: HP Talks About APM - Part Three

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

In Part Three of APMdigest's exclusive interview, Shane Pearson, Vice President, Product Marketing for HP Software, discusses predictive analytics and its importance to APM.

Click here to start with Part One of APMdigest's interview with HP's Shane Pearson

Click here to start with Part Two of APMdigest's interview with HP's Shane Pearson

APM: Why is predictive analytics such a hot topic in APM right now?

SP: As software vendors in this space, we have all done a good job at collecting data. We can monitor just about everything. But, IT operators are overwhelmed with all the data being collected. What data is important? What data should they pay most attention to? How can they make the best decisions with all this data? And with Cloud, Mobility, and Virtualization, the complexity in managing data has skyrocketed.

IDC recently asserted that predictive analytics will go mainstream in 2012 within IT and here’s why: Operational complexity, virtualization and the need for “optimization tools that can quickly discover, filter, correlate, remediate, and ideally prevent performance and availability slowdowns, outages, and other service-interrupting incidents” are pointed to as reasons for the growth in predictive analytics. “IDC expects powerful performance management tools, based on sophisticated statistical analysis and modeling techniques, to emerge from niche status and become a recognized mainstream technology during the coming year.”

APM: In APMdigest's recent Q&A with Forrester's JP Garbani, he mentioned that HP has "recently made a lot of progress" in predictive analytics. What are the latest HP advancements in this area?

SP: In December of 2011, HP released a predictive analytics tool called Service Health Analyzer (SHA) which is a part of the Service Intelligence pillar within BSM family. SHA is a “Run-time” Predictive Analytics tool that provides organizations a more intelligent way to manage IT by analyzing abnormal service behavior and alerting IT managers of real service degradation before it impacts the business. Because it is built upon the Run-time Service Model, it can correlate the metrics that are behaving abnormally with the underlying topology. This information, along with advanced analytics and sophisticated algorithms, enables SHA to forecast future problems and prioritize those issues based upon business impact.

In addition, SHA analyzes historical data to automatically create real thresholds. It then combines hundreds of baseline breaches that are associated with a single service into one event. The event generated by SHA includes a list of the CIs involved in the anomaly, so you can take action to fix the problem before the service is impaired by automated event-to-ticket closure remediation.

With SHA, you can:

1. Anticipate real IT incidents ... before they occur

2. Prevent business impact

3. Remediate events by fusing analytics & automation

APM: Besides predictive analytics, are any other analytics needed to improve APM?

SP: The dynamic relationships in a complex IT environment mean that correlating and mapping physical, virtual and cloud-based elements is beyond the realm of human judgment and spreadsheets. It requires analytics to provide intelligence in order to power agility and cost savings.

While virtualization and cloud deliver more agility to business owners and the ability to scale capacity with changing demand, these technologies add a layer of complexity that makes managing the infrastructure much more difficult. You need to understand how changes impact your applications and services.

Having visibility and insight into the performance of your applications, and knowing how those applications or services are tied to the underlying infrastructure, is absolutely crucial in today’s ever-changing, virtualized data centers. When issues occur, you need to understand what happened, why it happened, and how to fix them. Better yet, you need to be proactive and forecast issues.

This is where analytics can help.

APM: What analytics solutions does HP offer?

SP: HP solves the issues inherent in a dynamic, virtual environment with its Service Intelligence portfolio. HP Service Intelligence uses the information gathered from the Run-time Service Model (RTSM) to understand what happened at the business service level, and then analyzes that data to create actionable intelligence. With HP’s Service Intelligence, you’ll have the analytics to help you 1) analyze the past, 2) optimize the present, and 3) anticipate the future.

The products that reside inside HP’s Service Intelligence portfolio provide IT executives and operation teams the ability to use real-time service topology stored in the RtSM in order to:

- Anticipate service issues, prevent impact, and remediate quickly (Service Health Analyzer)

- Visualize, optimize, and plan performance in virtualized and cloud environment (Service Health Optimizer)

- Understand issues from a services view by leveraging cross-domain reporting (Service Health Reporter)

- Align IT to the business by tracking SLAs, KPIs, and business health (Service Level Management)

Each of these products provides the analytics tool set to help you understand how the availability and performance of your applications are tied to the underlying availability and performance of your infrastructure. Having this visibility can simplify the complexities of managing your applications and overall business services.

Click here to read Part One of APMdigest's interview with HP's Shane Pearson

Click here to read Part Two of APMdigest's interview with HP's Shane Pearson

ABOUT Shane Pearson

Shane Pearson, Vice President, Product Marketing for HP Software, is a product marketing professional with experience as a general manager and technologist at startups and Fortune 500 companies. In his current role, Pearson is responsible for managing the Operations Management, Cloud and SaaS product portfolios.

Prior to his role at HP, Pearson was Sr. VP and GM of NetWeaver Product Group at SAP. During his tenure at SAP, he was responsible for managing the worldwide NetWeaver business group including working across business operations, marketing, product management, and development. Pearson was also previously VP of Products at Gnip, a real-time social media data delivery provider, where he coordinated product development, marketing and sales. Additionally, Pearson served in various product management and marketing roles at BEA Systems, a provider of enterprise application infrastructure solutions acquired by Oracle in 2008. He holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial management and a master’s degree in management with concentrations in marketing and finance.

Hot Topic
The Latest
The Latest 10

The Latest

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 24: Network Observability Tool Sprawl

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

Capacity Isn't a Guess: Observability-Driven Sizing for On-Prem Databases

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

5 Security Principles Every Entrepreneur Should Apply to Leadership

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...

Signs It May Be Time to Reassess Your IT Infrastructure Strategy

Many organizations assumed their infrastructure strategy was settled. It had been implemented, optimized and built into long-term plans. Recent changes in technology and vendor consolidation are forcing a second look. Cloud outages and licensing changes have exposed how much dependency exists on a small number of platforms. As a result, organizations are reevaluating whether those decisions still hold up under current conditions ...

Enterprise Edge AI Reaches Inflection Point

Edge AI is strategically embedded in core IT and infrastructure spending across industries, according to the 2026 Edge AI Survey from ZEDEDA. The research shows that 83% of C-suite and IT executive respondents say edge AI is important to their core business strategy ...

AI Is Hitting Operational Limits

As AI adoption accelerates, operational complexity — not model intelligence — is becoming the primary barrier to reliable AI at scale, according to the State of AI Engineering 2026 from Datadog ... The report highlights a compounding complexity challenge as AI systems scale ... Around 5% of AI model requests fail in production, with nearly 60% of those failures caused by capacity limits ...

Alert Fatigue Is No Longer a Morale Problem, It's a Reliability Risk and a System Failure

For years, production operations teams have treated alert fatigue as a quality-of-life problem: something that makes on-call rotations miserable but isn't considered a direct contributor to outages. That framing doesn't capture how these systems fail, and we now have data to show why. More importantly, it's now clear alert fatigue is a symptom of a deeper issue: production systems have outgrown the current operational approaches ...

Most Enterprises Think They Can Switch AI Vendors in a Month ... Most Who've Tried Couldn't

I was on a customer call last fall when an enterprise architect said something I haven't been able to shake. Her team had just spent four months trying to swap one AI vendor for another. The original plan said three weeks. "We didn't switch vendors," she told me. "We rebuilt half our integrations and discovered what we'd actually been depending on." Most enterprise leaders don't expect that to be the experience ...

Your Observability Stack Has a Telemetry Pipeline Problem

Ask any senior SRE or platform engineer what keeps them up at night, and the answer probably isn't the monitoring tool — it's the data feeding it. The proliferation of APM, observability, and AIOps platforms has created a telemetry sprawl problem that most teams manage reactively rather than architect proactively. Metrics are going to one platform. Traces routed somewhere else. Logs duplicated across multiple backends because nobody wants to be caught without them when something breaks. Every redundant stream costs money ...

Operator to Orchestrator: 80% of IT Pros See Shift in Role as AI Permeates Workflows

80% of respondents agree that the IT role is shifting from operators to orchestrators, according to the 2026 IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous IT from SolarWinds ...

Q&A: HP Talks About APM - Part Three

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

In Part Three of APMdigest's exclusive interview, Shane Pearson, Vice President, Product Marketing for HP Software, discusses predictive analytics and its importance to APM.

Click here to start with Part One of APMdigest's interview with HP's Shane Pearson

Click here to start with Part Two of APMdigest's interview with HP's Shane Pearson

APM: Why is predictive analytics such a hot topic in APM right now?

SP: As software vendors in this space, we have all done a good job at collecting data. We can monitor just about everything. But, IT operators are overwhelmed with all the data being collected. What data is important? What data should they pay most attention to? How can they make the best decisions with all this data? And with Cloud, Mobility, and Virtualization, the complexity in managing data has skyrocketed.

IDC recently asserted that predictive analytics will go mainstream in 2012 within IT and here’s why: Operational complexity, virtualization and the need for “optimization tools that can quickly discover, filter, correlate, remediate, and ideally prevent performance and availability slowdowns, outages, and other service-interrupting incidents” are pointed to as reasons for the growth in predictive analytics. “IDC expects powerful performance management tools, based on sophisticated statistical analysis and modeling techniques, to emerge from niche status and become a recognized mainstream technology during the coming year.”

APM: In APMdigest's recent Q&A with Forrester's JP Garbani, he mentioned that HP has "recently made a lot of progress" in predictive analytics. What are the latest HP advancements in this area?

SP: In December of 2011, HP released a predictive analytics tool called Service Health Analyzer (SHA) which is a part of the Service Intelligence pillar within BSM family. SHA is a “Run-time” Predictive Analytics tool that provides organizations a more intelligent way to manage IT by analyzing abnormal service behavior and alerting IT managers of real service degradation before it impacts the business. Because it is built upon the Run-time Service Model, it can correlate the metrics that are behaving abnormally with the underlying topology. This information, along with advanced analytics and sophisticated algorithms, enables SHA to forecast future problems and prioritize those issues based upon business impact.

In addition, SHA analyzes historical data to automatically create real thresholds. It then combines hundreds of baseline breaches that are associated with a single service into one event. The event generated by SHA includes a list of the CIs involved in the anomaly, so you can take action to fix the problem before the service is impaired by automated event-to-ticket closure remediation.

With SHA, you can:

1. Anticipate real IT incidents ... before they occur

2. Prevent business impact

3. Remediate events by fusing analytics & automation

APM: Besides predictive analytics, are any other analytics needed to improve APM?

SP: The dynamic relationships in a complex IT environment mean that correlating and mapping physical, virtual and cloud-based elements is beyond the realm of human judgment and spreadsheets. It requires analytics to provide intelligence in order to power agility and cost savings.

While virtualization and cloud deliver more agility to business owners and the ability to scale capacity with changing demand, these technologies add a layer of complexity that makes managing the infrastructure much more difficult. You need to understand how changes impact your applications and services.

Having visibility and insight into the performance of your applications, and knowing how those applications or services are tied to the underlying infrastructure, is absolutely crucial in today’s ever-changing, virtualized data centers. When issues occur, you need to understand what happened, why it happened, and how to fix them. Better yet, you need to be proactive and forecast issues.

This is where analytics can help.

APM: What analytics solutions does HP offer?

SP: HP solves the issues inherent in a dynamic, virtual environment with its Service Intelligence portfolio. HP Service Intelligence uses the information gathered from the Run-time Service Model (RTSM) to understand what happened at the business service level, and then analyzes that data to create actionable intelligence. With HP’s Service Intelligence, you’ll have the analytics to help you 1) analyze the past, 2) optimize the present, and 3) anticipate the future.

The products that reside inside HP’s Service Intelligence portfolio provide IT executives and operation teams the ability to use real-time service topology stored in the RtSM in order to:

- Anticipate service issues, prevent impact, and remediate quickly (Service Health Analyzer)

- Visualize, optimize, and plan performance in virtualized and cloud environment (Service Health Optimizer)

- Understand issues from a services view by leveraging cross-domain reporting (Service Health Reporter)

- Align IT to the business by tracking SLAs, KPIs, and business health (Service Level Management)

Each of these products provides the analytics tool set to help you understand how the availability and performance of your applications are tied to the underlying availability and performance of your infrastructure. Having this visibility can simplify the complexities of managing your applications and overall business services.

Click here to read Part One of APMdigest's interview with HP's Shane Pearson

Click here to read Part Two of APMdigest's interview with HP's Shane Pearson

ABOUT Shane Pearson

Shane Pearson, Vice President, Product Marketing for HP Software, is a product marketing professional with experience as a general manager and technologist at startups and Fortune 500 companies. In his current role, Pearson is responsible for managing the Operations Management, Cloud and SaaS product portfolios.

Prior to his role at HP, Pearson was Sr. VP and GM of NetWeaver Product Group at SAP. During his tenure at SAP, he was responsible for managing the worldwide NetWeaver business group including working across business operations, marketing, product management, and development. Pearson was also previously VP of Products at Gnip, a real-time social media data delivery provider, where he coordinated product development, marketing and sales. Additionally, Pearson served in various product management and marketing roles at BEA Systems, a provider of enterprise application infrastructure solutions acquired by Oracle in 2008. He holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial management and a master’s degree in management with concentrations in marketing and finance.

Hot Topic
The Latest
The Latest 10

The Latest

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 24: Network Observability Tool Sprawl

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

Capacity Isn't a Guess: Observability-Driven Sizing for On-Prem Databases

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

5 Security Principles Every Entrepreneur Should Apply to Leadership

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...

Signs It May Be Time to Reassess Your IT Infrastructure Strategy

Many organizations assumed their infrastructure strategy was settled. It had been implemented, optimized and built into long-term plans. Recent changes in technology and vendor consolidation are forcing a second look. Cloud outages and licensing changes have exposed how much dependency exists on a small number of platforms. As a result, organizations are reevaluating whether those decisions still hold up under current conditions ...

Enterprise Edge AI Reaches Inflection Point

Edge AI is strategically embedded in core IT and infrastructure spending across industries, according to the 2026 Edge AI Survey from ZEDEDA. The research shows that 83% of C-suite and IT executive respondents say edge AI is important to their core business strategy ...

AI Is Hitting Operational Limits

As AI adoption accelerates, operational complexity — not model intelligence — is becoming the primary barrier to reliable AI at scale, according to the State of AI Engineering 2026 from Datadog ... The report highlights a compounding complexity challenge as AI systems scale ... Around 5% of AI model requests fail in production, with nearly 60% of those failures caused by capacity limits ...

Alert Fatigue Is No Longer a Morale Problem, It's a Reliability Risk and a System Failure

For years, production operations teams have treated alert fatigue as a quality-of-life problem: something that makes on-call rotations miserable but isn't considered a direct contributor to outages. That framing doesn't capture how these systems fail, and we now have data to show why. More importantly, it's now clear alert fatigue is a symptom of a deeper issue: production systems have outgrown the current operational approaches ...

Most Enterprises Think They Can Switch AI Vendors in a Month ... Most Who've Tried Couldn't

I was on a customer call last fall when an enterprise architect said something I haven't been able to shake. Her team had just spent four months trying to swap one AI vendor for another. The original plan said three weeks. "We didn't switch vendors," she told me. "We rebuilt half our integrations and discovered what we'd actually been depending on." Most enterprise leaders don't expect that to be the experience ...

Your Observability Stack Has a Telemetry Pipeline Problem

Ask any senior SRE or platform engineer what keeps them up at night, and the answer probably isn't the monitoring tool — it's the data feeding it. The proliferation of APM, observability, and AIOps platforms has created a telemetry sprawl problem that most teams manage reactively rather than architect proactively. Metrics are going to one platform. Traces routed somewhere else. Logs duplicated across multiple backends because nobody wants to be caught without them when something breaks. Every redundant stream costs money ...

Operator to Orchestrator: 80% of IT Pros See Shift in Role as AI Permeates Workflows

80% of respondents agree that the IT role is shifting from operators to orchestrators, according to the 2026 IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous IT from SolarWinds ...