Enterprise Reporting - Its role in today's evolving data centers

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Introduction

Enterprise reporting involves collecting data from multiple domain sources, with potentially different logical models to produce a human readable report. The granularity and latency of data collection and time horizon of the stored data are critical elements in the choice of the reporting solution. This depends on the use-case for which the reports are to be used.

Evolution of Enterprise Reporting in the Data Center

Enterprise reporting has had a long and interesting evolution to meet the needs of the team that manages the data center. Early on, domain specific tools were required to understand, analyze and triage data center incidents to provide service assurance. With the recognition dawning that the IT services are crucial to supporting the business, new functionality was expected from the reporting solutions. These new requirements stemmed from the changing perception (and reality) of IT's value to business, and changes in the technology and newer capabilities of the hardware and software from the vendors.  Not coincidentally, we saw the elevation of the CIO's role from being simply being a provider of services to a person that is key to business success.

As IT teams move along the maturity curve, the focus moves from simple service assurance activities, such as triaging, troubleshooting and diagnosis to continuous service improvement activities such as planning, optimization and forecasting. Our customers agree that for a true continuous service improvement, an understanding of the environment is crucial. Any visualization attempted by the reporting tool must seek to further that comprehension.  Thus, enterprise reporting is a fundamental part of the larger movement towards improved service and business intelligence and optimization.

HP Business Service Management (BSM) essentially works on the fundamental notion that all IT infrastructure essentially exists to further the business' goals. The data center management team must have knowledge and visibility into what business service(s) are impacted and how the infrastructure elements impact it. Absence of this data leads to a less than optimal management framework - from prioritization of events to knowing where to allocate the limited budget for upgrades.

It is therefore very critical to have a tool that is capable of bringing in the details of all the domains in the data center - such as systems, enterprise applications, database, etc . - and bring it all together in the context of the business services that they support. Going forward, if an enterprise does not bring in this context, it will not be considered an industry leading solution. Bringing business intelligence into the data center is the next step forward in the management and monitoring of data centers.

HP Service Health Reporter is built on this notion. With its long term data store and its highly capable aggregation engine, the Service Health Reporter plays a crucial role in furthering your understanding of the trends in your data center. It bases this on the performance data collected by your current HP monitoring and management solutions, leading to a very quick time to value.