See only what you need to see when monitoring the health of your business services

[#1]

A guest post from Izik Golan, one of our R&D engineers, on how to leverage the newly introduced Local Impact Views within BSM..

- Sonja

One of the new features introduced in BSM 9 is the Local Impact View, which enables you to define views with varying underlying calculations.  In other words,a different calculation for each view you or others create. If you want to exclude several CIs from the calculation or change the way calculation is performed, but you don’t want to impact other users’ calculations, you will find this article useful.

If you remember, there was a blog post back in July 2011 about a guy named John - a BSM administrator, who learned how to easily configure Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Let's learn more about John and the frustration he experiences when viewing a certain Business Transaction Flow (BTF) - frustration that originally costs him a lot of time and energy, but now with Local Impact Views, enables him to be much more efficient at what he does.

To refresh your memory, John knows how to create Health Indicators (HIs) and KPIs in BSM. In order to see the CIs representing the business' IT infrastructure, John used the Modeling Studio  capabilities of BSM to create views specific to his needs - views he sees using Top View which shows the CIs relevant to him.    A quick look reveals something strange. The Simple Order Business Transaction Flow (BTF) relies on the Application Availability KPI, which is propagated from its Business Transaction (BT) CIs, and this KPI is calculated using the Worst Status Rule. The problem is that all its transactions have this KPI with status OK - so why does the Simple Order CI have it with the status Critical?  (see the following figure)

The reason is that the view shows John only a part of the world. There are other BTs linked to the Simple Order BTF that impact the status calculation (resulting in this KPI having a status of Critical), but they are not included in the view.  When John created that view, he only chose what to see, but not the underlying calculations.

John then changes the view definition, so that now he can see the complete picture, as indicated in the following figure:

 

Now he understands why the KPI is in Critical status: the Provisioning Approved CI has the KPI with Critical status.

This is a great explanation, but it doesn't help John. The provisioning system has a different administrator and John wants to ignore problems in provisioning. Unfortunately, deleting the Provisioning transactions is not an option since they are required for other users. In order to achieve what he wants John needs to create a Local Impact View (LIV).

How?

First he needs to create a new view: a Local Impact View. In order to do this, John uses the View Builder tab under Service Health Administration. Here you can build views the same way you build them in the Modeling Studio; giving the view a name, and saving it under the “Local impact views” folder. In John's case, he already has a view that shows what he wants, so all he has to do in the View Builder is right-click the view and select “Save as local impact view”, as show in the following figure:

Once John creates a LIV (local impact view), it is calculated separately from the other views: only CIs that are included in the LIV will impact the calculation. In this way, John can have the Simple Order CI calculate its status based on the BTs he wants, and ignore the provisioning transactions. Looking at John's Local Impact View now, you can see that the Simple Order CI is calculated based on the 4 transactions he sees, while ignoring the provisioning transactions.

In summary, by utilizing the Local Impact View, you can save yourself a lot of time, energy, and heartache by simply creating views with applicable underlying calculations specific to your role in the organization - with the ultimate goal being greater efficiency when it comes to Incident and Problem Management. 

To note is that within a LIV, you can also add HIs and KPIs, or change the way they are calculated (rule, thresholds, etc).

For further information refer to the BSM documentation on "Using Service Health".

Thanks for reading this post and thanks to Izik Golan for contributing the content.  I'm sure we'll be seeing a lot more from Izik and his team on this blog, so stay tuned!!!

Sonja Hickey