Why Cross-Domain Reporting is Essential

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In today's complex and everchanging IT landscaping, reporting accross IT has become difficult, to say the least.  In this blog post, guest author Suresh Venkataraman, HP Product Manager, discusses how HP Service Health Reporter eliminates the diffuculty and challenges of enterprise reporting

Contributed by Suresh Venkataraman

The various domain areas such as systems, enterprise applications, databases, mail servers, etc. in a datacenter are often managed by domain-specific teams.  In a silo-ed operations environment, this is complicated further by the different teams working in with their own domain-specific tools, referring to the same infrastructure elements by different identifiers etc. This eventually leads to incongruent versions of the performance of the business services supported by the data center. 

Reporting solutions that ship with the domain managers do not close this gap. Often, there are heated arguments around the performance metrics generated by two different tools, leaving the senior management helpless as to how to reconcile the differences.

Needless to say, reporting on the performance of data centers has become very complex. 

The current challenges of reporting on today's data center can be summarized as follows -

• No consistent reporting across complex infrastructures - If your data center has evolved over time, different teams use silo-ed reporting solutions from various vendors, and while they provide good visibility into targeted IT technology domain, they are not ideal extending to reporting across all domains.  Additionally, there is the cost associated with acquiring experts to customize beyond the out of the box reports.   What is needed? Cross domain data collection, consolidation and reporting on a single pane of glass.

•  IT service performance must be visible to the Business - Most reporting solutions are unable to provide the relationship of the measurement source to the other IT components. Therefore, it becomes virtually impossible to even identify, let alone analyze, how infrastructure performance impacts business service performance. Without significant on-the-job-expertise, it becomes difficult to make the necessary correlation among reports from various sources, and to use reports to improve business service performance. What is needed?  An ability to tie the performance of the IT infrastructure to the performance of the business service.

• Challenges due to changing technologies - Flexible infrastructures such as VMs, XaaS and cloud services introduce additional challenges. Additionally, they generate new areas and requirements for optimization.   What is needed? In addition to understanding the relationships between the business services and the infrastructure domain, reporting products must adapt to report on the dynamic nature of the virtual environments where resources supporting a business application may change throughout the day.

• Flexibility - Finally, it has to be recognized that no matter how good the reporting solution, the out-of-the-box reports can only capture the use-cases for a subset of the wide variety of scenarios found in the customer environments. What is needed?  Customizability and flexibility are key in a good reporting solution. 

HP Service Health Reporter: a cross BSM domain reporting solution

HP Service Health Reporter (SHR) is a cross Business Service Management (BSM) cross-domain reporting solution.  With BSM 9, HP provides the industry leading tops-down, bottoms-up and cross-domain event and performance monitoring and data collection.

SHR provides a holistic, single-pane-of-glass view into cross-BSM-domain availability and performance data. The product ships a variety of collectors to pick up data from various BSM domains.  The reports in SHR relate to metrics gathered from EUM (BPM, RUM), application metrics generated by the application Smart Plug-ins (SPIs), physical and virtual server metrics (from the Operations/Performance Agents or Sitescope), and OM event data. SHR excels in generating dynamic cross-domain reports and provides the capability to drill down into specific domain areas. 

The reporting is guided by the topology information in either the Run-time Service Model (RTSM) or OM node groups. Because of this, the user is able to relate End User experience measures to the underlying applications and server metrics even in dynamic virtual environments.

SHR ships extensive out of the box reports that delivers fast time to value. By choosing SAP BO as the reporting framework, SHR's reports can be customized without expert intervention.

 

The reports are powered by a data-warehouse quality metric repository. Aggregation algorithms are run automatically on the data to facilitate SHR to serve up reports for varying time frames. For example, the user could pull up daily reports on a system's performance and can drill up to see monthly reports or even yearly performance data.

For more product documentation on Service Health Reporter, see the datasheet, or visit www.hp.com/go/shr.