Next week, we’ll be hosting a live webcast on how predictive analytics empowers application support teams by enabling them to avoid costly service interruptions.  As IT moves down the path of managing application in the cloud and deploying new business services for mobile devices, it is critical to use monitoring to understand your end-user’s experience.   Even better, you need to be alerted to potential issues before they even occur.

Join us on May 10th as we talk about the new HP BSM software solutions that can help you monitor your cloud and mobile applications, as well as provide predictive analytics that will notify you of potential problems so you can remediate them before your users are impacted.

 Register for the Predictive Analytics to Manage Cloud/Mobile Application today!

System health is not just about performance and availability, but security as well.  In other words, security cannot be ignored when monitoring the IT environment.  Nor can operating performance be disregarded when the security team is working to mitigate risk and compliance violations.  Want to participate in a dedicated session to define the linkages between security and operations?  Sign up today and join the SecOps discussion group at HP Discover.

I'm happy to announce that we have made the BSM Connector for IBM Tivoli available. This includes integration for Tivoli Enterprise Console and Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus.  Here is more detail about the integration…

More and more customers are implementing Configuration Manager in order to save time on configuration audits, identify servers with nonstandard configurations, monitor undesired changes to their applications and systems, and report on configuration policy breaches.  The latest release of HP UCMDB Configuration Manager (version 9.31) aligns with these needs and focusses on improving the configuration management process and information sharing with particular attention paid to enhancing other IT management processes such as change management and incident management.

Hi everyone, this is Rafal Los (some may know me as "Wh1t3Rabbit") from the "Following the Wh1t3 Rabbit" blog where I talk about all manner of things security.  You may be asking yourself what I'm doing posting here on this fantastic BSM blog ... well just as the title says I'm here to talk about hackers and how you can defend yourself smarter.

As companies seek to gain speed, agility, and cost savings out of their virtualization initiatives, trying to improve the utilization of their resources can be a difficult task.  IT organizations need analytic capabilities to help them optimize their virtualized environments and to help them make intelligence decisions when it comes to capacity planning for the future.  Guest blogger Shiva Prakash from HP’s Service Intelligence R&D team explains some of the tips and tricks for making optimization an easier task.

One Size Does Not Fit All

You’re about to deploy BSM for the first time, or upgrade your BAC\BSM environment. What hardware do you need for this deployment?  How can you make sure that your specific BSM deployment is tailored for your needs both in terms of functionality and capacity?

Mobile device capabilities are constantly growing – leveraging more and more information as well as new and enhanced tools – all to make our daily lives easier.  Most likely, your company has a browser-based application (or two!) that you hope your customers are using – regardless if your business model is B2C or B2B.  Question: Are you monitoring that application?  How do you know your customers are lost, dazed, confused – perhaps frustrated – when trying to use your application?  Read this post – the first of a series – and learn how to quickly and easily start monitoring those web-based applications … and realize the full benefit of your application development efforts!

Read this technical post to learn how to easily monitor MQ communications.  HP Real User Monitor (RUM) offers "out-of-the-box" capabilities, which means you don't spend time setting up or configuring a monitoring solution for MQ.  Don’t want the overhead or “intrusiveness” that typically comes with monitoring message-based middleware software?  Then HP RUM (Real User Monitor) is your answer! 

Learn how Service Health Analyzer (SHA) can detect anomalies within 24 hours of installation!

This post (the first a series of articles that will be written by the SHA R&D team) discusses a technique that can drive a baseline calculation sooner.  In the first few hours after installation, the required configuration will enable you to see some anomalies, based on availability problems, and towards the end of the first 24 hours, anomalies will be based also on their normal behavior characteristics: the baseline sleeve. 

This post is written by Shahar Tal from the SHA R&D team.

This is the 2nd blog in a 3 part blog series which addresses best practices for troubleshooting Java Memory Leaks.  In the first blog titled "Plugging the leaks: best practices fro troubleshooting Java Memory Leaks" Piotr talked about understanding Java Memory leaks and the challenges with diagnosing and fixing Java Memory Leaks. 

In this 2nd blog Piotr will go into some details around  some of the traditional troubleshooting approaches used today to diagnose Java Memory Leaks.

The HP Operations Smart Plug-ins for Infrastructure 2.0 was released in June of this year and it brings a wide range of new features to provide comprehensive monitoring of your IT Infrastructure. Infrastructure SPI version 2.00 has also released monitoring of hardware with this release. This blog provides, compliments of Sanjay Chaudhary, provides an introduction to HP Proliant hardware monitoring with Infrastructure SPIs.

I want to show you some of the charts that were captured in the TechValidate research study around HP Application Performance Management.

This first chart highlights some of the pain points experienced by these customers before adopting APM. 

HP Application Performance Management Customer’s discuss their results!

 - “Improve MTTR by 90%”

 - “Labor cost for incident management dropping 98.2%”

 - “Reduces problem isolation efforts from, literally, days to minutes”

 - “Finally given us visibility into the health of our applications”

 And that is just the beginning...

In March 2011, we released version 9.02 of HP TransactionVision (TV).  There were a number of impressive features that came out in this release.  I’d like to spend some time describing one feature in particular – the ability to monitor transactions that traverse through IBM WebSphere DataPower Appliances in SOA environments.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced this week new capabilities for CloudWatch, allowing custom metrics to be reported into the CloudWatch monitoring service.  The recently released HP SiteScope version (11.10) has out of the box support for integrating with Amazon CloudWatch.

Last year, we launched a new mobile monitoring feature of HP Business Service Management that allowed owners the ability to manage the availability and performance of business-critical applications using their iPhone or iPad devices. 

Should we place this feature on more mobile devices?  Are you using the mobile feature today?  Is using your mobile device to be alerted of issues of interested to you?  Please give us your feedback on how we should expand this mobile support for BSM by filling out a quick 10 minute survey.

We've had a great turn out in the two cities we've hit so far, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive.  See the images from the APM test drive events and register to attend one of the remaining four events.

HP Business Process Monitor 9.02 is now generally available.  Don't be fooled by the version number there are many new changes added to this release.

Hello everyone.  For those of you in the UK, there is a fantastic HP BSM Customer Special Interest Group event taking place in London on March 9th. 

The IT trends such as cloud and virtualization, and the need for end-to-end perspective across key business services, have placed Business Service Management at center stage.  How are the latest developments addressing these trends, and how are best practices developing?

The event will focus on sharing practical customer experiences and best practices around cloud and virtualization through a combination of plenary and breakout sessions.  Among the presentations, you’ll hear from GlaxoSmithKline as they discuss how they used APM to move key applications and services to the cloud, and how the performance of those cloud services is being monitored. 

To learn more about this event, visit the HP Business Service Management Special Interest Group.

Want to know about your company's IT infrastructure availability before your end users do?
If you are already reaping the benefits of HP SiteScope, the HP SiteScope iPhone application is the next logical step for you!

As a follow up to the recent "Script Recycling for Fun and Profit webinar (link)" guest blogger HP APM Global Practice Lead Miron Mizrahi goes a bit further into the mechanics of Reusing test scripts to monitor application performance in production.....

 - Are you attending our HP Software Universe event in Washington this year?

- Are you a current HP Business Service Management (BSM) customer - customer who has one or more products from

HP Business Availability Center (any of these products Business Process Monitor/Real user monitor/Sitescope/Diagnostics/Service Level Management/Transaction Vision)

HP Operations Management Center (Operations Manager, Operations Manager i, any of our SPIs)

 HP Network Management Center (NNMi, Performance SPIs, etc)

- Are you happy with your BSM deployment and want to talk about it?

- Do you want to be seen as a leader and innovative company by having your BSM story quoted in press articles?

If you answered yes, to all of the above, then send an email to: aru@hp.com with your contact information (your name, company, email and phone number). I’ll call you and we can discuss how to give you and your BSM deployment some great exposure.

Thanks
Aruna Ravichandran
Group Product Marketing Manager
Application Performance Management ( part of BAC)
aru@hp.com

An ICT services provider to enterprises across the Middle East, Smartworld meets and exceeds its customers’ expectations with efficient, high-quality services. HP Business Service Management makes this possible by bridging IT silos and consolidating network, system, and application events. Integration with HP Service Manager enables proactive alerts and ticket creation, accelerating mean time to repair.

In the end, Smartworld optimized IT operations efficiency, delivered superior service levels, and reduced TCO by between 30 and 60%. Now that’s smart.

To learn more about the benefits of BSM at Smartworld

Many of you have asked for HP Business Availability Center (BAC) lessons learned and customer success stories. Here’s one from Deloitte Australia, a member of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, one of the world’s leading professional services firms.

Deloitte is using HP BAC to monitor the health of its business services and the entire underlying infrastructure including servers, operating systems, network, Internet services, and applications.

Aligned with ITIL processes, HP BAC has streamlined incident and problem management and reduced mean time to resolution from a few hours to a matter of minutes. In addition, Deloitte has decreased downtime of external systems (client business systems), enriching the customer experience. These results, among others, contributed to the service excellence that made Deloitte the 2008 Accountancy Firm of the Year.

Read how Deloitte achieved their exceptional outcomes.

by Michael Procopio

Just over 3200 attendees at the show this year.

Each of the last eight years at the European Universe, Ulrich Pfeiffer, CTO for IT Management in EMEA creates a Live in Action demo showcasing the fictitious Full Throttle Company (FTC) on mainstage. Live in Action is a demonstration of HP Software integrated into a complete solution.

Ulrich Pfeiffer

This year, the Live in Action team recalled Hamburg of the early 1960s when this German city gave the Beatles a start before the group became a mainstream sensation. The demo featured the HP Performance Optimized Datacenter (“POD”), a datacenter in a container, along with music by the re-Beatles band and an on-stage yellow submarine in a disaster recovery scenario involving a flooded datacenter.

The POD is a standard container completely fitted with servers, storage and HVAC. You can see the POD demo here.

BTO (Business Technology Optimization) solutions demoed live on stage showed capabilities in three areas: 1) business and disaster recovery; 2) service recovery and web security; and 3) business improvements to avoid service disruptions and enhance capacity via virtualization management.

Disaster recovery highlighted HP Operations Orchestration configuring the POD to the state of the original datacenter.

Web security started with finding the problem using End User Monitoring, HP SiteScope and HP Problem Isolation. The problem was a hacked web site. The knowledge base in HP Service Manager (SM) which was populated during QA testing by HP Quality Center has the solution to the problem.   QA had not originally done security testing on every release but it is now added to their plan in HP Quality Center (QC) to run HP Security Center.

HP WebInspect, was run directly from SM. The test failed and WebInspect automatically created a ticket in SM for the QA team.  Once the QC test passes the SM ticket is automatically closed.

The website having the problem was supporting a reseller using a configuration utility to order Snowmobiles, a new business line for FTC. When Ulrich, playing CIO for FTC, called the reseller to tell him service was restored the reseller claimed his SLA (Service Level Agreement) was violated and would not pay. Ulrich brought up HP Service Level Manager to show that while any further downtime would violate the SLA, it was currently in tact.

Now that the problems is solved the infrastructure manager looks to see how the failure happened and what can be done to prevent it in the future.

They review the infrastructure using HP Asset Manager and Operations Manager Virtualization Smart Plug-in, both now running on Linux. The CIO wants this Virtualization data to show up in his 360 degree dashboard and it does.

It is much more fun to watch and it was video recorded which will be up after the holidays.

Related items:

• HP Operations Orchestration


• HP SiteScope


• HP End User Management


• HP Problem Isolation


• HP Quality Center


• HP Application Security Center


• HP Service Manager


• HP Service Level Management


• HP WebInspect software


• HP Asset Manager software


• HP Operations Manager software


• HP Smart Plug-in for Virtualization

by Michael Procopio

Wednesday was Day 1 for Universe and cloud was the word on announcements. Here is a video of the HP Software Universe Press Conference.

Here are the official announcements, I’ll provide some comments on them in another post.

» HP Accelerates Cloud Computing Adoption for Businesses and Service Providers

» HP Helps Businesses Optimize Costs of Cloud Adoption

» HP Helps Telecoms Tap New $6.2 Billion Market: Communications as a Service for Midsize Businesses

» HP Extends Automation from In House to the Cloud

• HP Cloud Assure service: Assuring security, performance, and availability to enable business confidence in the cloud (1.25MB, PDF)


• Clarifying the cloud


• Clarifying the cloud hype


• HP Cloud Consulting Services


• HP Software as a Service


• HP Operations Orchestration


• HP SiteScope


• HP Diagnostics