We're looking for customers who want to share great stories around their use of HP's BSM solution. Get chosen and you may get a free pass to the event!!!

Learn about the inner workings of Service Health Reporter -- "Conformed Dimensions."   Forced dimension conformance is how SHR can do the analytics for cross-domain reporting.  

Balasubramanya Ramananda of the SHR R&D team discusses how this is done.

Join HP and your peers at HP Software Customer Forums in Houston, Boston, Chicago, and New York City!

These forums are customer-led, best-practice sharing events focusing on automation, predictive business service management, and application lifecycle management.  HP customers are presenting at each forum, so you can get first-hand knowledge of how they are implementing and benefiting from HP software solutions. You will also have the opportunity to talk with HP executives, product managers, and service consultants to learn about HP strategies, roadmaps, migrations, and integrations.

Topics being discussed include:

• Leveraging intelligent automation of cloud services - realize the benefits of hybrid IT from infrastructure to applications
• Advancing the "DevOps" agenda - get app developers and IT ops more tightly aligned
• Using BSM 9.1’s new analytics capabilities - predict issues before they negatively impact your customers
• Managing business-critical applications for predictability, repeatability, agility, quality, visibility, simplicity and more across their entire lifecycle. 

Dates of the forums are as follows:

Houston - February 22nd

Boston - February 28th

Chicago - March 1st

New York City - March 22nd

Register now for the HP Software Customer Forum to learn how businesses worldwide are discovering a new level of enterprise performance.

Cloud Visibility?  Myth or reality?

This article was written by Eyal Kenigsberg HP RUM  R&D Architect and Lior Matkovitch PM HP RUM.

As we start into 2012, many retailers have just closed a busy holiday season.  Since many retailers make most of their revenue during the holiday shopping season now is a good time to look back on sales and buying behaviors to prepare for the next year.  Some will notice a growing trend of customers using online and mobile device to make their holiday purchases.  Black Friday online retail sales were sky rocketing and latest reports indicate Cyber Monday have now taken the lead as the largest online sales day of the year, end user experience cannot longer be ignored.

Vendors acknowledge that in any enterprise reporting tool, irrespective of how good the out of the box reports, it is impossible to consider every possible scenario found in the customer’s environment. A lot of effort in the development activities of reporting solutions goes into the ease of use, and ease of customization capabilities of the product. The lack of an easy customization capability leads to costs associated with ramp up on learning, training and maintenance of the customized reports.

To that end, HP Service Health Reporter (HP SHR), attempts to make the report customization easy for its users.

Krishna Mahadevan Ramakrishnan and Prapulla B, SHR R&D Engineers, explain...

Service Health Reporter (SHR) uses Sybase IQ, a Column based Database Management System (DBMS), to implement its Data Warehouse. The choice of DBMS technology in SHR proves to be an advantageous choice for data analytics, storage and aggregations.

Balasubramanya Ramananda of the SHR R&D team expains.

This month we are joining up with our testing team to address issues around mobile applications from development to operations.  All month long we will have various blogs, webinars and events to help you deliver better performing mobile applications.  Learn more about Mobile Month and follow our future of testing blog and the bsmblog which will cover blog topics from testing, mobile application quality and yes even monitoring mobile applications once they go live.  Here is our first contribution to the blog series around challenges for monitoring mobile applications.  This blog will be followed-up with 2 other blogs that address these challenges.  Stay tuned!    

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 3rd part to the blog series "Plugging the leaks:  Best practices for troubleshooting Java Memory Leaks".  The first blog talked about understanding Java Memory Leaks and the challenges with troubleshooting Java Memory Leaks.  The second blog Piotr talked about the traditional approach to troubleshooting Java Memory Leaks.  In this final blog, Piotr will discuss a novel approach to troubleshooting Java Memory Leaks called Collection Leak Pinpointing (CLP).

If you cannot view the screenshots, the attached file maybe referenced.  After reading the blog please view the demo by clicking the link at the end of this blog.

Want to learn more about HP Business Service Management 9.1?  Join us tomorrow for a live webcast featuring HP and Vodafone as we explain the new features in BSM 9.1. 

Hear how the latest HP Business Service Management (BSM9.1) can help you:

• Analyze: Measure mobile, cloud, and dynamic application & infrastructure service health from a single IT service view
• Anticipate: Predict potential issues before they impact the business
• Remediate: Act quickly to automatically resolve issues

You’ll hear from Shane Gaffney, Head of IT Operations at Vodafone Ireland, on how they realized 300% ROI within the first twelve months, transforming to a world class model of operational excellence.

Register at http://www.hp.com/go/BSM91webcast  

Since announcing HP Service Health Analyzer at HP Discover in Vienna, we have seen tremendous interest from the market in this predictive analytics tool.   The reason?

Analytics is hot. 

Organizations have a done a great job of collecting data, but with cloud and virtualized environments they need something more.  IT needs a way to analyze that data to make more intelligent decisions that will benefit the business.  In fact, IT needs to receive advanced notification of potential issues before they impact the business. 

Please join us on January 26th as we talk with Glenn O’Donnell, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, about the trends around analytics, and why predictive analytics is being identified as one of the top keys to IT operation success. 

Don’t miss your chance to hear from an industry expert on one of the hottest topics of the year. 

Register for this event by clicking on the following link - Power of predictive analytics featuring Forrester Research. 

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.

Java technology is widely used today for server side programming. One of the most prominent issues affecting deployed Java applications is the so called Java memory leak. Because Java offers automatic memory management, Java memory leaks are actually only unintentional object retention cases. However, the former term is universally used and recognized, so we also use it here.

The most important effects of the Java memory leak for long running applications are as follows:

• the performance of the application degrades over time, because of increasing frequency of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) garbage collector (GC) runs,
• the application eventually terminates with an OutOfMemoryError.

This is a serious problem for business critical applications, as it wastes computing (and human) resources, causes unpredictable outages in the IT environment and can lead to lost business.

During this 3 part blog series we will discuss the following topics:

1.  Understanding Memory Leaks and the challenges faces with diagnosing and fixing Java Memory Leaks
2. Take a look at traditional troubleshooting approaches
3. Introduce a new novel approach that will change the way you troubleshoot Java Memory Leaks

Last week at HP Discover in Vienna, we launched a new BSM predictive analytics tool called Service Health Analyzer.  Already, we have heard a lot of positive feedback.  Many have asked for a video demonstration of the tool at work. 

Ask and you shall receive.    This video shows you how SHA uses the Run-Time Service Model (RTSM)  to capture and correlate metric data with anomalies to help forecast issues.  Enjoy!

On Tuesday, December 6th at 9am PT / 12pm ET, HP’s Jon Haworth and Matt Smith will conduct a webinar for Operations Manager customers that will explore the new functionality available by upgrading to OM version 9 as well as the functional and financial gains that you can achieve by upgrading your existing HP OM software for HP-UX and Solaris.

This webinar will cover the following topics:

• New features including extended virtualization support, web based administration UI and WMI support

• Upgrade options including OM server on Linux and best practices

• Operational efficiency and cost of ownership benefits

• Real customer examples illustrating the benefits of upgrading

Click here to register: http://bit.ly/sTrsoL

Guest post by Matt Smith, BSM Global Practice Lead for HP Software Professional Services

(Matt Smith has more than 20 years of process and software solution consulting experience and has been with HP for the past 11 years. He works with HP customers to create solutions to align their IT operations across people, process and technology to meet the demands of the business.)

As cloud and mobile disrupt the technology landscape, it’s more important than ever that IT operations have visibility into the health of business services. HP Business Service Management 9.1 is a major new release of our leading business service management software. It offers a single console for monitoring cloud, virtual and mobile business services to keep your business healthy.

To make the upgrade go as smoothly as possible, HP Professional Services has created tools and processes based on years of success in helping customers through upgrades and integrations. Here are three steps you can take for a successful upgrade.

Being able to use the sophisticated policy management capabilities of Operations Manager to administer SiteScope templates when the two products are used together has been a frequent customer request. Well it's here with some enhancements to Operations Manager 9.1 and SiteScope 11.12 - read on to find out more.

If you could forecast potential issues in your data center, what would it mean to you?  Would advance warning technology be useful?  If you could be notified early of an impending problem, would it benefit your business?

Announced this week at HP Discover Vienna, HP Service Health Analyzer is providing IT managers this exact capability -- to anticipate, prevent and remediate IT incidents before they impact the business. 

Service Health Analyzer (SHA) is a predictive analytics tool within HP’s Business Service Management Portfolio that will change the way IT manages data and operates the data center.  Much like weather forecasters are monitoring and predicting major hurricanes and cyclones, SHA is using advanced analytics to forecast IT storms, which can help you prevent problems from impacting your business.

Today at HP Discover Vienna, HP announced a new predictive analytics tool within HP’s Business Service Management portfolio called Service Health Analyzer (SHA) that will help IT…

1.       Anticipate real IT incidents… before they occur

2.       Prevent business impact

3.       Remediate events by fusing analytics & automation

Ever hear the expression "eating your own dog food"?  According to Wikipedia, this is "when a company (usually, a software company) uses the products that it makes".  And that's just what HP is doing when it comes to managing network devices on behalf of its IT infrastructure outsourcing customers.  Read on to learn how HP Enterprise Services has reduced the time it takes to perform device security checks and configuration updates from 15 minutes to mere seconds - by using HP Network Automation. 

Advanced correlation technologies need to be able to adapt as changes in the IT Infrastructure and its relationship to the Business Services occurs. Without this capability, in modern dynamic virtualized environments, the guidance provided to Operations staff is quickly outdated.

OMi Topology Based Event Correlation provides a unique and highly efficient solution that adapts to IT infrastrcuture change dynamically, delivers exceptional guidance to Operations staff to ensure that they focus activities on the causes of incidents - and requires very little ongoing maintenance even where the IT infrastructure is flexing or changing.

This blog will talk about how TBEC works at a high level.

A critical aspect in enabling event consolidation and management to occur in a controlled manner within large scale IT infrastructures is event correlation. Event correlation reduces noise, rationalizes the event stream and helps operations staff to focus on what matters to the business.  An effective event correlation architecture yields operational efficiency gains, uses minimal resources in the IT environment and does not require a huge ongoing maintenance effort.

This article discusses HP Softwares Operations Management approach to event correlation starting distributed event reduction and culminating with advanced topology Based Event Correlation (TBEC).

Enterprise reporting is a fundamental part of the larger movement towards improved service, business intelligence, and optimization.  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 . in the context of the business services that they support.  Learn how HP Service Health Reporter is enabling intelligence with cross-domain reporting in the enterprise.

Looking for ways to improve your efficiency when it comes to Incident and Problem Management?  One way is to filter out extraneous information that does not pertain to your job.  But how to do that when other people in the IT organization need to see that information or rely on that information when things such as Key Performance Indicators are based off of that information?.  Introducing Local Impact Views in BSM9 - a way to calculate the health of your business services based only on Configuration Items of importance to you! 

Have you ever wondered how to keep a business critical application up and running on various machines and servers – all the time? Most of us are aware of the various factors at play required to make sure these business critical applications run as smoothly as possible ......

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.

Do you face the following challenges when trying to create reports?

• No consistent reporting across your complex infrastructures  
• Making IT service performance  visible to the business  
• Reporting challenges due to changing technologies 
• Customization in reports to meet your specific need

See how HP Service Health Reporter eliminates each of these challenges...

Read this blog post to hear how Will Gillen, a SiteScope power user, leverages numerous configurable settings to achieve maximum performance when using HP SiteScope.

At the next two HP Discover events, we are hoping to have some roundtables where customers exchange knowledge on ITIL-related topics.  I'd like to solicit feedback on hot topics that we should discus during these particular roundtables ...