We are merging the Infrastructure management blog into the BSM blog to align with the way our customers think about IT monitoring.

On Wednesday, August 3, 2011, my co-authors Jon Haworth and Sonja Hickey joined me on The Bill Marlow show, a radio show focused on business innovations. Bill interviewed us for about half an hour, asking questions about the IT Operations Management book and how we came up with some of the insights in the book.

You can listen to a recording of the episode here - and perhaps gain some additional color beyond what’s in the book.

For HP Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel.

Thank you to everyone that has purchased our IT Operations Management book (www.itopsbook.com). I will be appearing on The Bill Marlow Show (http://www.thebillmarlowshow.com) along with my co-authors Jon Haworth and Sonja Hickey on Wednesday August 3 at 10AM Eastern time.

As a special promotion to readers of this blog, you can download a FREE copy of the ebook version at www.hpitopsbook.com.

There is now extensive integration of HP SiteScope with HP Service Health Optimizer (SHO) and Service Health Reporter (SHR), which enables SHO/R to work on SiteScope data for purposes of capacity management/reporting. A long list of virtualization monitoring enhancements were recently introduced for that purpose ...

Attend this webnar, being presented by Brandy Reid from Baptist Memorial, where she will discuss the synergies between HP Operations Manager and the relevance engine from xMatters and how Baptist Memorial now resolves incidents in a matter of minutes versus what used to take up to 60 minutes.

Want to know about infrastructure availability issues before your end users do? If you're already reaping the benefits of HP SiteScope, the HP SiteScope Android application is the next logical step for you!

A guest post from Will Gillen, a SiteScope user with about 10 years of experience with the product. He currently manages over 10,000 servers, 16,000 URLs and about 200,000 total monitors. 

Per popular customer demand, we are re-instating the old HA solution for SiteScope. Read on to learn more ...

In this day and age, the amount of information may seem insurmountable. The size of IT infrastructures is constantly growing and frequently changing. The need to manage and monitor it all is greater than ever. HP BSM (Business Service Management) is the best solution available to overcome such a task.

In BSM, to see results, it all starts with the configuration. And when you get down to the screws and bolts, it all comes down to CIs and indicators. This article focuses on the KPI configuration. Configuring many KPIs can be an exhausting and tedious task. But it doesn't have to be.

We’ve scheduled a  'Meet the Experts' session for Performance Manager 9.0 

Date: Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Length: 90 minutes
Time: 08:00 PT / 11:00 ET / 17:00 CET

This session introduces the new release of Performance Manager 9.0, and showcases its features and enhancements with a detailed demonstration followed by a Q&A session.

Important new features include the Diagnostic View which provides powerful options for faster root cause analysis, Real Time graphs, Integration with SiteScope 11.00, AD based Authentication etc. 

Here's the link to register for the event -

http://h30501.www3.hp.com/t5/Meet-the-Experts/What-s-new-in-Performance-Manager-9-0-July-6/td-p/35163.

For HP Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel.

In second week of June, I was at HP DISCOVER 2011 in Las Vegas and I had the privilege of meeting many BTO customers. The week was packed with many customer meetings, 3 sessions and a keynote demo which I will talk about later. My sessions were about sharing the information across Security Operation Center (SOC) and Network Operation Center (NOC). Every customer in the room agreed that they could use some security background to do better analysis on alerts coming up on BTO products like OM, NNM and OMi.

The HP Operations Smart Plug-ins for Infrastructure 2.0 released in June 2011 brings a whole gamut of new features to provide comprehensive monitoring of your IT Infrastructure.

Super advanced tools that claim to automate and optimize front line operations tasks are great, but how much effort do you have to expend to configure and maintain them in dynamic environments? What happens when the costs of admin exceed the benefits gained?

As part of the rollout of our Service Intelligence offerings, a webinar was presented that showcased our latest solutions - Service Health Reporter and Service Health Optimizer. The webcast included a demo and a discussion on the overall Operations Center portfolio.

Think that the only way to feed information into HP’s Run-time Service Model (RtSM) is via agents?  The answer is “No”.  This is also possible via agentless monitoring …

Last chance to register for a free webinar on Service Intelligence. We'll show demos of Service Health Optimizer and Service Health Reporter and how they help you get more performance and higher availablity out of your virtualized IT environment.

Register now:

www.hp.com/go/serviceintelligencewebcast

The Operations Center Roadmap presentation is always one of the most highly anticipated sessions of the show. It is one of the few times where we discuss the product direction in a public (or semi-public) format.

One attraction for customers that attend HP Discover is the opportunity to schedule individual meetings with product experts. These meetings tend to be open and honest discussions about where customers want to go with their infrastructure or business service monitoring and how HP can help them on that journey. The latter is where we have a great advantage in the market with our innovative and integrated business service management solutions.

A guest post from Judy DePuy, who is one of the people at HP who helps manage partner relationships.

- Peter

I just attended a fabulous get-together at the V Bar at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, where we are holding HP Discover this year. The hosts of the event were CT Consultants, one of our Canadian Partners, and Arrow, one of HP’s leading distributors.

One of my favorite parts of HP Discover is hosting the Customer Roundtable discussions. For those of you who have not participated in these sessions, it is when a group of customers get together with some HP experts (typically from Product Management, Technical Marketing, R&D, and/or Product Marketing) and have a discussion. What I like best about the customer roundtables is that they are completely unstructured; every discussion is different, based on the composition of participants.

While the main stage presentations on Monday focused on high-level strategy, Tuesday’s keynotes were more tactical, showcasing innovations across the hardware and software portfolio. The thing that came together for me and many others I spoke to was how complementary the hardware and software presentations were. Both focused on solving one of the big challenges customers face today: how to deliver new business services more efficiently.

The IT Performance Suite (ITPS) was a common topic of conversation among customers, partners, and peers during the week. Most of my discussions focused on how ITPS used metrics collected by the products in the Operations Center portfolio, such as Operations Manager, SiteScope, Performance Manager, and our Smart Plug-Ins. The short answer is that the Operations Center metrics rolls up and ITPS combines it with other metrics from other parts of the portfolio to provide executives with a complete picture of how their business is running.

I arrived a day early to HP Discover (Sunday rather than Monday) to participate in our Customer Advisory Board (CAB) meetings. For those of you not familiar with the role of the Customer Advisory Board, it is to solicit input from a select group of power users of our products. This CAB focused on users of our Business Service Management (BSM) solutions, which include Operations Center, Business Availability Center, and Network Management Center.

We will have many opportunities to learn about Service Intelligence at HP Discover. You can attend sessions, see demos on the show floor, or schedule meetings with experts to discuss your specific neeeds.

To gain the agility and cost advantages from virtualization and cloud computing, organizations must be able to combine historical and current infrastructure performance data with usage forecasts.  That ability enables IT to visualize, optimize, and plan workload placement and future infrastructure investments. The dynamic relationships in a complex IT environment, however,  means that correlating and mapping physical, virtual, and cloud-based elements is beyond the realm of human judgment and spreadsheets. It requires business service intelligence.

Attend a free webinar on Service Intelligence to see HP's exciting new offerings in this area.

IT Operations staff have measured what matters for decades. They have successfully used products such as HP Operations Center (and its predecessor HP OpenView Operations) to define metrics and track them to manage increasingly complex IT infrastructures. One challenge has been rolling up this data - connecting the information across disparate parts of the business so corporate and IT executives could manage holistically.

At HP Discover, Ryan Granard, Director IT Infrastructure at DreamWorks Animation, and I will deliver session 4562 on Friday June 10 at 11:00AM.

DreamWorks takes virtualization to the next level:
Best practices for building and managing a private cloud

You will learn how they harnessed 55 million render hours to create the visual magic behind Kung Fu Panda 2 and their other hit films.

If you are attending HP Discover, make sure to have your sales rep take you into the Innovation Zone. We will be showing an exciting new product that ...

For those people that are unable to make it to Las Vegas, we are excited to offer a web-only software event on June 7 and June 8. Each day we will host 2 hours of exclusive media coverage, which will include General Session keynote presentations, customer and executive interviews, and live commentary. Customers, partners and employees are all invited to attend this free event. Register now at www.hp.com/go/discoverbackstagepass. To view the agenda, click here.