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. 

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.

Update from the show floor from John Lee and Rajkishore Govindu, two HP product experts, who are staffing the HP Software booth at Citrix Synergy. They are showing demos of how HP Operations Manager and our Citrix management solutions

HP Discover is only two weeks away.  If you are still unsure about whether you should go, take a look at what will bediscused during the week.  This list combined with Paul McCartney's performance just might change your mind!

HP SiteScope 11.10 just released in May.  Here is a recap of all the great stuff from this release.

There is a never-ending debate on which is better - agent-based or agentless - when it comes to monitoring your IT environment. There are advantages to both.  Read this blog post to learn more about the advantages of agent-based monitoring – “hard to beat” benefits by deploying agents on nodes being monitored - and how this type of monitoring  may even help with ITIL’s Event, Incident, and Problem Management processes.

Announcing the launch of the HP Operations Center practitioner's forum where you can interact with other Operations Manager, SiteScope, OpenView customers and HP Subject Matter Experts to share your experiences, learn best practices and get pressing questions answered.

Did you know that HP Operations SPIs (Smart Plug-ins) are now available for OMW 9.0?  Just released last week, you can now use SPIs with 64-bit, OMW 9.0 servers.

Learn how SMA Solar Technology AG created a highly integrated IT environment with tools from HP to monitor its IT infrastructure and the IT services based on it.

It has been two weeks since I wrote a post on how IT organizations align with the ITIL framework.  Lo and behold, so do we ...

Of course this is a trick question. HP changed the name of OpenView several years ago. The solution that is the main topic of this blog, HP Operations Manager, was formerly OpenView Operations or OVO. If you are interested in a mapping of all the former OpenView products and their new names...

Have any unanswered questions around HP Operations Center products like HP Operations Manager, Openview, SPIs, or SiteScope?  Then make sure to attend Expert Day, which ends in only about 4 hours!

Ever wish you could talk face-to-face with more technical people about Operations Center and Network Management Center products? Don’t really have the time or budget to travel very far to do so?  Well, here is a great opportunity to meet and talk with technical experts on products like Operations Manager and NNMi – right in your background.

Vivit will be hosting a series of six (6) one-day sessions, where there will be a nice mix between presentations and Q&A sessions around these products.  The sessions will be held in the following states on the following days:

- (Columbus) Ohio – April 20, 2010

- (Orrville) Ohio – April 21, 2010

- (Dearborn) Michigan – April 22, 2010

- Wisconsin – April 27, 2010

- (Chicago) Illinois – April 28, 2010

 - (Fishers) Indiana – April 29, 2010

Feel free to contact me if you have any further questions about this roadshow at asksonja@hp.com.

Join HP Software and Solutions for a live InformationWeek webcast with special guests Maryann Phillip, Director of Service Delivery at Independence Blue Cross (IBC), and Ken Herold, Practice Manager & Principal Architect with Melillo Consulting.

Hear first-hand how IBC is using HP Operations Center products like Operations Manager, Performance Manager, and DDM in addition to agentless and agent-based data collection to:

• achieve profitable growth through enabling technologies


• reduce costs by achieving a competitive cost structure


• manage medical costs better -- through operational stability & improvements

Register today and learn how you can streamline and make YOUR processes more efficient.

I had an interesting meeting this week with Christel Mes, Director of Marketing for one of our technology partners, AlarmPoint. They are a leader in Alert Management solutions, transforming events from monitoring, planning and help desk applications into role-specific information. AlarmPoint extends Operations Manager’s event consolidation capabilities by eliminating alert overload and reducing operational costs by making personnel more efficient and allowing them to resolve incidents faster.

We have a number of joint customers that are managing some very complex IT environments. AlarmPoint is hosting a free webinar on Wednesday, May 13, 2009 in which Wells Fargo will talk about how they are using the combination of Operations Manager and AlarmPoint for incident management. Their new approach now allows Wells Fargo to notify personnel of critical events and gives them the tools to intervene before there is a business impact to their customers.

Wells Fargo, like many online enterprises, found that downtime and unresolved issues were negatively affecting response times, mean time to repair and resolution of incidents. In order to manage, respond to and resolve critical alerts rapidly, the bank turned to automated Alert Management, consolidating IT staff profile information and combining it with complicated rotation schedules to ensure alerts never fell through the cracks.

I don’t want to give the entire story away here. If you want to learn the details, including some tips and tricks for increasing efficiency to reduce costs, please register for the AlarmPoint webinar.

For Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel.

Network World had an interesting article today called “IT budget '09: Spending down, contingencies at the ready”. It shows some survey results about IT professionals’ spending forecasts. Interestingly, there is some optimism that smart IT spending can drive productivity improvements.

This mirrors the sentiment I hear in most of my conversations with customers. Everyone is looking to cut costs. But, many IT executives are open to making investments in their infrastructure, including management software, as long as they recoup their investment within a reasonable (or some might view as unreasonable) period of time. These days that is often six months. For some who are more patient, they might stretch this period to a year. During other (rosier) times, people might accept a 2-year payback period.

Tool consolidation is often one initiative that results in significant savings in a short time horizon. (Data center consolidation done properly can generate even larger savings, but this is generally a multi-year proposition.) In addition to the savings in software license costs by consolidating management tools, organizations often see reductions in training costs and improvements in efficiency as operators can focus their skills on learning one tool really well instead of gaining a superficial knowledge on a variety of consoles. Using a single vendor for all your IT infrastructure management also saves money on integration, as the individual components, at least in HP’s case, are pre-integrated.

Of course, one of the biggest potential savings in a tool consolidation is in applying automation to perform routine tasks. A global financial company saves over $4 million per year by automating only 22 IT processes, most of which take only five minutes or less to execute. For one database process, the savings is only a minute, but the operation happens 400,000 times per year.

How many routine tasks do your administrators complete each day? How long does each take? What does this cost you? What will you do about it?

For Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel.