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

IT Operations Management is a complex discipline. It had become even more challenging over the past few years with the advent of virtualization and cloud computing. While you can read 1000-page user manuals, dry text books, or ITIL training materials, it has been hard to find a good high-level overview of best practices for managing your IT infrastructure - until now!

HP Discover is less than two weeks away. In lieu of a single “tips and tricks” session on HP Operations Manager, we are having a full-day technical session on Wednesday June 8, 2011 where you can meet experts from HP and share your experiences with your peers. This day-long event of technical forums adds a face-to-face setting to the online practitioner series hosted by Lindsay Parker.

BSM is all about monitoring. Comprehensive, consolidated monitoring that starts with the end user experience, and covers applications, servers, networks and storage. In short all the components that comprise a business service.

BSM for cloud is about extending this monitoring approach to cloud environments, whether public, private or hybrid. As you start building out their own cloud environments or purchasing cloud-based services, you need a way to monitor them. Again, from the user experience all the way through the underlying infrastructure.

HP software provides a way for you to monitor your Citrix virtualized resources alongside all other components in your IT environment. Monitor all Citrix application, desktop, and server virtualized resources using either agent-based or agentless monitoring technologies from HP. And bring all of this information into a central location, greatly increasing the efficiencies of your IT Operations teams.  

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.

Don't miss these live forums at HP Discover where you will have the opportunity to learn tips and tricks, best practices, and innovative ways to use HP software - from like-minded individuals like yourself!

Both Operations Manager and SiteScope include log file management capabilities, But ArcSight Logger’s additional functionality makes the Operations Bridge team even more productive in searching log files for recurring patterns that affect system availability and performance.

Implemented some or all aspects of ITIL's "Service Operations" phase, but forgot to include monitoring of your virtualized resources?  And now you need to quickly bring monitoring of those ever-so-precious resources into your centralized monitoring environment?  Did you know that you can do just that with HP SiteScope - in a matter on minutes? Watch this YouTube video to learn more!

Only two hours until the Vivit webinar and demo on SiteScope and Operations Manager AgentOne starts.

Last chance to register.

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/207995242

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.

Join the APM product marketing team, along with an APM9 customer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida on the road for an interactive event where you’ll be able to test drive HP Application Performance Management. 

You can register at: https://h30406.www3.hp.com/campaigns/2011/events/1-ALJ1Q/index.php?rtc=3-3JEMZ3W&jumpid=ex_R11374_us...

We are conducting a research project on what metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) people use most. Send in your response and see what your peers are doing. The survey will take about 2 minutes.

Did you know that the recent release of SiteScope allows for integration between HP Network Node Manager i (NNMi) and HP SiteScope?  Now you can send events and reporting metrics to NNMi from SiteScope. See a demo of this new capability.

Did you know that HP SiteScope now has LDAP support?  Watch (via YouTube) and learn how this new feature allows IT Administrators to be more efficient and productive through automated user authentication during ITIL's "Access Management" processes!

Last week, HP presented a webinar in which Beth Pfost of Boeing shared her best practices for monitoring server performance.

Here is a summary of some of the questions submitted during the webinar, along with our answers.

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.

You collect performance metrics and response time statistics throughout your environment, and you have a dynamic model of the IT infrastructure and the business services - so what happens if you bring the two sets of data together?

Over the past six months, HP announced new functionality within the Operations Center portfolio to simplify your IT operations. In this session, we’ll review updates to Operations Manager 9, Performance Manager 9, and the Virtualization Smart Plug-In, while focusing on key innovations released in Operations Agent 11.0 and SiteScope 11.1. Register for this free VIVIT webinar.

HP Software has a comprehensive set of products to manage a Virtualized datacenter effectively. Customers who are already reaping the benefits of HP’s industry leading systems management products, such as Operations Manager, Performance Agents have a new arsenal in their toolkit now – HP Service Health Optimizer – a “Business Aware” Capacity Management, focused on virtualization.

I have been receiving many inquiries recently from sales reps and partners about how to compete against open source IT management software. “How can we beat free?” is the typical lament. The answer, of course, is to look beyond the license and maintenance costs and consider the total cost of ownership, or TCO, over a three year period.

Consolidated operations drives efficiency. In this example, the leading mobile telephony distribution network in France has standardized on HP Operations Manager and HP Network Node Manager to optimize their IT operations.

“Almost half of the workloads will be deployed in virtual environments by 2012”*

“Virtual Machine installed base to grow by 5x in 3 years between 2009 and 2012”*

“By 2012, there will be nearly 55M VMs”*

“Average number of VMs per server might explode to 75 by 2012”*

*Various sources, such as IDC, Gartner and Forrester

Pre-virtualization, server utilization was typically under 20%. Now, with virtualization, it's still less than 50%. What is preventing server admins from achieving higher utilization?

Considering agentless monitoring for your virtualized resources, but need more robust features from currently available products in the marketplace?  HP SiteScope now has them ...

I am pleased to announce we have a new presentation on HP Software’s overall solution for IT Operations. The presentation includes the newly announced Cloud Service Automation product suite.

This Wednesday, Beth Pfost of Boeing will will share her best practices for server performance monitoring, including:

• How to achieve better server performance while driving down costs
• How to better manage people and process change
• Best practices for meeting and exceeding SLAs 

I will also discuss how performance management fits with the rest of HP's operations management solution.

Register now for this live webinar on March 9, 2011 at noon Eastern time / 11AM Central time / 10AM Mountain time / 9AM Pacific time.

I recently had the opportunity to present to a mid-sized American Service Provider in our executive briefing center in Cupertino. They manage three datacenters spread geographically for better customer services as well as disaster recovery. Since their product is outsourced IT, maintaining high availability is their biggest challenge. With 50% annual growth, they want to know how to allow their rapidly growing business to run with minimal oversight.

Implemented ITIL's problem management or maybe your own version of problem management?  I'm guessing it includes monitoring log files generated by your agentless monitoring tool, SiteScope.  Tired of it being such a manually-intensive process? of culling through thousands of logging lines trying to find that "needle in a haystack"?  Read this post to learn about SiteScope's new Log Analysis Tool, which helps you quickly monitor thousands of lines in log files - efficiently and productively!

One consistent piece of feedback in almost every presentation I make on Operations Center, its individual products such as Operations Manager or SiteScope, or Business Service Management overall is the people want to see a demo. This applies for customers, prospects, partners and new hires. So, my colleague Jon Haworth and I have put together an Operations Manager demo.