http://www.wireservices.ca

Electric Energy T&D - Index

Electric Energy T&D - EEMag March / April 2008 - Index

Few end-users care whether or not a server, a
switch or a router is up or down; rather users
care whether the business service is working
– services that incorporate IT and business
processes, such as e-mail, the ERP system
or financial management applications.
In the IESO’s case, business users were
most concerned with the availability of
systems deploying a reliable power system
or facilitating energy trading – not with
underlying components that make up these
systems. End users at the IESO desired an
improved method of IT management – service
management, or more specifically, business
service management.
Sea of Red
For many in IT operations, Business Service
Management is the holy grail of IT management.
It may also seem a vague or idealist goal. This
may be because IT operations are drowning in
a sea of red – a direct result of componentbased
IT management – and a reference to
the red, yellow or green color code of traditional
IT management tools. Generally, when alerts
and events stemming from management
systems are initiated – be that network,
systems or application performance tools – the
alerts are presented on a component basis as
opposed to in the context of business impact.
[Figure 1]
An example of a common component-based
management shortcoming is when an alert
refers to a server or network router outage,
but without information regarding how this
impacts the application or services. If there
is redundancy in the network, as there often
is, a single router may not in fact be severely
disruptive to the service. By contrast, if it’s a
server on which multiple critical applications
are dependent, the outage would be very
serious. Yet, commonly both alerts are
issued at approximately the same time.
Traditional IT management tools give
operations no way to distinguish between two
or to prioritize based on impact. More than
likely, alerts are addressed in the order in
which they are received.
Compounding this problem is the growth of
technology. As technology has evolved and
matured, so have the number of components,
systems, and infrastructure devices that
comprise any given business or business
system. The increasing complexity of these
underlying components that comprise
these systems, while providing the enduser
with more value and capabilities,
have created an even more challenging
environment. The volume of alerts has
simply grown beyond the human ability to
manage. As such, unless the IT operations
can understand the impact of an outage on
the service involved, the frequency, duration
and adverse business effects are likely to be
increased and prolonged.
figure 1: courtesy of managed objects
March-April 2008 Issue I
Silos of Data
If priority and impact alone weren’t complicated
enough, the mix of heterogeneous technology
components, from various vendors within their
infrastructures, has trapped IT organizations into
using a number of existing IT network, systems,
and applications management tools to
monitor the health of their IT environment.
Because roles and responsibilities are commonly
segmented by functional discipline
– that is network experts, application specialists,
database champions and so on
Circle 52 on Reader Service Card
75