End-to-end Monitoring Software: Improve Quality of Service with IBM Tivoli

http://www.ibm.com/software/tivoli/governance/servicemanagement/?cm_mmc=agus_itmbipcty-20090810-usitp200-_-n-_-dz2-_-m

Don Zeunert of IBM discusses the importance of having a single view of all resources associated with a business application in order to improve quality of IT service.
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Customers are demanding better quality of service these days than they used to and we're exposing our IT applications to them. When they call on the phone and say they're having a problem, they say, "I have a problem entering an order." They don't call on the phone saying, "I think maybe this CICS region is having a problem," or "We've got a DB2 problem over here." They have no clue what the problem is.

…What's the problem? The problem is that you're looking at resources not business applications and if you're asking your IT department to manage better quality of service for customers' business apps, you have to give them a view into the business application, not a view into resources. And you can't manage these resources the same way we did 20 years ago with silos. Here's the AIX guy, here's the z guy and here's the network guy; we can't do that. We have to look at all of the components that provide service to the end user and get a view of which resources are needed to provide that service and manage those resources.

Tivoli provides that capability. Tivoli has a single pane of glass that shows you distributed monitors, distributed application monitors such as SAP, database monitors on distributed mainframes. The mainframes, CICS, DB2, IMS, CICS, all of these MQSeries, same user interface for distributed and mainframe; WebSphere, same user interface for distributed and mainframe. All from a single pane of glass that we can customize to show your business application and the components of the business application so when you have a problem you've got a red light that says, "Here's a problem. It's impacting my accounts receivable department. Here's a problem that's impacting my order entry."

Which should I work on first? ITIL tells you to work on the one that's causing the biggest business impact. If you look at TBSM, Tivoli's Business Service Management, we'll actually put dollars associated with the cost of service of this service delay or outage so that you can see where's the dollars -- ching…ching…ching -- you're losing money over here. Let's focus on this. Where -- if you do resource management -- you might have had a nice red light over here that said “I think I'll fix that” but it didn't fix the money going out the door.