Configuration Management Data Base (CMDB) and BTM

Any organization that has or is planning to implement the ITIL methodology will find great value in a Business Transaction Management (BTM) solution. BTM contributes significantly to the population and utilization of your CMDB, along with the auto creation of a service model relationship within your CMDB.

CMDB Population: Business Transaction Management solutions auto discover your application dependency map by monitoring the real transactions that run through an application's full topology. Additionally, the auto discovered transaction types are then added to the CMDB. Anyone accessing the CMDB that wants to see more specific information about various transactions will be referred directly to the BTM tool's transaction repository.

Enhanced Utilization: BTM solutions enable better utilization of a CMDB by linking true business activities to IT processes, enabling the management of IT from the business perspective. Additionally, BTM solutions connect specific transaction segments and servers – virtual or real – to service degradations enabling rapid resolution.

BTM Enables the Real Time Population of Your CMDB

BTM solutions are designed to operate around the clock in production environments and collect important data on all transactions that flow through all of the IT components in the datacenter. This enables your CMDB to be continuously populated with the critical business processes that are linked to their underlying IT counterparts.

Some examples of Configuration Items (CIs) that a BTM solution can populate a CMDB with are:

› Business services (transaction types)

› Data flows - the full structure of the infrastructure that supports each transaction - down to the methods that are executed - enabling much more granular impact analyses in change management

› The Topology of each transaction type (true service models)

› IP addresses of clients and servers

› All of the possible physical servers that transactions may run through

› All of the possible virtual servers that may be brought up on the fly in response to increasing load

The advantage of defining business relationship CIs with the help of a BTM solution is that those relationships are 100% accurate and are based on the flow of real transaction activations in the production environment, as opposed to other CMDB populating tools which must rely on assumptions, or manual input.

It is now possible to understand which changes affect which transactions – or business services - so that the criticalities of each change can be better understood from a true business perspective.

CMDB and the Help Desk Ticket

A BTM solution will automatically detect slow or hanging business transactions and open an Incident. By doing so, the IT Service Support or Help Desk team can be proactive in dealing with the incident. They can proactively start working on the root cause of the problem and fix it – possibly even before any users feel the negative impact of the degradation.

Tickets that are opened by the help desk are automatically put in the context of the CMDB since the BTM solution links the IT components that are involved in the transaction degradation to that ticket. This not only enables tickets to be sent to the appropriate administrator for resolution, it also enables that administrator to utilize CMDB information to help resolve the issue.

BTM – CMDB Scenarios

A Service degradation

› The BTM solution identifies the degradation of a specific transaction type’s SLA

› An incident is created and a help desk ticket is opened - flagging the server which is causing the latency - for example – the latency is due to a specific application server

› The Help Desk forwards the ticket to the Application Team as part of the problem resolution process

› The Application Team can now look at the change history of that specific application server within the CMDB and identify the cause of the problem

A Change is Being Contemplated

› A change to a specific application in the application server is being contemplated

› The Change Manager identifies all of the real business transactions that are associated with the change

› The Change Manager will be able to anticipate the business impact that the change will have on the business users and will later be able to measure the impact with real user measurements

Prioritization of Incidents

› Two servers fail at the exact same time

› The system administrator knows which server is more critical to the business and can prioritize the recovery - something that is not possible to perform without the true model

Change Verification

› Measuring the impact of a change that has been conducted

› A change to the application has been implemented

› The BTM solution will show the impact of that change by comparing the performance of transactions and transaction segments before and after the change

Roll Back Has Been Performed

› The performance of all transactions in the current time frame is compared to the time frame of the last known consistent state in order to verify the roll back

Comparisons

› The performance of specific transaction segments on two identical servers is compared in order to verify the consistency of performance

› The topologies of two similar applications are compared in order to validate the quality of implementation

A CMDB for the Cloud

Cloud Computing's value proposition to the enterprise is a substantial one - maintaining a CMDB for the cloud introduces new challenges. These challenges are related to the real time scalability of applications in the cloud.

Business Transaction management solutions can at any given moment provide a real time snapshot of the cloud enabling a CMDB to keep up with the constant change.

Additionally, BTM's ability to effectively support a federated environment contributes to the stability and scalability of a CMDB in the cloud.

The CMDB can define a template that is fed in by the Business Transaction Management solution. In this manner the current status of the cloud can be shown – this can only be done with a real time BTM tool.

BTM Brings Value to Your CMDB Investment

Consider the following scenario; an application utilizes twenty different servers within the datacenter, a specific business critical service that the application provides really only utilizes only four of those servers. When building a CMDB with traditional tools it is nearly impossible to crack this scenario since most models are based on theories and assumptions. The only way of achieving this accurate level of granularity with the CMDB – short of going line by line through the application’s code - is by using BTM to help populate the CMDB with real data.

Implementing a CMDB is not a small investment, not to mention maintaining it, utilizing it, keeping it up to date and ensuring its validity. Business Transaction Management solutions enable organizations to better utilize and maintain their CMDB by filling in the gaps that occur in real time. BTM solutions are the only solutions that can link the degradation of a business service to the problematic IT component. This enables the location of the relevant CMDB data needed in order to resolve the problem.

BTM and Real User Measurements (RUM)

A complete BTM solution cannot ignore the “first mile” – the segment from the end-user to the data center. Real User Measurements (RUM) should be part of any complete BTM solution, since the origin of every user related transaction, is at the user.

Enterprises must have the ability to measure the level of service that their users are actually receiving - from their own desktop - and provide fast answers when performance degradation occurs.

Whether response times are degrading, or transaction failures are proliferating, IT staff must provide fast answers.

RUM must address two separate needs:

• Web based applications used by remote users at their home or on a mobile device

• Internal corporate users with desktop or Citrix based applications

For home users, installation on the home user desktop is usually not an option. BTM must provide the technology for measuring latencies from the home user’s browser, without installation on the desktop.

Enterprise users, tend to use numerous applications, some based on fat clients (no browser) installed on their desktop. In such cases a local agent has to be deployed to capture every transaction issued by the user in order to measure its latency and successful completion.

Agent based RUM solutions also provide inventory metrics – how many applications are actually being used, what applications are installed and executed within the user’s operating system, and so forth.

BTM Benefits Both Business and IT

Business Transaction Management is becoming a strategic investment for any enterprise since it sits at heart of IT management.

With a complete BTM solution, every single transaction is captured and traced; from the moment the end user hits a button in any application, be it browser or desktop based, to the last CICS program call in the Mainframe.

Complete BTM solutions do this within a production environment - are always turned on - in order to assure the reliability of complex modern applications.

The Benefits

BTM enables IT to align with business requirements by making sure every business transaction is processed successfully in a timely manner along with putting every IT process within the datacenter in the context of an end user activated transaction.

End-to-end transaction tracing enables full accountability for every transaction processed within the IT topology. Whether it spans through proxys, load balancers, web servers, application servers - based on J2EE/.NET, C/C++ or even proprietary home grown applications (e.g Cobol) - down to message brokers/hubs, databases and legacy systems within the Mainframe.

No tier is ignored, no transaction is lost. Real time alerts are propagated - proactively - from the moment a performance degredation starts to occur. Root-cause-analysis can always be done in a scientific and accurate manner.

By creating a Performance Management Database (PMDB) – IT staff can now speak to each other in a common language. No more talking about packets, HTTP, SQL, or CICS – but a single transaction that encapsulates all relevant information on how it is doing, where, and when.

Automatic topology mapping is a byproduct of any BTM solution. By tracing the transaction along the IT topology, a complete map of IT relations – what logical component is interacting with what – emerges. At a granularity that has never before been available. Every web server instance, every message broker, every database and every external application that is part of a transaction flow will be located in the relevant path within the topology map. Real time measurements allow constant monitoring of latencies between different tiers, and actual transaction volumes.

Proactive management – Proactive resource allocation management per transaction instance, or in other words prioritization of transactions according to business context, or blocking of transactions/transaction segments according to security requirements, are all part of the potential of the BTM solution.

Do not Confuse BTM with Traditional Tools!

Even experienced IT professionals can confuse traditional monitoring tools and the newer generation of transaction monitoring tools. In today's market, all of the marketing messages are the same so it is very hard to differentiate between the old and the new. The following provides insight into the difference which needs to be understood before considering the purchase of any monitoring tool.

Disclaimer: There is nothing wrong with traditional tools, they do their job well and all of the vendors that have been listed are good competent vendors. As with any technology, newer generations tend to improve on the old ones. Additionally, BTM has yet to fully mature and vendors of traditional tools are bound to jump to the newer generation at some point.

Traditional Monitoring:

Traditional Tools monitor the performance of each component individually and display all of these metrics on a "single pane of glass".

"End to end" performance monitoring means that you can see the performance of every component in a single centralized console. So for example you see the resource consumption of your servers, the threads that your application is running, the throughput of your network components and the calls to your database all displayed in their own section.

When traditional tools monitor transactions what they do is pick up various segments of transactions throughout the data center without stitching them together into one full transaction flow.

For example: The database monitor picks up all of the SQL statements that it sees and displays them on the central dashboard along with their response times, while the real user monitor picks up all of the requests that are sent out to the datacenter and displays them on the same dashboard along with their response times. Now say that an application slow down occurs and both monitors (including the application server monitor which was not mentioned) are showing erratic response times for various "transactions" – the real user measurements only show that the user is experiencing a problem but cannot show where the problem is within the datacenter – and the silo specific tools do not have the context of the CICS program names, SQL statements, web service calls which are showing erratic performance. The IT professional is stuck with a glut of confusing information on the dashboard that is not connected.

How to identify traditional monitoring tools: Vendors
that provide these tools typically sell them as suites. What they will do is develop or acquire separate server monitoring tools, network monitoring tools, application performance management tools and real user measurement tools - and then offer them bundled as an end to end package. These tools tend to be pricey and hard to implement not to mention their limited visibility due to the lack of correlation between tiers. On the up side they can provide more thorough metrics within the tier – that is why the new generation seeks to complement the traditional tools as opposed to replacing them.

Some examples of vendors: Opnet, Compuware, Quest, NetScout, CA, IBM

The New Generation of Monitoring Tools:

The new tools connect every single process within the datacenter to a click of a user within the application that initiated all of the activity within the datacenter.

"End to End" means that the user request and the related activity within the proxy, web server, app server, database server, MQ and mainframe are all connected as a single transaction instance.

The resource consumption at each component can still be seen – but at the granularity of a single transaction segment.

For Example: If service levels are starting to degrade, this new generation of tools not only pick up the performance degradation that the user is experiencing but they also immediately know what is causing the specific degradation down the line.

Some examples of vendors: Optier, Correlsense, HP Transaction Vision, SeaNet