May 30 2008 10:20PM GMT
Posted by: Ryan Shopp
DataCenter
Well, first off I wish to apologize for the lack of original content during this hectic month in my personal life (aka birth of first child). It’s obvious when I look back and see that I only crafted a single original piece this month. This also makes it kind of pointless to actually do a “month in review” since a majority of my posts were links to news & articles I was able to consume over the month in between the moments of chaos.
So instead of using this post to simply apologize and say I’ll do better next month, I thought I would take the time to list off some items I have on my to do list for the month ahead.
- HP Software, round 2 - had a talk back in late April with a product executive over the performance oriented products….time to update the original write-up
- Part 5 , the final installment of the Performance/Availability vs. Analytics discussion thread
- An update to the Data Center Automation Blueprint based on the that 5 part thread
- Further discussion and impressions from my backlog of vendor briefing notes I’ve accumulated that include (in alphabetical order); CITTIO, eG innovation, GridApp Systems, InfoVista, Managed Objects, Mazu Networks & Nimsoft
I also thought it would be a good opportunity to ask you the reader to throw out some topics to ponder, investigate and discuss in the month(s) ahead. This blog is now going on 8 months in age and it dawned upon me that I haven’t recently asked what you want to hear/talk about. So please leave a comment (either anonymous or otherwise) on things you would like to see more dialog around.
May 20 2008 10:47PM GMT
Posted by: Ryan Shopp
DataCenter,
Integrien,
Managed Objects,
Firescope,
Opnet
Sorry for the delay but family time called as we were blessed with a baby boy a couple weeks ago. So back on track; in part one we hit data collection, part two talked about applying analytics and business/service mapping and part three we hit on evolving the Data Center Automation Blueprint from Performance & Availability to Service Assurance. So what does that mean for analytics?
Well, here is where it gets tricky. I believe their are two types of analytics that are sometimes being confused or blended together…
Type 1: Is Per functional category - meaning, software automation that uses algorithms, automated analysis, etc focused on one of the 3 functional categories (e.g., Performance & Availability, Configuration & Change, Security & Protection).
Cross functional category.
Type 2: Is Cross-functional - like Process Orchestration & Resource Reconciliation, you have a roll-up aggregated view of metrics that are mapped to the business (beyond IT specific metrics). This is also commonly called Business Service Management by most definitions.
Some quick examples….companies like Integrien, Opnet fall into type 1, while companies like Managed Objects, Firescope map closer to type 2. Now this all gets very confusing as there are overlaps where vendors who do mostly type 1 analytics and some type 2 analytics claim both and even call themselves BSM vendors…meanwhile, the same occurs where mostly type 2 analytics (aka BSM) also claim to do some type 1. So I’m not a BSM guru but I do exchange blogs/emails with some and would love to hear them chime in on this thread. Based on this feedback and some further reading over at my favorite BSM blog, my next post will wrap up this series and I’ll update the Data Center Automation Blueprint.
