Performance and Availability vs. Analytics - Part 5 of 5

Finally, the last installment of this 5 part series (which was originally a ? part series). This last segment took a little more time then expected to get to. These days you can find BSM definitions and products all over the place. So the question I’ve been asking myself is BSM different then Analytics (as defined in our Data Center Automation Blueprint).

First up, here are some of the best definitions of Business Service Management:

• Business Service Management is about enabling IT operations and support staff with empowering information that helps them to understand the impact on the business in business terms
• Business Service Management is the integration and consolidation of systems management with business management
• Business Service Management is about understanding the business perspective also known as the “top down perspective”. What value, revenue, cost, churn, ROI, etc. can be associated with the IT services, applications, processes, transactions, etc. being delivered and supported by your IT organization?
• Business Service Management is an IT operations management software product that links the availability and performance status of IT infrastructure components to business-oriented IT services that enable business processes
• Business Service Management metric might look at the dollar impact of server downtime as opposed to an ITSM (IT-focused) metric that identifies the percent uptime for the same server
• First-generation BSM solutions offer:
  • a way of defining and describing business processes;
  • discovery (partly manual, partly automatic) of IT service components;
  • mapped (partly manual, partly automatic) business processes to IT components;
  • adapters to other infrastructure management products;
  • Measure end-to-end performance for business processes;
  • Measure the business impact of downtime;
  • analyz the root causes of incidents resulting in downtime;
  • provided dashboard views so that selected target audiences can combine relevant information.

In part 4, I defined the Data Center Automation Blueprint’s analytics category as “a roll-up aggregation view of metrics that are mapped to the business metrics and goals.”

So from what I’ve heard/read etc, Analytics is a major component/subset of BSM…but BSM isn’t specifically or just analytics.   BUT, if you combine (from the DCAB) Resource Reconciliation, Process Orchestration and Analytics into one bundle things are looking very, very close to BSM as I read it.  With that said, going forward we will continue to watch/discuss BSM and it’s specific applicability to the data center.

To jump back to any of the previous topics in this series follow the below links:

Part one covered data collection
Part two covered applying analytics and business/service mapping to those collection points
Part three covered evolving the Data Center Automation Blueprint from Performance & Availability to Service Assurance.
Part four coverd the term analytics and how it’s applied as a standalone category and within categories of the DCAB.

Next action item would be a couple key updates to the Data Center Automation Blueprint.