Benefits of MIDAS for HP Operations Manager

Transcription

1 Whitepaper Benefits of MIDAS for HP Operations Manager How MIDAS enables an IT organization to unleash the power of HPOM by balancing people, process and technology in IT monitoring.

2 Content Introduction... 3 Productivity Gains... 3 Delegation of Tasks in HPOM Administration... 3 Configuration, Change and Release Management in HPOM... 4 Automation of Administrative Tasks in HPOM... 4 Quality Improvements... 5 Transparency of Information... 5 Desired State Management... 6 Instant Analysis... 6 Auditing at IT Infrastructure Level... 7 Contact... 8 About BLUE ELEPHANT SYSTEMS GmbH... 8 Copyright Statement... 8 BLUE ELEPHANT SYSTEMS GmbH Page 2 / 8

3 Introduction The MIDAS Product Family for HP Operations Manager (HPOM) provides a solid and complete solution for the administration of HPOM. Each member of the MIDAS Product Family addresses specific aspects of the lifecycle in HPOM administration. Most people think of IT operations management and IT monitoring as a particular set of technologies, such as agents, management server systems, policies or scripts. This technology-first mindset provides only temporary fixes in an increasingly complex IT operations environment. To increase the efficiency, effectiveness and quality in IT operations in a sustainable manner, an IT monitoring solution must balance three fundamental aspects: people, process and technology. The general focus of the MIDAS Product Family is to enable an IT organization to unleash the power of HPOM by matching tool capability to established processes. MIDAS can also be used by an organization to design new processes to fully leverage tool capability in IT monitoring. Productivity Gains Delegation of Tasks in HPOM Administration Self-service monitoring and delegation of administrative tasks are rather new practices in IT operations. Typically changes in IT management and IT monitoring require dedicated personal to facilitate customer service interactions. Therefore many organizations in IT operations would like to delegate administrative tasks to the appropriate application specialist, group of specialists or service owner. Some IT organizations, for example, have the need to involve the Oracle database administrator in the development and maintenance of the Oracle policies in HPOM. In other IT organizations it is common that HPOM related change requests are communicated via phone and . This manual process is not only error prone, but as it requires the unnecessary attention of HPOM specialists, it also wastes the time of valuable resources. MIDAS Configurator adds an administrative user role model which allows the delegation of administrative tasks in HPOM. Using this model, it is possible to define workspaces reflecting the responsibilities of HPOM administrators. The workspaces provide HPOM customers with means to guarantee that an HPOM administrator is able to implement changes for his area of responsibility only, and nothing beyond this. MIDAS Outage Manager provides HPOM customers with an easy to use interface to outages. The software enables them to delegate the BLUE ELEPHANT SYSTEMS GmbH Page 3 / 8

4 responsibility for defining and changing maintenance windows to the application and service organization, while the consequences are reflected in HPOM automatically. MIDAS Administrator introduces Excel2Policy enabling roundtrip management of HPOM configuration using Microsoft Excel. Excel2Policy does not require any in-depth know-how on HPOM concepts. This feature enables application and service owners to maintain parameters like the frequency of monitoring, monitor thresholds or the text of an HPOM message. Configuration, Change and Release Management in HPOM Adequate configuration, change and release management is an important part of establishing and maintaining consistency and integrity in IT operations. This is also true for the HPOM configuration and instrumentation. The lack of modern configuration, change and release management in HPOM is one of the major barriers to the deployment of reliable, robust and correct IT monitoring. In IT monitoring release management is about planning, scheduling, and controlling everything needed to monitor a given managed object, such as application, server system or IT service. In addition release management involves development, testing, assigning and deployment of the appropriate instrumentation packages. The goal is to ensure that IT operations delivers managed IT services required by the business, while protecting the reliability and safety of IT operations. MIDAS Configurator adds versioning, search/locate and auditing. These features enable IT organizations to handle changes to the HPOM configuration systematically. MIDAS Administrator introduces process oriented HPOM administration. By adding release management capabilities, HPOM configuration items can be packaged and controlled through their lifecycle. The packages may consist of policies, scripts, user profiles, managed node related information, SPIs, custom SPIs, documentation, and arbitrary instrumentation and files. Automation of Administrative Tasks in HPOM Automation is a key tactic to do more with less and to optimize productivity. This is especially true in labor-intensive organizations such as IT operations. Traditionally the administration of HPOM often requires human processing and manual steps which contribute to the high workload in IT operations. Therefore automation interfaces are BLUE ELEPHANT SYSTEMS GmbH Page 4 / 8

5 highly requested enhancements on almost every HPOM customer s wish list. MIDAS is able to automate even complex tasks and processes. The HPOM provisioning process, for example, consists of steps like agent onboarding and deployment, policy assignment and deployment. To handle this process manually, it s time-consuming and expensive. Using MIDAS, it is possible to automate the process of preparing instrumentation and equipping an IT environment with the appropriate configuration to allow for the provisioning of new managed IT services. MIDAS provides HPOM customers with multiple means to automate tasks in HPOM administration. First of all MIDAS is able to manage multiple HPOM server instances from central points. Centralized administration helps HPOM customers to reduce duplication of effort. Routine tasks like policy downloads, archive files, transfer archive, unarchive files and upload policies can be automated. MIDAS also adds APIs, CLIs and web services enabling HPOM customers to move towards lights out HPOM operation. For instance MIDAS can be used to automate the validation of an agent environment. In addition MIDAS Synchronizer automates the process of synchronizing HPOM configuration. Synchronization is very important for HPOM customers which use server pooling. MIDAS Automator automates the creation and maintenance of service trees. Quality Improvements Transparency of Information Having faith in the value of great documentation is usually the result of doing it the hard way for too long. Poor documentation is very, very expensive. This becomes painfully evident once you learn to connect the impact of poor documentation to your bottom line. Despite the fact that the importance and value of documentation has always been understood in IT, the reality in IT operations tells another story. It is rather time consuming, cumbersome and error prone to create and maintain documentation on HPOM instrumentation. This is one of the major reasons for the lack of documentation and transparency in the HPOM domain. In today's era, where IT operations organizations are changing frequently, it is important that all are backed by the right documentation. BLUE ELEPHANT SYSTEMS GmbH Page 5 / 8

6 The ability to automatically generate documentation on HPOM configuration items is a key enabler for collaboration in IT operations and monitoring. Therefore this feature contributes to both; productivity gains and quality improvements. Audit documentation, for instance, is an essential element of audit quality. Although documentation alone does not guarantee audit quality, the process of preparing sufficient and appropriate documentation contributes to the quality of an audit. MIDAS Configurator automates the generation of documentation on HPOM instrumentation and configuration. MIDAS generates documentation of applications, policies and nodes at various levels of detail and in different output formats such as PDF, Excel or RTF. In addition the administrative user role model provided by MIDAS Configurator can be used to create a read-only user. This enables a stakeholder to interface with his part of the HPOM configuration. Desired State Management One of the most error prone and cumbersome tasks in HPOM is to ensure that everything is monitored as it is supposed to be. A single HPOM policy or script, which is missing or disabled on one of the HPOM managed nodes, can cause a significant failure not to be detected in sufficient time. Therefore it is important to be able to verify the state of the HPOM environment. MIDAS Administrator introduces desired state management to HPOM. This is a simple and effective approach in quality management. MIDAS Administrator enables HPOM administrators to check the state of the HPOM managed environment against the definition of a desired state. Any deviation of the current state from the desired is visible and will be reported. Instant Analysis Monitoring services, applications and server systems costs time and money, but the relationship of effort and value in HPOM is complex. Most organizations recognize the need to analyze the rich management information captured by HPOM. Using traditional reporting methods and Excel spreadsheets, exporting and analyzing the runtime and configuration information inside HPOM, can be a time-consuming and often daunting task. IT infrastructure managers are asked to make timely and accurate decisions, that are based on the past performance and behavior of the IT environment and the respective staff as well as on future trends and directives. To make effective decisions, IT infrastructure managers have to analyze the management information captured by tools like HPOM. The data, that IT infrastructure managers review, determines the quality of their decisions. They must be able to BLUE ELEPHANT SYSTEMS GmbH Page 6 / 8

7 maintain a certain degree of momentum, when querying the data. An answer to one question usually leads to additional questions and to review the data. Simple data stores do not successfully support this type of querying. MIDAS Analyzer introduces OLAP based analysis of HPOM configuration and runtime information. It enables HPOM customers to identify hotspots in terms of inefficiency and lack of quality in HPOM. MIDAS Analyzer allows for tasks such as message reduction, message storm analysis and message delay analysis, analysis of message forwarding and notification, and configuration cleanup. MIDAS Analyzer helps to find instant answers to questions like which policy has caused the highest workload measured in number of incidents opened or which automatic or operator action has caused the most fixing effort, because it fails on specific platforms very often. Therefore MIDAS Analyzer is able to reveal hidden trends, inconsistencies, and risks in HPOM. Auditing at IT Infrastructure Level An IT infrastructure audit is about the formal verification and validation of the quality and effectiveness of IT infrastructure controls to support the overall business control objectives. Without the proper understanding and appreciation of the major changes in an IT infrastructure management tool like HPOM, an organization may fail to meet their auditor s expectations. MIDAS Configurator adds advanced auditing features enabling HPOM administrators to manage changes within HPOM configuration information. They retain the overall responsibility, are able to track which changes have occurred and can easily revert to a previous version if necessary. MIDAS auditing also enables HPOM administrators to quickly find the context within which changes have been made. This feature allows, for example, documenting all the changes made for a specific change request. Advanced comparison functionality enables HPOM administrators to quickly verify changes, and to push these out to production machines. MIDAS Configurator introduces auditing for all HPOM related changes. Using the MIDAS audit trail, HPOM customers can analyze and understand changes and assess risks, efficiency and quality in HPOM. BLUE ELEPHANT SYSTEMS GmbH Page 7 / 8

8 Contact If you would like to know more about the MIDAS Product Family or are interested in a demo, please visit send an to sales@blue-elephant-systems.com or give us a call on About BLUE ELEPHANT SYSTEMS GmbH Blue Elephant Systems GmbH is a specialist in IT monitoring solutions and in the development of innovative IT management solutions. As a partner for projects in all industry sectors, Blue Elephant Systems has extensive experience and long standing relationships with major companies. Alongside enterprise tools in the field of IT monitoring, the company develops and runs IT monitoring and IT management training workshops on behalf of Hewlett-Packard. Over 100 companies of the Fortune Global 500 list rely on the expertise and the consulting, support and migration services of Blue Elephant Systems. Blue Elephant Systems GmbH is registered as a limited liability company (LLC) and is located in Stuttgart, Germany. The U.S. subsidiary, Blue Elephant Systems Inc., is located in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Copyright Statement Written by Joachim Hörnle, August Copyright 2013 by Blue Elephant Systems GmbH. All rights reserved. No part of this document may be copied, reproduced, translated to another language, transferred to electronic media, or transferred into machine readable format without the prior written consent on Blue Elephant Systems GmbH. The information contained in this material is subject to change without notice. All product names are the property of their respective trademark or service mark holders. BLUE ELEPHANT SYSTEMS and the BLUE ELEPHANT SYSTEMS logo are registered in the US Patent & Trademark Office. All other product or service names are the property of their respective owners. If you have any questions about these terms please contact us via at info@blue-elephantsystems.com. BLUE ELEPHANT SYSTEMS GmbH, Zettachring 2, Stuttgart, Germany. BLUE ELEPHANT SYSTEMS GmbH Page 8 / 8