Centerity BSM & IT Performance Analytics Platform (Use Case #5 – Creating Transparency & A Common Purpose)

Best Practices in Performance Analytics for Big Data Environments (SAP HANA, Hadoop, Enterprise Applications)

Use Case #5 – Creating Transparency & A Common Purpose

Synopsis:

  • A Single Truth
  • The Power of Sharing Information and Goals

Use Case Overview

Many organizations are challenged due to technical specialization within its departments. This leads to siloed goals aligned only with the technology layer of immediate concern.

To make organizations more service and application centric, IT needs to share information on organizational goals and service level status. By sharing information across technical and functional domains, people have better insights into performance, availability, and continuity. This inspires employees to think about service and business value and less about their individual domains in isolation. Centerity can be that single point of truth for the entire organization providing one view of the entire stack so everyone is working from the same baseline and towards common goals.

Executive Dashboards and BSM views highlight organizational goals and deliverables that transcend individual technologies and priorities.

Technical Overview

Product Screen 11: Live Visual Layout

The Hidden Threat to Your Data – Tracking Data Protection as a Business Service

Millions of dollars are spent each year to manage and monitor IT infrastructure. Different organizations often deploy competing or redundant tools to achieve the same objective within their own unique settings.  Every day exciting new technologies are being announced and they seem to get the lion’s share of attention, while a critical process like data protection and disaster recovery sits like an island at the remote reaches of daily operations. Most IT departments focus their efforts on assuring uptime for the applications, network, and infrastructure that customers interact with every day, so data protection is often neglected and sometimes forgotten.

Centerity Systems is different, making it easy for business owners to encapsulate all IT components (software and hardware) within their critical business services. Many monitoring solutions overlook data protection during performance planning as it doesn’t seem to be part of the operational mainstream. But data protection has a significant impact on the overall SLA of the technology stack, especially when it comes to ensuring that information is available whenever it is required. Centerity works differently, evaluating relevant KPIs within an analytical model for each business service, allowing organizations to know whether or not the technology stack is achieving required goals, including data protection. By delivering real-time, actionable intelligence to operations every day Centerity’s customers are fully-protected as the often-overlooked component of data protection is easily incorporated into their business service management goals. Data protection is a necessary component of every business service, proving the old industry adage, “Never underestimate the recovery potential of a station wagon full of tapes driving away from the disaster.”  That station wagon has been replaced by WAN and Cloud services but the premise remains valid because ensuring data protection is up-and-operating remains mission critical.

The paradigm shift toward de-centralized backup has made the process of monitoring and management more complicated. With shifting locations, storage and transport methodologies, it is a bigger challenge to correlate how data protection is impacting the business services. Next-generation data protection platforms like Rubrik, Cohesity, and Acronis have robust APIs available where all manner of key metrics are available for business SLA management. Bringing data protection into the same BSM framework as all other mission-critical components ensures the safety and reliability of critical data by leveraging Centerity’s analytical model for measuring business service health.

Isn’t it time to stop treating data protection and disaster recovery like a remote island? Treating the data protection process like the rest of your vital business services ensures your data is always secure and always accessible. Centerity’s BSM platform is designed to help you achieve this goal.



Centerity Unified Monitoring & Performance Analytics Platform (Use Case #4 – Reducing OPEX)

Best Practices in Monitoring and Performance Analytics for Big Data Environments (SAP HANA, Hadoop, Enterprise Applications)

Use Case #4 – Reducing OPEX (Operating Expense)

Synopsis:

  • Historical Graphs
  • Utilization Reports

Use Case Overview

Organizations don’t have time to manage multiple tools that each cover a single technology silo. First, these single tools are expensive to deploy, maintain, and require a specialist for each technology layer. Second, as these siloed tools don’t share information, these can’t do the cross-correlation necessary to provide predictive analytics on impact and trends.

As big data remains a major concern for IT leaders, the need for a unified platform, that can cover the entire environment end-to-end, begin to emerge .This unified platform will have a common GUI to all features and a common operational approach. This makes the performance analytics platform easy to use and maintain requiring fewer specialized resources while providing the proactive, operational analytics to be more effective. Centerity is such a platform with a vast selection of “out of the box” profiles and templates as well as discovery options that make the platform extensible and efficient to operate. Furthermore, as Centerity records performance over time, Usage Summary Reports can provide information on historic performance against service levels highlighting which technologies are causing the greatest degradation of service and why focusing management’s attention on these.

This unified approach can contribute substantially to reducing MTTR (Mean Time to Repair) and OPEX.

Technical Overview

Product Screen 9: Historical Graphs

History Report

Product Screen 10: Usage Summary Reports

Usage Summary Report

“Business Service Management” Are you there? Some questions to ask yourself.

Business Service Management is an enabling technology at the intersection of business and IT alignment. The days of IT organizations operating with only an understanding of the IT perspective are quickly passing. Business Service Management brings the business perspective and context to the IT environment. Business Service Management solutions help IT understand how their infrastructure and technology investments support the business and how business benefits from that IT infrastructure and technology. (See dougmclure.net for Entire Article)

These flows look pretty but are they really helpful to a VP of Sales when his order processing is not working. How does he know what technology is the root of the problem the impact of the remediating options?

Does this look like your technology stack? Or are you not sure?

More importantly, from a BSM perspective, do you know which technologies make up critical business processes?

And therein lies our first problem. Who has the time to document all of these technologies and keep up with changes as well as seed the “BSM” so if something does happen, everything is up to date?

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And to take it to a more tactical level. How does the complexity of this order entry process match up with yours back at the office? Can you match up each discrete step with the technologies that enable it so that when problems are identified either in the process or a technology component, you know the impact on the other side! Problem two!

If you were identifying with the complexity and challenges of relating technology to business processes you are not alone. We live in an ever more connected world with highly heterogeneous environments. How many of these technologies are a part of your world? Problem three, what platform can manage these diverse technologies?

I am missing some but then this is all I could fit on one page. Add another page for IoT protocols!

BSM is achievable and we’d like to show it to you in person.

Centerity Business Service Management provides service level roll-up by:

  • Business process
  • Across all layers
  • Across all deployment models
  • Across all departments, organizations, geographies, customers

Centerity replaces silo monitoring with service level management and provides a single-pane-of-glass for end-to-end BSM making it ideal for complex heterogeneous environments, including customers running SAP applications. The solution includes integrations and touchpoints for ALL of the technologies listed above, including the IoT protocols we missed.

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