Do CMDBs Need Business Transaction Management?
Do CMDBs Need Business Transaction Management
?
To answer this question, it may be helpful to look at the history of CMDB, its goals and ITIL, the standard that has already become standard practice in Europe and is gaining momentum in the U.S.
Configuration Management Database (CMDB) has been around since early 2000, but it didn't begin to take off until 2007. The problem was everyone had a different approach to configuration management. The typical solution had always been similar to slapping a Band-Aid on a cut. If a problem occurred, someone wrote a patch to fix the problem. This patch would precipitate another problem, so another patch would be implemented. Every Band-Aid tended to cascade into more issues that required more Band-Aids. Persisting all of these changes in a database seemed like a good idea, but few were doing it as initially there were no pervasive standards for change management until the arrival of ITIL.
ITIL began emerging at the same time as CMDB. It was seen as a way to help accomplish the goals of CMDB, "a practical, no-nonsense framework for identifying, planning, delivering and supporting IT services" to the business community. The goal of ITIL is to develop a systematic and professional approach to IT services so that problem management follows dependable processes, rather than continuing to propagate a Band-aid approach that only generates more IT challenges.
How Business Transaction Management Empowers both CMDB and ITIL Goals
Enter business transaction management (BTM). Both of these IT approaches, which clearly complement each other, require discovery. Automated discovery is one of the basic components of BTM, because without a clear understanding of what the actual configuration of an IT system is, it is impossible to build a configuration or to manage it. And it must be automated as these systems are highly volatile and any manual effort to document their configurations would be out of date almost immediately.
The first layer of discovery begins with discovering the dependencies that exist at the application level. At this level of discovery, dependencies between applications, generally based on port dependencies, are identified and uploaded into the CMDB. However, this approach is somewhat coarse presenting a static image based on the last time a discovery was run. Unfortunately, it does nothing to document the actual behavior or the running applications, their transactions.
CMDB planners need complete visibility into both application infrastructure and application activities in order to provide service support, service delivery, security management, application management and software asset management. A BTM solution must provide more than a static image of the IT infrastructure. It needs to create a behavioral image that recognizes the separate active application dependencies.
There are two types of business transaction solutions on the marketthose that use a complex event processing (CEP) engine at the core of their BTM product and those that expand an existing management tool by attaching CEP engine to the existing tool. While both methods will provide automatic population of the CMDB, a BTM solution that has an integrated core CEP engine offers advantages.
An integrated solution with CEP at its core not only has capabilities for harvesting data from the local environment, it is designed to import, in real-time, data from external sources. This aggregate data set enables CEP to power a broader, more accurate, multi-dimensional view of all the IT applications, transactions and middleware making problem prediction and prevention more accurate and effective. A business transaction management solution with an integrated complex event processing engine becomes the more ideal real-time data source to populate the CMDB with.
Changes are inevitable within IT. Increasing complexity is also the norm. Having a tool that enables smooth implementation of changes to the IT configuration is essential. Ongoing evaluation of the applications and transactions interacting across application layers and the ability to maintain a trouble-free IT services is vital, especially as businesses grow.
According to Hewlett Packard's website, "Nastel's Certified Smart Plug-in for MQ extends HP Software to help the most sophisticated IT infrastructures in the world leverage the enterprise strengths with the most complete management functionality available for WebSphere MQ (WMQ)."
HP Software also reports that AutoPilot's Smart Plug-in for MQ supports ITIL by:Easily linking and correlating events in IT infrastructure, integration applications and business applicationsRapidly generating customer-specific policies and templatesHolding overhead costs down by consolidating WebSphere events such as WMQ, WBI Message Broker, WMQ Workflow, WebSphere Interchange Server, etc.Mitigating the risks that business processes will be unavailable due to WMQ or other application infrastructure failuresExtending visibility so managing availability, status, and functioning of all WMQ components and transactions is possible from one point of reference Reducing the time it takes to isolate and resolve issues across the complete WMQ network.This improves operational excellence. AutoPilot business transaction management capabilities go far beyond WebSphere MQ and include TIBCO RV/EMS, J2EE, .Net and CICS Transaction Server. With tools that provide business transaction management from a problem predicting as well as resolving position, AutoPilot is an IT technology solution that complements CMDB and ITIL goals. In fact, AutoPilot is a tool that helps make CMDB effective, especially when beginning to implement ITIL Problem Management.http://www.articlesbase.com/information-technology-articles/do-cmdbs-need-business-transaction-management-3711814.html
Cash In 1 Hour - Gain Instant Approval For Needful Finance Business Stationery - Giving Dynamic Direction To Any Business/product Launch Call Logger-helps Keep Your Business Away From Further Disputes Targeted Business List- An Effective Way to Get More Customers On Lead Generation and a Business Database The BEST Cash Gifting System -cash gifting system You Can Have Your Own Online Home Business In Under 24 Hours How Can Seo Help Your Business Grow? Dubai Real Estate Business Is It Still Charming? Europe Asia Business School (eabs) Launches Mumbai Campus In Partnership With Guruinc Why Is A Good Affiliate Business Opportunity A Lucrative Enterprise Do You Really Need A Technology Management Service For Your Business? Take Control of Your Business with Pay-Per-Leads