Centerity is proud to be Lenovo’s featured software solution at SAPPHIRE 2018, Orlando.

We welcome you to join us at Booth #558 to learn how Lenovo and Centerity can improve service levels (SLA) and customer satisfaction (CSAT) for SAP HANA environments.

The presentation will occur on Tuesday, June 5, at 12:15 PM, and will show how Business Service Management (BSM) has become a reality,

providing real-time performance analytics for specific business processes that cross the entire IT stack (applications, infrastructure, operating systems, Cloud, Big Data, etc.). 

Kamran Amini, GM & VP, Data Center Infrastructure at Lenovo said, “The combination of Centerity and Lenovo solutions enables us to deliver the best experience for SAP HANA customers by providing complete, end-to-end performance analytics for complex IT environments. When combined with Lenovo systems, Centerity’s unique capabilities for monitoring and managing data center landscapes, including SAP HANA environments, helps ensure Lenovo customers experience maximum performance, reliability and return from their investment.”

Centerity will present a performance optimization use case using Lenovo’s SAP HANA Vora-powered Crime Scene Investigation solution.

 

We would be delighted to meet you at SAPPHIRE to discuss best practices for aligning technology and business environments (P&L), while also improving SLA and CSAT.

You can schedule a meeting time here:

Here is a sneak peek for Centerity’s offer on SAPPIRENOW:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOq2XWdaqOM

 

“We’ve deployed several solutions to track our technology assets, manage SLA, and align IT with Business, but our efforts went very poorly. We receive very little return for our investment”.

To properly support corporate objectives, IT professionals need to align service levels (SLAs) with business objectives. Although achieving this alignment can be difficult, when properly implemented the resulting solution (called Business Service Management – BSM) is critically important for technology-driven businesses. An effective BSM solution delivers a consolidated view of every technology asset and how each one affects SLA, providing the insights needed to reduce operations costs and improve uptime. Unfortunately, traditional approaches for developing BSM solutions have repeatedly failed, causing Gartner to claim that “BSM Is Dead”. This blog will start the important process of disputing Gartner’s claim because the truth is, BSM is not dead. In fact, only a stand-alone BSM solution can consistently align technology and business objectives. From our perspective it would have been better for Gartner to say, “Traditional BSM is dead but a fresh approach can bring a new BSM generation.”

Traditionally, IT departments and system integrators develop custom BSM solutions based on one of many different technologies: a configuration management database (CMDB); a fault management console; application performance management (APM); data analytics, etc. Using a CMDB (inventory-based) or fault management (alert-based) system as the foundation for BSM is a challenge because neither of these systems is designed to evaluate service levels or optimize business value. Data analytics and APM also struggle to deliver the promise of BSM as they fail to recognize cause-effect and relationships that exist within (and across) business services. Finally, because traditional BSM solutions are tailor-made they tend to be “fragile”, requiring constant attention to support the frequent changes, revisions and updates that occur in a typical IT environment (i.e., new applications, deployments, devices, and configurations that get implemented over time).

A lot of companies that pursue a custom-built BSM solution, find that making/ maintaining integrations across multiple systems (that often change) is only a fraction of the cost. The biggest risk for traditional BSM projects is scope-creep, where different departments suggest additional “required” functionality. Each of these new capabilities has time, cost, and quality implications, and most companies struggle to agree on urgent, important, and nice-to-have features. The result is a never-ending BSM development cycle that fails to deliver the promised business results. This experience has convinced IT departments that building a BSM solution is difficult and costly (in terms of both budget and reputation) and instead they fall back on service desk metrics to approximate SLA measurements.

Building a true BSM solution is challenging because it is difficult to define and model dependencies and relationships across multiple technology layers and business processes, and because it is difficult to maintain a custom-built system over time. The result is that IT departments have largely given up trying to deliver true BSM solutions because they don’t deliver much value to IT (aside from faster troubleshooting and fewer false positives). However, the primary objective of BSM solutions is not to improve IT, it is to improve the overall business while making IT better. Traditional approach solutions (such as Fault Management) fail to deliver value at the service level, struggle to properly correlate events with root causes, and lack comprehensive monitoring and analysis. Because so many companies pursued custom-built solutions they failed to realize the promises of Service Management and have been forced to bridge the gap by throwing more IT analysts and administrators at the problem. If this is the case, what’s the resolution?

With so much noise around IT performance analytics, we will have a future blog that goes deeper into the challenges of delivering a true BSM/SLA solution. Until then I invite you to contact us to learn how Centerity improves the cost, time, and quality of your business operations, including full-stack BSM and performance analytics. We would be happy to share how our customers benefit from a single-pane-of-glass that allows decision makers to measure end-to-end performance and correlate it to SLA, bringing a whole new meaning to the term Business Service Management. Gartner’s obituary was a bit premature because BSM isn’t dead, it’s just getting started.

 

Enterprises and service providers constantly worry about loss of time, money and unscheduled downtime and look for new or better ways to overcome the conflicting demands for higher performance with lower costs.

when problems do occur (and they always do), system administrators need to avoid long, drawn-out processes of fault identification and root cause analysis. To increase performance, IT pros need agile solutions that can redirect applications and reallocate storage and computing resources to ensure a reliable, scalable platform. Furthermore, to meet or exceed service level agreements (SLA), IT experts need to deliver real time reports and trend analysis that will enable the IT team to be proactive, identify maintenance requirements, and document the business impact.

A Closer Look

Take for example an IT project we were recently working on with an international manufacturer of defense systems, whose equipment often integrates with high-performance computing platforms. As part of a client contract, their team had been asked to develop and install a Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), a pre-loaded and pre-configured server rack consisting of hardware and software for compute, storage, networking, virtualization, containers, data streaming components and a range of other new technologies. A crucial part of the project included having tools that would ensure consistent performance and reliability over time.

The vendor needed a way to evaluate the entire HCI system (all software applications, networking, and infrastructure components) that would recognize problems in real-time, isolate root causes, identify trends and foresee impending issues before they caused performance degradation and downtime. Furthermore, they needed a solution that displayed the “health status” for each business process so that system administrators could recognize the operational implications of various problems, and assign the right resources to solve the most critical issues.

How to Monitor The Entire IT System and Associate Each Layer of Technology To Individual Business Processes?

Traditional infrastructure and operations (I&O) tools alone lack the comprehensive coverage of these various IT domains – applications, Big Data, operating systems, database, storage, compute, security, networking, etc. So, while HCI architectures will accelerate implementation by simplifying storage and hardware decisions, by itself an HCI approach lacks the required performance monitoring and analytics of software layers, where 70-80% of performance problems occur.

Without an end-to-end view of the entire IT system, and an understanding of how different technology layers impact one another, administrators must scramble to trace the propagation of problems (cause-and-effect). This leads to poor first-time-fix rates (FTF), more no-trouble-found events (NTF), and longer meantime-to-repair (MTTR).

With the growing complexity of IT environments, especially hybrid computing models (consisting of private Cloud, public Cloud, and on-premise), the need to solve the enterprise-level monitoring and analytics problem has become even greater.

What Can Be Done to Optimize complex IT Environments?

The only way IT experts can manage tech complexity, reduce costs, and get higher performance, is through a unified IT performance monitoring and analytics approach.

Unified IT performance monitoring delivers a consolidated view of overall service levels by evaluating all layers of the technology stack, including applications, Big Data, operating systems, database, storage, compute, security, networking, Cloud, Edge, and IoT/IIoT devices.

Unified IT performance analytics provides reports that reveal dependencies, correlations, and trends of operational issues before they happen. This approach essentially provides an early warning system to problems, along with corrective action tools that quickly isolate defects and identify root causes. As a result, organizations can capture a real-time picture of the complete IT stack and ensure that service levels are consistent with contractual agreements.

Keeping this in mind, lets go back to our customer example above. Our defense systems manufacturer IT Operations team had three potential paths worth consideration.

Three Potential Paths to Victory

The first path was a combination of built-in (often packaged with infrastructure devices and software applications) and 3rd party monitoring tools (commercial performance monitoring tools) together with a layer of custom code written on top to integrate the pieces, implement business rules, and provide the high-level dashboard that was required.

A “combo pack solution” like this however would be very time consuming, risky, and expensive for the customer. In addition, it would require an ongoing consulting agreement with the vendor to ensure the custom code continued to perform as expected.

The second path was to implement an integrated monitoring suite from one of the large software vendors. A ‘suite solution’ looked good at first but in the end was too expensive and limiting because each IT layer would require purchasing and managing a separate software module. All too often though critical monitoring features like these were not going to be available until the “next” release.

IT team’s third option was the unified IT and operations performance monitoring and analytics solution from Centerity.

Be on The Right Path

Centerity was considered cost effective because a single platform covered all technology layers (hardware and software), and pricing was not based on separate modules but on the number of metrics (or KPIs) that needed to be monitored.

The technology evaluations also revealed that Centerity’s risk profile was low because the system was up and running within a matter of hours, including monitoring and root cause analysis. Indeed, by the end of a week-long test the entire HCI system was being optimized based on Centerity’s analytics and trend reports.

After implementing Centerity’s end-to-end IT performance monitoring and analytics platform, our client and his customer finally had real-time access to critical information that allowed them to manage and improve service levels and customer satisfaction.

Since implementing Centerity, reports show that the fault isolation and root cause analysis capabilities have reduced MTTR on the HCI system by as much as 80% over previous systems.

Centerity’s unified software appliance was the only solution that could cover the entire IT stack on the Hyperconverged system and let our customer experience the performance and reliability they expected.

For further information or questions about how to improve IT performance via unified IT performance analytics solution, please schedule a demo for how Centerity can help with your IT needs.