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Get a leg up on the competition through increased service levels.

In today’s highly competitive world, organizations are focusing their efforts on delivering new services at higher service levels using the latest technologies such as virtualization and cloud computing. To accomplish this, IT needs to leverage automation, collaboration, intelligence, and up-to-date data in such a way that valuable resources are used where they add the most value.

Figure 1. Operations Manager i is a single pane of glass for IT operators.

“ By using OMi—specifically TBEC, we were able to consolidate event management with a single pane of glass, significantly reducing the time to understand event alerts raised by the different monitoring systems.”– Jason Siegrist, Manager, Enterprise Management Technologies, Sentara Healthcare

HPE Operations Manager i softwareAutomate infrastructure management so you can innovate business

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You face a number of business innovation challenges today.

It sounds simple, but freeing IT personnel from mundane, day-to-day activities and assigning them to more strategic initiatives is no easy task. This is compounded by the fact that customers have more data and less information, and face increase in volume, source, and complexity of event and performance data. The fastest approach is to consolidate IT event management activities into a single pane of glass in operations bridge that reduces duplication of effort, allows quick identification of the causes of IT incidents, and decreases the time it takes to rectify IT issues.

Simultaneously, IT has to cope with cost pressures—do more with less, work smarter not harder, and reduce total cost of ownership (TCO).

Automatically identifying, prioritizing, analyzing, and remediating IT incidents significantly reduces the amount of time your IT organization needs to spend on monitoring and managing the IT infrastructure.

However, consolidating events from increasingly complex IT infrastructures into a single event stream proves difficult for many organizations. One challenge is that different IT silos, such as network, server, and storage teams, monitor events using their own tools and processes. There is no single cross-domain view of an event stream that includes monitoring of disparate technologies as well as products from multiple vendors. This leads to significant duplication of effort for both tier-1 operators and subject matter experts (SMEs). Because there is no consistency from one team to another, they typically collaborate using manual processes. In addition, because separate tools do not work together, tasks that could otherwise be automated are not.

Another challenge that operations personnel face today—especially with the advent of newer technologies such as virtualization and cloud computing—is managing increasingly complex and dynamic IT ecosystems. What used to be straightforward has now become difficult to monitor and manage because of the challenges associated with understanding how an issue with one of these newer technologies impacts the business.

Today, it is critical to monitor such technologies effectively because a failure in one area will most likely affect others. If you don’t understand the interdependencies within your IT environment, that failure can significantly impact your services and your competitive position in the marketplace.

How can HPE Operations Manager i software help?

HPE Operations Manager i (HPE OMi) software uniquely addresses the challenges discussed above. What makes OMi unique? It is the only IT event management product that dynamically and automatically discovers and correlates—even as the environment changes—three sets of data: event data that indicates infrastructure- or service-impacting issues, topology data that ties the IT infrastructure to the business services that rely on it, and metrics that describe the availability and performance of the business service and its dependencies. And two types of data can be brought into OMi end-to-end monitoring—structured as well as unstructured, like log files—which allows for comprehensive insight when monitoring and managing business services. This data can come from HPE and other third-party monitoring products.

Using this rich set of information, OMi applies various techniques and advanced root cause analysis logic to determine the real cause of an incident, provides advice on the likely business impact, and makes recommendations on how to prioritize remediation activities. Because OMi event correlation rules and impact calculation rules use the latest discovered topology data, they always provide an accurate guidance to operations staff—even if the IT infrastructure changes.

What’s more, because this data is now consolidated and correlated into a single pane of glass modern operations console, the administration burden typically associated with managing events is significantly reduced. That translates to less time and effort spent by tier-1 operators on day-to-day operational activities and by expert staff on maintenance of operational management solutions.

3

Tablets and smartphones

Custom event dashboards

Health Perspective Views

ArcSight Logger and ESM

OM/OM

BSM connectors for SCOM, IBM, Nagios

IBM Tivoli and Netcool

Microsoft® SCOM

Third-party domain mgrsNagios

Open BSM connector interfaces

Machine data Application logs and metrics

Visibility into security events

Agents and management packs

Agents and SPIs

HPE connectors

APM

NNMi

HPE Service Manager

Ops AnalyticsOMi

BSM platform

Run-time service model

BMC Remedy

Service Now

Service Watch

SiteScope

Operations Manager i—Umbrella Console for IT Management

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HPE Run-time Service Model

The HPE Run-time Service Model (RTSM)—which comes with the OMi Event Management Foundation—serves as a repository for all the discovered configuration items, including the relationships among them (topology) and dependencies between business services and IT infrastructure. The RTSM can receive discovery information from multiple automated discovery sources, which facilitates a complete and up-to-date picture of the managed environment, and enables sophisticated IT event-correlation and impact-analysis logic of OMi to deliver better operational and business value to the organization.

The RTSM is updated on a near-real-time basis whenever a monitored component or its context changes in any way. The resulting dynamic, accurate, and up-to-date view of how infrastructure components relate to one another speeds diagnosis, eases the burden of maintaining complex static rules and mappings, and frees expert staff to work on more strategic projects.

Figure 2. Operations Manager i is a single consolidation console for all IT events.

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HPE Operations Manager i Event Management

HPE OMi provides a cross-domain single pane of glass view of the entire IT environment—covering virtualization technologies, cloud infrastructure, third-party products, applications, servers, storage, networks, HPE Application Performance Management (APM) monitors, and much more—via a single, modern Web-based user interface. This single, consistent, and holistic view of the entire IT ecosystem helps both operations teams and application support personnel to decrease duplication of effort, increase collaboration across teams, and improve mean time to recovery (MTTR)—all of which promote more efficient utilization of operations staff.

In addition, operations teams can easily access customized visual representations of an event’s business impact and gain insights on how infrastructure and end-user experience or application performance alerts affect business services. Armed with this information, they can determine which activities to work on first based on prioritization levels—in effect, increasing their efficiency in handling incidents.

Once the cause of an incident has been identified and prioritized, it is important to enable tier-1 operations staff to address resolution of the issue in a consistent manner and, whenever possible, in an automated fashion. However, when manual activities are required, OMi provides operators with a number of incident management tools, workflows and cross-domain performance graphing, analysis and triage to guide and speed their activities, analysis and triage as well as instructions, and knowledge-base links, which are embedded directly within event.

These facilities, along with automated incident resolution, promote streamlined and consistent incident management, and reduce errors, rework, and incident escalations by tier-1 operators. The ultimate outcomes are a reduction in operational cost and higher IT operator productivity, more time for expert staff to work on strategic initiatives, and improved business service availability.

HPE Operations Manager i Event Correlation Techniques

In complex dynamic environments, one of the biggest challenges is how to manage the large number of events that originate from a variety of sources. Within this sea of data, the requirement is to identify the events that have a significant impact on business services. So while it is essential to minimize the number of events that appear in the event browser, greater efficiency is gained by highlighting the events that, if unmanaged, could cause a breach in service level agreements (SLAs) and generate incidents in your help desk system.

Event correlation plays a vital role in automatically reducing the noise and allowing IT to focus on those issues that really matter to the business service and IT objectives. Operations Management i correlates events automatically using the following forms of event correlation:

•Suppressing duplicate events

•Closing related events automatically

•Stream-based event correlation (SBEC)

•Topology-based event correlation (TBEC)

•Automatic event detection and suppression

Suppressing duplicate eventsA new event may be a duplicate of an existing event. As new events are received, they are checked against existing events. If duplicates are found, new information, such as a change in severity, is used to update the existing event, and the new event is ignored. The advantage of correlating events using duplicate event suppression is that it reduces the number of events displayed in the console but without losing any important information.

Closing related events automaticallyA new event can automatically close one or more existing events. When a new event arrives, a search is made for existing related events. Some specific information contained in the new event is used to match the new event to any existing events, and the new event closes the existing event.

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Stream-based event correlation SBEC uses rules and filters to identify commonly occurring events or combinations of events. It simplifies and accelerates event management by automatically identifying events that can be withheld or removed, or need a new replacement event to be generated and displayed to the operators.

The following types of SBEC rules can be configured:

•Repetition rules: Frequent repetitions of the same event may indicate a problem that requires attention.

•Combination rules: A combination of different events occurring together or in a particular order indicates an issue and requires special treatment.

•Missing recurrence rules: A regularly recurring event is missing, for example, a regular heartbeat event do not arrive when expected.

Topology based event correlationHPE OMi TBEC utilizes detailed, comprehensive, and automatically updated discovery and relationship information to analyze alerts and events, and ultimately determine the event that is most likely the cause of an incident. Operators are presented with a clear representation of which event they need to investigate and what symptoms can be ignored, which then helps them determine the team best suited to resolve an incident. With TBEC, there is less need to guess at the cause of an incident or spend time chasing symptoms—so operations staff can fix issues faster, handle more incidents, escalate fewer issues to expert staff, and collaborate more effectively to resolve problems—all of which ultimately help make incident management more efficient.

From an expert staff perspective, TBEC assists in streamlining work by allowing correlation rules to be defined only once. Because these rules are based on configuration item (CI) types, not on components themselves, they can be automatically applied to each new CI as the RTSM dynamically discovers and captures it and its interrelationships. With no need to update IT event correlation rules according to the changes in the IT environment, ongoing rule maintenance is significantly decreased.

Figure 3. TBEC provides sophisticated event correlation.

In addition, TBEC guides SMEs in the creation of new rules, thus ultimately reducing the amount of time they spend on maintaining operational solutions. For example, expert staff can create new TBEC rules by simply selecting events in the browser, where the topology behind these events is used as a starting point by OMi.

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User interaction and visual presentation

IT operation efficiency is increased when the human interface of tools is simpler. As shown in figure 2, HPE OMi provides glance efficient information, allowing fast construction of service watch and event dashboards in which IT staff can typically group information specific to their priorities, giving them personalized, at-a-glance perspectives on these without the need for any programming and maintenance. The power of event correlation means they gain quick access to causal indications, and isolate other events as symptoms, vastly improving their analysis. Since domain experts with differing responsibilities will use their own dashboards but based on the same correlation engine, a common version of the truth of IT health, overall operational efficiencies can improve vastly.

IT operators need to gain access to perform their management tasks from anywhere. With the proliferation of mobile devices finding their way into everyone’s lives, HPE OMi simplifies access yet renders its power through modern, colorful interfaces on tablets and smartphones. As shown in figure 3, operators gain access from where they are, practically everywhere in the world and can visualize events, drill down to health views, and perform actions to repair IT issues. All this without programming and no fiddling to gain access through corporate virtual private network (VPN) backbones.

Figure 4. OMi event dashboard

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Performance graphing with OMi Graphing enables you to draw graphs and design custom graphs for infrastructure item types that you are monitoring. You can also compare multiple instances of a resource or an application on one or more of these items.

Preformatted graphs and reports help you:

•Evaluate application and system performance

•Analyze usage trends

•Correlate usage

•Compare application and system performance

Figure 5. Performance graphing

User engagement Almost everyone is motivated by at least one of the psychological drivers that game dynamics employ, and this makes user engagement such a powerful feature. The new, innovative user engagement feature applies game dynamics to stimulate OMi users, thereby accelerating workforce efficiency and know-how. Successful progress through the various achievements is rewarded with real-time notifications, helping to motivate OMi users towards better performance in their daily work. Timelines are available to record each user’s progress and collection of achievements.

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Monitoring automationMonitoring of your composite applications deployed across physical, virtual, and private or public cloud infrastructures in modern hybrid IT environments is crucial to your business. Using traditional management tools and paradigms, the resulting monitoring configuration in such dynamic environments is complex, time-consuming to establish, and often error prone.

Monitoring Automation (MA) is designed from the ground up to simplify and automate monitoring configuration, while hiding irrelevant environment details. It uses one consistent method to configure your environment, independent of monitoring technologies used (for example, agent-based or agentless monitoring). MA’s parameterization concepts enable self-service based easy tuning by SMEs. Finally, built-in configuration reporting eases auditing, completely saving the time usually required to record configurations, and improves compliance, reducing risks by an order of magnitude compared to manual methods.

MA is offered in two options:

•Monitoring Automation for Servers: Included in the OMi Event Foundation, it provides all the above described capabilities from a server-centric perspective. Monitoring Automation for Servers focuses on virtual and physical systems as well as on server-centric applications.

•HPE MA for Composite Applications: This is an add-on to the HPE Operations Manager i solution family. It provides extended capabilities, specifically targeting the new challenges of a dynamic data center—making use of RTSM. This add-on exploits topology to automate monitoring configuration for complex, multi-tier applications. For example, it automatically adapts monitoring configurations when application instances or parameters are adjusted as result of business or environmental needs.

Figure 6. Aspect Model driven configuration of Monitoring Automation

Extending HPE Operations Manager i

Many IT organizations need a single view of the entire IT ecosystem—a cross-domain view that encompasses all the technologies being used, whether old or new, including not just HPE tools but also products from other vendors. Rich information in this holistic view—for example, an incident’s cause within an event stream: how it was diagnosed and remediated—needs to interoperate with other tools in the IT ecosystem. The following is a selection of related solutions from HPE and HPE partners:

HPE OMi Management PacksHPE OMi Management Packs for applications, including Oracle Database, Vertica, Hadoop, and infrastructure (such as system, cluster, and virtualization) extend the OMi monitoring capabilities, thereby offering a consolidated view to monitor your entire customer IT environment—from infrastructure (server, network, and storage) to application. Enriched with the capabilities of OMi and monitoring automation, HPE OMi Management Packs provide operators an ability to deploy, monitor, and correlate disparate applications and infrastructure elements.

Figure 7. Hadoop NOC Dashboard in OMi using OMi Management Pack Software for Hadoop

Figure 8. Hadoop Ops Dashboard in OMi using OMi Management Pack Software for Hadoop

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The OMi Management Packs for applications and infrastructure provide preconfigured policies, data collectors, reports, and tools for monitoring your IT environment. Used in conjunction with HPE Operations Agents, the OMi Management Pack collects metrics using vendor-supported interfaces. It automatically updates applicable service maps in the HPE OMi console, constantly showing up-to-date relationships between various configuration items and allowing rapid identification of root cause of an issue in your environment.

Enriched management with OMi content packs Content packs tailor the operator’s OMi environment to recognize and provide enhanced management of specific applications. OMi 9.20 includes Microsoft IIS server topology-synchronization rules, and creates IIS health and event type indicators fed by monitoring. It also provides new view mappings for Web server and FTP server CIs. The content pack for SAP environments provides indicators, view mappings for SAP ABAP and J2EE deployments, and topology synchronization package. For SAP discovered CI features, include SAP CCMS alerts monitor, SAP Java Web Application Server Monitor, and SAP Performance Monitor.

Systems management and infrastructure managementAn operations bridge approach to systems management allows you to monitor, diagnose, and prioritize infrastructure problems based on business impact and supports consolidated operations. An integrated operations bridge consolidates event and performance data from physical, virtual, and cloud sources to reduce duplicate monitoring and boost productivity. HPE OMi software already had the core of this approach, but now it directly connects to HPE Operations Agents and HPE SiteScope software as direct system management data sources as well as connectors to third-party management tools. Optional to this are additions from HPE Operations Manager software, HPE Performance Manager software, HPE Reporter software, HPE Glance software, Operations Agents, SiteScope software, HPE Operations Smart Plug-ins (SPIs), HPE Network Node Manager i (NNMi) software, and HPE Storage Essentials software.

HPE Operations IntelligenceHPE Operations Analytics unifies searching, reporting, alerting, and analysis across any type of enterprise log data, making it unique in its ability to collect, analyze, and store massive amounts of data generated by modern networks. ArcSight Logger supports multiple deployment options and can be deployed as an appliance and as software. It integrates with HPE Operations Manager, HPE OMi, and NNMi, giving IT operators universal event logging for faster triage, insight into their data and event enrichment.

HPE Business Service Management (BSM) products offer more analytic capabilities with HPE Server Health Analyzer (SHA). A predictive analytics solution, SHA automatically learns system behavior, detects anomalies, and notifies operators ahead of time to prevent outages. SHA also calculates baselines and feed events with additional context, which is then provided to the OMi software.

HPE Operations Bridge Reporter (OBR) collects data from all the dependent items of a business service across all domains, applications, servers, and networks, simplifying the task of reporting on service performance and ensuring that consistent reporting is obtained when changes are made to the resources the service depends on. OBR also analyzes this data to provide forecasting reports. Finally, it also consumes OMi event and availability data to report on top-event generators or similar analyses, providing increased return on investment (ROI) of the management platform.

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HPE Application Performance Management productsWith the increased use of cloud computing, it is important for you to understand your customers’ experience and also how your business services are tied to and rely on which components in your IT environment. Through a common look and feel, HPE Application Performance Management (APM) software—such as HPE Business Process Monitor (BPM) and HPE Real User Monitor (RUM)—is integrated with OMi providing a foundation for collaboration among your organization’s IT teams. And when these products are tied together, you also get consistent and transparent information on event streams and causal incidents—along with recommendations for resolving those incidents.

Automated workflows and service desk integrationsManaging business services goes beyond just monitoring. It means managing the entire lifecycle of an event, which includes automatic submission with service desks and automated remediation using run books.

HPE Operations Orchestration software allows for the execution of automated process steps— IT process workflows or “run books”—which are called by OMi. With more than 4,000 out-of-the-box workflows, Operations Orchestration software enables automatic remediation of recurring incidents—with no intervention from operations staff or SMEs. Where no automated remediation flow exists, tools—all in context of a selected event—are presented to users via OMi, providing a consolidated list of possible actions to take. These capabilities—speeding incident resolution and promoting consistent remediation—when integrated with OMi, allow your expert staff to work on initiatives that drive business innovation.

OMi also integrates with HPE Service Manager software and third-party service-desk offerings to automatically create and synchronize trouble tickets and third-party notification systems to notify IT staff (for example, via paging and SMS) for greater incident-handling efficiency.

HPE defines a solution called Closed Loop Incident Process (CLIP) as one which helps you transit from reactive to predictive operations management, prevent unplanned service interruptions, and keep service quality high. It consists of four integrated HPE products: HPE Operations Manager i software, HPE Service Manager software, HPE Operations Orchestration, and HPE UCMDB. It enables your IT staff to overcome the drawbacks of event and information overload; lack of linkage between events and service model; and manual ticketing, troubleshooting, triaging, and remediation.

Integrations with third-party monitoring tools Operations Manager i consolidates IT monitoring across domains and third-party tools for comprehensive monitoring, at the same time protecting existing monitoring investments. For example, HPE offers off-the-shelf Integration Adapters for Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager (SCOM), IBM Tivoli Netcool, and Nagios, as well as a new OEM connector for other integrations allowing for more sophisticated integration between these specific third-party monitoring tools and OMi.

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Start managing smarterHPE Operations Manager i enables you to deploy a consolidated IT operations bridge that delivers tangible business value. By combining advanced logic and a comprehensive, automatically discovered model of the IT infrastructure, the software takes the guesswork out of infrastructure monitoring.

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