8 FEBRUARY, 2005

Micromuse adds tools to measure business services

Here is another entrant into a new area that will be of some interest to solutions architects - building the bridges between what business needs from IT and what IT thinks it is providing. The burgeoning market for Business Service Management (BSM) solutions brings with it the need for tools that can measure the performance of business systems in business terms. The idea is straight forward, measuring the way a business service performs from the point of view of the service consumer and delivering the results in the form of impact on the actual business. HP has such a tool with Business Process Insight - part of its own BSM offering - and now Micromuse has come up with a competitor.

This is Netcool/Application Discovery, an application discovery solution that provides a tool that will allow enterprises to get complete visibility of their business services and the supporting infrastructure, so that problems can be tracked down rapidly. Based on technology provided by Collation Inc., the tool automatically discovers the components associated with business applications, their configurations, and their inter-dependencies, allowing enterprises to monitor and manage the availability, performance, configuration, and delivery of business applications and services. Application information is then maintained in a real-time configuration management database, which enables users to plan changes such as new upgrades and deployments without interruption.

The system automatically discovers business applications and their dependencies, builds and maintains a service dependency model, and auto-deploys agents for detailed application and system monitoring. One possible weak point is that it uses patented adapter technology for real-time collection of business indicator, dependency, status, and transaction information from data sources such as ERP and CRM systems, configuration management databases, element management systems and custom applications. Using proprietary technology in this way may provide some point of potential lock-in for users, especially when there are a wide and growing range of Open Adapters available via the open source community.

Automated analysis and advanced integrations with other management tools enable comprehensive real-time application management, troubleshooting, service-level tracking, and reporting from a real-time BSM dashboard. www.micromuse.com