Maximize composite application business value

An integrated solution for aligning business technology with business goals

As enterprise IT moves forward into the new millennium, a central part of the story becomes clarifying and improving the connection between technology and business services. In theory, IT resources and assets should be deployed in a way that makes ideal business sense—driving and fulfilling business strategies in an elegant, business-prioritized and cost-effective manner. In practice, this can be very difficult to achieve.

To illustrate how such difficulties can present themselves, consider the complexities involved in enterprise-class composite applications. Composite applications commonly draw from multiple data sources and span multiple systems throughout the infrastructure, and as such they can be conceived of as a Web of dependencies and relationships. Problems in one part of the Web can (and typically will) degrade the performance of the entire composite application, and with it, the business value that application generates. As a result of this structural complexity, composite applications represent an exceptional challenge to organizations as they attempt to closely align IT services with business goals.

Because these two tools are seamlessly linked... troubleshooting is accelerated; the composite application and service return to target performance levels; the business service served by the composite application better meets customer needs; and the business outcome is quickly and effectively optimized. Toward meeting that challenge, the technology side of this situation can be addressed by tools designed to help IT managers see clearly how, in the case of any particular composite application, data flows through the infrastructure, and how it is transformed in the process. However, this information, while valuable, represents only half the overall issue at work. For that technical information to generate best business results it must be presented in a business context—it must be migrated automatically into a second tool which is focused on business service management. In this way, IT managers get not only the technology side of the story, but also the business side—and are thus empowered to make changes in a prioritized manner that corresponds well to business strategies and helps to fulfill business goals.

Tivoli business service management and application discovery generates powerful intelligence for business and IT

Fortunately for the enterprise IT market, IBM offers a highly integrated solution designed to fulfill exactly this charter: IBM Tivoli Application Dependency Discovery Manager (TADDM) and IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager (TBSM). Together, they represent a powerful solution (PDF, 570KB) which can help managers to visualize complex application dependencies, isolate problems when they occur, quantify the business ramifications of such problems and accelerate their resolution in a prioritized fashion—in short, they help IT to align its technology and resources with business requirements for superior overall IT service management.

The first of these tools, IBM Tivoli Application Dependency Discovery Manager (TADDM), includes automated discovery and configuration tracking capabilities. Using it, IT managers can create application maps to discover and visualize the dependencies involved in a complex chain of composite application resources, including configuration values and change histories.

Because TADDM shows the underlying cross-tier infrastructure components (such as systems) involved in a composite application, it also gives the IT team visibility into the impact on composite applications should a particular component degrade in performance or fail.

Furthermore, change and configuration details are also available through TADDM; as components change, TADDM continually updates its maps to reflect those changes, and when problems occur, the possibility that recent changes have created those problems can often be confirmed or ruled out.

As a result, the business benefits to IT are tremendous. Problem isolation is accelerated, and with it, problem resolution. TADDM also serves as a mechanism to facilitate configuration auditing, helping to ensure that changes are taking place in accordance with schedules and milestones set to fulfill business goals.

Tracking business complexities in real-time

TADDM thus focuses primarily on the technological relationships and configuration of IT assets and resources involved in composite applications. Focusing on the business ramifications of them, particularly with respect to dynamic changes to service dependencies and indicators, and their business consequences in real-time, is IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager (TBSM).

As IT service levels shift, it's always important to know how those fluctuations can translate into the business outcome. TBSM is designed to improve service visibility in this manner though real-time dashboards. Just as the dashboard of a car reflects its status and performance while driving in quantified metrics, so TBSM reflects the performance and integrity of a business service—the extent to which IT services are succeeding in meeting committed business objectives.

This happens visually within the TBSM dashboards via easy-to-understand mechanisms such as balanced service scorecards, graphical maps and charts, real-time service-dependency models, service level agreement (SLA) tracking and other trend indicators that show how well services are meeting―or not meeting―targets.

Here, too, the business wins are numerous. The business consequences are tracked against committed service levels to ensure prioritized response according to business impact. Furthermore, problem identification and resolution is accelerated through predictive analysis which automatically processes the health of IT resources against the service dependency model to identify the impact on service performance, and identify the service impacting root-cause. Superior business intelligence, in short, is generated in real-time, enabling IT teams to take prompt, effective and prioritized action where it is required and where it makes the most business sense.

TBSM creates this powerful, actionable business intelligence by collecting, consolidating, correlating and analyzing data drawn from a wide range of tools, including IBM or other vendor monitoring, discovery, Change and Configuration Management Databases and other tools.

Among them, of course, and playing a key role, is TADDM. The TADDM application and infrastructure topology can be automatically loaded into TBSM and, once there, used to populate business services, establishing the crucial links between technological assets and business goals. When TADDM discovers changes in the application infrastructure, similarly, those changes are automatically conveyed in TBSM, helping to keep TBSM and its dashboards in tight synchronization with the composite application infrastructure at all times.

Taking decisive action

The integration works the other way as well. Suppose a business problem is discovered in TBSM by way of a color-coded status change for a service in the real-time dashboard. Technical details surrounding the composite application's components could be helpful in resolving the problem.

Because these two tools are seamlessly linked, it is possible to launch in context from TBSM to a configuration details view in TADDM, which, in turn, will reflect those technical details. Troubleshooting is accelerated; the composite application and service return to target performance levels; the business service served by the composite application better meets customer needs; and, in short, the business outcome is quickly and effectively optimized.

In combination, then, TADDM and TBSM can be used to achieve a comprehensive perspective of composite applications from both technological and business vantage points—helping IT teams to align resources with business strategies, minimizing mean-time-to-resolution in the event of an application problem, controlling costs more effectively and generating the superior intelligence necessary to improve the business bottom line.

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