BSM Views

70 percent of incidents are reported by users before IT knows what’s going on. It doesn’t have to be this way. Organizations are often plagued with multiple monitoring systems generating too many events, and too much noise to deal with effectively.  Critical events get missed in the mess, and don’t recieve the priority they deserve. Recently I came across a great demonstration of getting proactive with infrastructure events. On BMC TV, check out the Service Assurance Demo with Ron Coleman.  This is a tight, well organized demo that shows how to get effective and automated with infrastructure issues for fast effective response.

Event Management seems the puzzle piece that has fallen on the floor, and no one notices until the puzzle is almost complete. Traditional thinking seems to be that you can, through proper filtering, just send infrastructure messages into the Service Desk. Either, the filters have worked well, and select few important messages do get through and it works, or filtering has been implemented poorly, and the service desk is flooded with messages, prompting a quick shut down (aka the fire hose effect). In the later case it tends to be some time before another attempt is made, if ever. The case where the filtering works, messages to get through properly, however, there is opportunity loss, because proper event management has not taken place.

Where proper event management is done, a great deal of good data can come through from the system messages. In addition to filtering, messages are also normalized, correlated, and root cause information gets passed through as well. This more complete approach has great benefits both in further processing of coming messages to ensure the most intelligent messages get through, and also downstream where the service desk gets better quality information, which helps with faster incident resolution.

For more information, here is a white paper on the benefits of real Event Management. Event Managment Whitepaper.