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Service-Centric IT Operations Management for

Mid-Market Service Providers and Enterprises:
Challenges and Requirements
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Service-Centric IT Operations Management for Mid-Market Service

Providers and Enterprises: Challenges and Requirements

IT Operations Management In Flux

Over the last few years, the heightened pace of innovation in service delivery technologies has
increased the complexity of IT Operations Management for organizations of all sizes. This problem
is particularly acute for mid-market service providers and enterprises (MMSPE’s) – which have
traditionally operated with a lean staff and simpler but silo-based management systems. As long as
the technologies they managed were relatively isolated and did not change rapidly, this management
and monitoring structure worked fine. However, with the rapid advent of new technologies and the
increasing pressure to do more with less – the very fabric of IT services has undergone a sea of
change.
For example, converged communication services today no longer carry only data, but latency-
sensitive voice and video packets that require considerable systems and application processing.
Virtualized systems have completely overturned the conservative “one application per server” rule
that was a costly, but safe choice for many IT managers. Expectations
on utilization rates of virtualized servers are now pegged at more
than fifty percent, instead of single digit rates. Return on investment While organization’s have
expectations has likewise increased considerably, and focuses on the reigned in IT budgets and are
effective delivery of end-to-end services (like say web apps, voice or doing more with less, their
video) rather than individual infrastructure availability. And lately, cloud
architectures have evolved
based architectures are making resource allocation and monitoring
even more dynamic and distributed. to include more specialized
While all of these changes have helped reign in IT budgets and do service components that are
more with less, they also have introduced more specialized service far more complex to manage
components within scalable multi-tier architectures that are far and monitor.
more complex to manage and monitor. Many of these components
are dynamic and can be moved or re-allocated based on advanced
automated tools – for e.g. the movement of virtual machines across a
server farm or entire applications from the enterprises premises to the cloud. Interestingly enough,
while the first adopters of virtualization were large enterprises, recent analyst reports predict that x86
virtualization adoption in mid-market organizations will outstrip large enterprise penetration levels
in the next few years. More than 50% of small enterprise systems are expected to be virtualized by
2012.
The implication of the structural shift in the nature of service delivery technologies and management
is that mid-market organizations will have to contend with vastly different kind of operational

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challenges going forward.

Challenge # 1: Rise in the Volume and Complexity of Operations Events

As IT infrastructure, applications and services become real-time, dynamic and increasingly componentized
and specialized - the sheer volume and complexity of operational events is increasing by an order of
magnitude even in mid size organizations. Operations teams cannot handle this volume of events without
adequate intelligence and correlation capabilities that can, say, de-duplicate a lengthy set of related events
to a manageable number of root cause alerts. Further, for the correlation to happen, events need to be fed
into a centralized operations management platform that has a comprehensive view of the service delivery
infrastructure across the enterprise.

No Centralized View of:

What’s wrong? Where did things break? What services are affected?
Figure 1: Silo-based IT Operations Management

Challenge #2: Moving from Infrastructure Operations to Service-Centric Operations

Ensuring service availability and performance also means that event streams (whether caused by degradation
in quality or by complete outages) comprise of alerts from across the infrastructure silos (networks, systems
and applications). Hence, the operations management system needs to be able to assimilate and analyze the
relationships between different events across the silos – managing the end-to-end service and not just the
infrastructure. Further, contextual data on these events is often only available in disparate external databases
– and need to be correlated centrally for complete understanding and prioritized action. Examples of contextual
data would include service classes, configuration and dependency information, customer information (in the

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case of a managed service provider), or quality of service targets linked to operational hours.

Challenge #3: Diverse Technologies Drive the Need for Multiple

Monitoring Systems
The componentization and specialization of service delivery technologies
Componentization and
means that, more than likely, there are now multiple monitoring and specialization of service
management systems in place in the IT operations environment in mid- delivery technologies
market service providers and enterprises. Yet there is no single picture or means that, more than
centralized operations management console, making any kind of cross-
likely, there are now
system correlation impossible.
multiple monitoring and
For example, many organizations continue to use proprietary management
management systems in
systems that are shipped with network or server equipment (e.g. CiscoWorks
or Microsoft SCOM). Introducing a virtualization layer may introduce a
place in the IT operations
completely new management system – like, say, a VMWare vCenter. Windows environment.
and Unix applications may require varied kinds of instrumentation with their
separate monitoring solutions. Converged services like IP Telephony or Video
have multiple sub-components that may require dedicated monitoring – with many proprietary alternatives.
Cloud systems add another wrinkle by requiring specialized capabilities and integrations based on new
protocols – which are not yet supported by legacy tools.

Challenge #4: Lack of Enterprise wide, Centralized Operations Management

Moreover, IT teams in individual business units, departments, region or country operations may have taken
autonomous decisions in the build out of their own set of management platforms – adding to the veritable
zoo of monitoring systems. All of these systems send out events and information that require the attention of
overstretched operations staff. As long as the infrastructure was self-contained within a management unit,
this architecture may have been adequate. However, with the introduction of web services and distributed
networks and systems – there is a pervasive interdependency among enterprise components. Without a
centralized management platform that can correlate, prioritize and troubleshoot enterprise-wide infrastructure
issues, operations teams may not have the means to carry out effective triage and deliver service levels
demanded by their customers.
The result of the fragmented nature of IT management is that when problems arise, separate IT groups
operating in their own silos are prone to finger-point at each other causing friction and slowing down problem
response. Without a unified picture of the operations issue and its impact across the infrastructure and the

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business, setting up a large triage team with representatives from all groups becomes necessary for tackling
any problem. This is a typical, but wasteful process that is enacted daily in silo-based IT organizations.

Challenge # 5: The Demand for Scalable Real Time Operations

Another transformative shift in the nature of enterprise services is the increasing share of real-time
technologies. As mid-market organizations strive for higher business agility, services that facilitate real-time
communication, collaboration and transaction become very important. The use of web and video conferencing,
IP Telephony and even social media communication embedded into traditional enterprise applications are but
a few of the examples of such services. The flip side of the coin is that IT operations teams need the right
tools that can help them analyze, prioritize and troubleshoot high volume events in real-time. This calls for
a separate class of operations management platform compared to what mid-market service providers and
enterprises have been used to in the past.
In the next section, we will review what kind of management systems mid-market organizations need to face
these challenges.

2. What Are MoM’s and Why Mid-Market Organizations Need Them

The end result of the massive shift in the nature of service delivery is that,
mid-market organizations face the same level of challenge and complexity
as larger service providers or enterprises. While their relative size of In general, MoM’s are higher
infrastructure is still small – the sheer volume of events, their inherently layer management systems
cross-silo nature and the plethora of monitoring systems in place – demand
that consolidate IT-related
a centralized, coordinated triage process without which costs, downtime and
events, alerts, performance
degradation of performance of end user services can easily spiral out of
control. and security information
All in all, the necessity for mid-market organizations to streamline operational
from multiple proprietary
processes and hold down costs is driving the acquisition of centralized and disparate management
operations management systems that can consolidate, correlate and manage systems, devices and
enterprise wide events in a single console. Such operations management applications in one central
platforms – sometimes called Manager of Managers (MoM’s) have been the
platform.
staple of large enterprises.

What Are MoM’s?

In general, MoM’s are higher layer management systems that consolidate IT-related events, alerts,
performance and security information from multiple proprietary and disparate management systems, devices
and applications in one central platform. The centralized operations management capability of MoM’s is well
captured in the IT Service Management (ITSM) and Business Service Management (BSM) set of best practices.

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MoM’s by their very nature have involved complex integration and configuration activities. Since they brought

together the event and performance data streams from disparate sources into a single management point,
they necessarily needed to offer multiple data collectors, custom adapters and high configuration flexibility.
And, in order to bring real intelligence to operations while filtering out the background noise, events were
often subject to a set of conditions and actions determined by complex, programmable business rules.

Centralized View of Correlated Service and Infrastructure Events

Figure 2: MoM-supported Operations Management

In legacy MoM solutions, the business logic needs to be propagated manually across multiple bolt-on products,
with each more than likely, using a different programming language. This dispersion in business logic also
means that it becomes difficult to maintain system wide integrity of the rule sets – especially when these
need to change with dynamic shifts in the infrastructure. It also makes the execution of common operational
process flows relating to incident triage highly complicated. All taken together, the cost of acquiring and
maintaining legacy MoM’s has been prohibitively high.
Consequently, in spite of their usefulness to support a unified operations process, MoM’s were mostly
restricted to larger organizations. Also, mid-market service providers and enterprises were relatively slower
in the uptake of new technologies involving distributed web services and virtualization compared to larger

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companies. With the price point of MoM’s well beyond reach, and the heavy lifting required to deploy and
maintain a MoM platform – mid-market organizations bypassed the trend in a large measure. With smaller
and simpler service delivery requirements, they continued to rely on stovepipe monitoring and management
systems.

Why Mid Market Organizations Need a MoM System Today

However, as mid-market service providers and enterprises move towards Service-Centric IT operations
management, a MoM platform is now a necessity. Without the level of event consolidation, correlation and
automation that MoM’s provide, operational triage costs can rise exponentially with increasing complexity of
services delivered. End user service levels can be compromised and business operation may be interrupted.
While cost was a huge barrier to adoption of MoM’s by mid-market organizations, new platform technologies
and open source-based business models are bringing them into the realm of affordability. So is the massive
simplification in the architecture, capabilities, ease of deployment, and maintainability of next-generation
MoM’s.
In the next section, we will outline the top 10 requirements that mid-market organizations should look for
when evaluating and acquiring a next-generation MoM system that can help them realize their service level
goals.

3. The Top Ten Requirements for Next Generation MoM’s

As described above, a key requirement of a MoM system is its ability

1. to act as the central management point for service-centric operations.
Centralized A MoM should be capable of consolidating events from disparate
Service-Centric management systems, data sources and cross-silo (spanning
Operations environmental, network, servers and applications) infrastructures. It
Console should offer an intuitive ‘single pane of glass’ view that IT operations
team can rely on to effectively manage their business services.
Further, in multi-site or multi-departmental organizations that require
distributed management platform deployments – next-generation
MoM’s should provide a simple way to propagate a single set of
business rules across all entities to preserve integrity and reduce
complexity.

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Next-generation MoM’s must offer quick installation (within minutes)

2. and rapid deployment (within hours), to be attractive to mid-
Quick market service providers and enterprises. Unlike large providers
Installation and or enterprises, smaller organizations work with fewer IT staff and
Deployment resources and need to avoid lengthy configuration and deployment
Ensuring Rapid cycles. To enable this, next-generation MoM’s must provide out-of-
Time to Value the-box support for standard mid-market equipment, management
applications and services so rapid time to value can be achieved.

Complex management systems are expensive to maintain and

3. acquire. Next-generation MoM’s that are attractive to mid-market
Simplified organizations must enable massive simplification in ongoing
Management management and operation. To do this they need to support a high
and Operation degree of management process automation through the collection,
analysis and correlation of both technical and business service data.
Also, if the MoM system utilizes commonly used and well known
programming languages for configuration changes – this can ease
the training and skills recruitment burden and facilitate adoption.

Next-generation MoM’s need to support dynamic infrastructures

4. from the ground up. This support has to be automated so that the
Dynamic system can adapt itself to infrastructure and service reconfigurations,
Infrastructure automatically. For example, a movement of a Virtual Machine instance
Support from one host server to another should be linked back to the same
management entity within the MoM system – preserving historical
linkages to past events and alerts.
This requires that MoM’s have the capability to detect, identify and
represent the dynamic nature of (virtualized) managed entities and
can update their configuration as they “uncover” information about
these entities. Doing this requires more advanced mechanisms
to collect event information. The current method of using hosted
proprietary agents, which take time to deploy and incur significant
cost, is no longer sustainable. For example, applications that spawn
machine instances dynamically in a cloud environment may have a
lifespan shorter than the time it takes proprietary agents to be up
and running.

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With the high volume of events and multiple levels of dependencies,

5. next-generation MoM architectures need to support scalable, real
Support for time processing. Typically, mid-market monitoring systems perform
Scalable, Real poorly on this regard as they were not intended to be real-time event
Time Event processing engines.
Processing

A key requirement for next-generation MoM’s is the ability to

6. distinguish and store raw events and each stage of processed
Separation of alarms, separately. Business logic of alarms is usually dependent on
Raw Events their message content, therefore modifying the content and throwing
from Processed away the initial data, means that it cannot be used for compliance,
Alarms analytics, or root cause analysis including play back capabilities.

Next generation MoM’s must support the latest web service and
7. industry standard communication protocols like SOAP/XML, DMTF
Standards- CIM, WSMAN etc. to enable easier north and south bound integration
based with other management systems. This would enable closed loop
Integration for operation of processed alarms in concert with Help Desk systems
Cost-effective – with automatic ticket creation when new alarms are processed
Deployment and removal when its related ticket is closed. Support for standard
protocols eliminates a common failing in legacy products with their
proprietary mechanisms - making integrations difficult and costly.

While MoM’s may be a central consolidation point for availability and

8. performance information, they cannot hold all contextual information
Open in their own database. Therefore, it is important for next generation
Architecture MoM’s to recursively look up event enrichment information from other
for Event management systems or CMDB’s . This can only be possible, if the MoM
Enrichment system is built from the ground up in an open architecture enabling
easy integration with federated management systems and external
databases that provide contextual technology and business data.
Needless to say, this is a vital requirement in the dynamic business
architectures where contextual information can change rapidly.

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Next-generation MoM’s should support multi-tenant operations

9. to meet the privacy /security requirements of managed service
Multi-tenancy providers, government regulations, shared service infrastructures
and customers. Role-based access and operations console views
should limit operator and customer visibility on an as-needed basis.

Next-generation MoM’s need to be affordable. They must be less

10. expensive than existing MoM platforms and provide improved
Affordability levels of economic efficiencies. It is estimated that the overall cost
of ownership would need to be one-fifth to one-tenth the price of
existing platforms to generate interest among its audience.

4. Introducing RiverMuse PRO

RiverMuse is pioneering the development and propagation of a next-generation MoM for mid-market
service providers and enterprises. With the power of a full featured management console and the automatic
adaptability to dynamic infrastructure changes - RiverMuse Pro offers unique value at highly affordable price
points. Mid-market organizations will find that RiverMuse Pro can consolidate multiple management tool
information and help streamline their operations processes for higher productivity and cost benefits than they
can achieve today.
RiverMuse Pro also is a platform that is poised to launch a new level innovation in the industry. With completely
new platform capabilities around reusable and transportable business logic, it promises to overturn the ‘lock-
in’ that customers have to endure with management vendors and their proprietary tool sets. With RiverMuse
Pro the event and fault management community can now collaborate and interact at a shared technology
level, to stay ahead of future IT challenges.

London Office About RiverMuse

The Foundry
Established in 2008, RiverMuse delivers next-generation real-time IT
157-168 Blackfriars Road operations management software that uniquely enables service providers
London, SE1 8EZ UK and enterprises to maintain the health of their increasingly complex and
+44 (0)870 141 4514 adaptive environments so they can optimize service levels, drive down
costs and respond more nimbly to the changing needs of the business. The
company was founded by the serial entrepreneurs who launched Micromuse
Silicon Valley Office and RiverSoft, which assure a majority of all public and private internet
805 Veterans Blvd. Suite 309 infrastructures in use today.
Redwood City, CA 94063 USA
+1 877 771 MUSE (6873)
For more information, please visit www.rivermuse.com.

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