In this post I’d like to discuss a phenomenon that we see in almost every organization we encounter, including the best IT shops. It’s called finger pointing.

When things go wrong and the pressure is on, you’ll start hearing things like “this cannot be a network problem”, “it’s a database issue”, or “but all servers are up and running.”
Sounds familiar?

That’s natural human behavior – shifting the heat to others, so you can go on with your own business. Even before resolving the problem, management is first faced with a communication challenge – bringing everyone to the same table and working as team to isolate and resolve the problem.

So how can such scenarios be avoided? For one, you could build a great team that works in harmony and full cooperation. A politics-free team with a laser-focus on problems, and whose members help each other – even if the problem at hand does not relate to them directly.

Another option is adopting a tool that can do the dirty work for you – isolate problems and pinpoint their root cause – network, storage, servers, application or other. This requires the ability to map the dependencies between each of your managed business services and the entire infrastructure supporting it. Then, when a business service is having problems – the related configuration items (CIs) can be immediately identified.

In the meantime, stay away from IT finger pointing and work with your fellow team members on resolving IT problems.

Data center management is all about managing the business services that run within the data center – be it the trading application, the on-line ticketing service or the call center. At the same time, it is not about the servers, storage and network that comprise the data center.
No one cares if a server is down. Everybody cares when the trading system is down.

But the monitoring tools today seem to be focused on the infrastructure level. There are so many tools out there that tell you everything about the health of the network, storage, and servers. It is all very accurate and detailed information but totally unrelated to what matters – the business.

Application Performance Management (APM) tools attempt to provide information about the health of the business service or more precisely about the application level. This is of course much more useful.

But there is still a need to connect this “higher level” information to the “lower level” information coming from the monitoring tools that know what elements are failing or responding slowly. To enable that – a real time mapping of how IT components, either on-premise or in the cloud, are configured to deliver a business service – is warranted.

This mapping, referred to as Business Service Mapping is essential for both efficient root cause analysis and for impact analysis. Business Service Management tools rely on this service mapping to deliver intelligent IT monitoring information that is tied to the topology of the business service. With this info, isolation the location or a problem becomes easier and the mean time to repair a problem (MTTR) is shortened with root-cause analysis becoming far more efficient.