DATE	Thursday, May 31st, 2012	PRESENTER:
TIME	1:00pm EDT/10:00am PDT	Noam Biran Director Product Management Neebula Systems
DURATION	60 minutes (including Q&A)

A service catalog is a central repository of all services provided by the IT organization, as defined by ITIL.
The service catalog is expected to serve as the central repository which unifies all IT & business (non-IT) functions around a common terminology and definitions.

However, there are no best practices or commonly accepted disciplines to create and populate a service catalog in a manner that actually integrates with existing IT processes .

Join Noam Biran, Director of Product Management at Neebula, for a discussion about how to create a service catalog and the benefits you can achieve by successfully integrating the service catalog in your existing IT processes.

The webinar will cover:

• What is a service catalog
• The goals that a service catalog should fulfill
• Best practices for creating a service catalog
• A review of available tools to support a service catalog initiative
• How to keep the service catalog up to date in a constantly changing environment
• How to realize value from the service catalog by improving existing IT processes

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Typically, many IT issues signified by an event are accompanied by additional derived events. A database failure will likely include multiple console events related to database connection failures, application errors, etc. On your path to identifying the root cause of a problem, you will have to filter through all such derived events, as well as other unrelated events.

Here’s a quick look at 5 different problem detection methods and tools, followed by some thoughts on how to select which ones are the most suitable for you.

1. Users help detect unknown problems that are not reported by infrastructure monitoring tools. The challenge – this occurs late in the process as the problems have already impacted your users. Additionally, the reporting of ‘symptoms’ by users is far from being objective and accurate and may lead you in the wrong direction in your quest to find the root cause.
2. Infrastructure monitoring tools let you monitor resource utilization – disk, memory, CPU, etc. These are excellent for identifying availability failures, but also include many false positives – e.g., the database is reported as running smoothly, though it is not. Another drawback is the difficulty correlating infrastructure problems to user experience issues.
3. End user experience monitoring tools are a great method for identifying problems and overall response times from a user perspective largely before the real users are impacted. Such tools become more powerful when integrated with infrastructure tools. The drawback? They will generally not be of much assistance in pinpointing the root cause of problems.
4. Transaction management tools help you follow business transaction paths while highlighting potential problems. These tools are excellent for correlating end user experience to specific technical components. These tools cover only a specific domain, rather than the entire data center.
5. Domain specific tools such as Application Performance Management (APM) tools, or tools targeted at databases, ERP systems, or other applications, let you drill down and diagnose problems within a specific application. These are very helpful once you are aware of a problem and where it resides but leave you without the wider perspective and without the ability to detect problems across the data-center realizing the interrelations between applications and components.

So which one is best? Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet solution.
Instead, you should select the right mix of methods & tools – the one that suits your environment, applications and processes.

You should consider selecting tools that go beyond problem detection and also help you in finding the root cause of problems.

The final piece of advice relates to detecting and managing cross-domain issues. These are the more difficult problems that cannot be easily identified within specific technological silos. For such problems, you should try dependency mapping tools, which map business services and applications to infrastructure components. Once problems are detected, by providing a visual topology of all configuration items of a business service, such tools help with the identification of the root cause. Take a look at our live product demo to experience the value of dependency mapping.
For a more detailed review, watch Noam Biran’s webinar: The Elusive Root Cause of IT Problems and How to Easily Identify it.

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.

DATE	Tuesday, May 1st, 2012	PRESENTOR:
TIME	13:00 EDT/10:00am PDT	Ariel Gordon VP Products Neebula Systems
DURATION	60 minutes (including Q&A)

Application dependency mapping is a key component for availability and change management processes as well as other strategic IT initiatives (e.g. data center consolidation, Business Continuity Planning, etc.). Organizations use application dependency mapping tools to model business services to support the above mentioned goals, as part of the ITIL processes.

However, in spite of the growing popularity of application dependency mapping tools, leading analysts found that only 1% of business services are actually modeled.

Join Ariel Gordon, Neebula’s VP Products and the former CTO of BMC Software, to learn how to avoid common pitfalls and use best practices to succeed with application dependency mapping and service modeling.

In this webinar, we will review:

• The common IT use cases for application dependency and service modeling
• How to correctly define the goals for an application dependency mapping project
• The relation between application dependency mapping and service modeling, or how to achieve true service modeling with application dependency tools
• The common pitfalls in service modeling to watch out for
• Best practices for a successful mapping project

A video recording for the webinar is now available. Please register to get immediate access.

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So how about 2 tips that will make your Configuration Management Database (CMDB) succeed? Only 2 pieces of advice, compared to 10 failure reasons – but hey, we’re about quality not quantity.

What’s the purpose of a CMDB?

Let’s start at the end. Why are companies spending all the effort & resources on building a CMDB? Creating a repository is not an end goal in itself. There are quite a few reasons behind a CMDB, and these two are probably among the top ones:

• Change management – be able to identify how IT changes will impact your business environment.
• Incident resolution – use CMDB as a reference to quickly resolve problems – identify problematic IT components, understand the interrelations with other CIs, and so forth.

So with these 2 goals in mind, here are our 2 pieces of advice:

Use business services entry points

Begin your CMDB journey with your end goal – the business service. Discovery of applications, CIs and relationships – all should be done in the context of a business service in order for them to be useful later when they are needed for change management or incident resolution.

But now comes the question – how do you define a business service? Seems like a no brainer, but reality is – you’ll find some major disagreement on this (more on this in a separate blog post).

We say, keep it simple – find a unique identification for each business service. The best approach is to follow the way users ‘consume’ or access the service. Put in other words – find a tool that lets you begin populating the CMDB by providing an entry point of the business service. Whether it’s the URL, an IP address, or any other address – this should be the starting point for each business service to allow identifying all of the IT elements comprising the service.

Use automatic mapping of CIs to business services

If the CMDB is to help you resolve incidents and analyze impact of IT failures on your business, it must clearly map CIs to business services. The important question, though, is – how is this mapping done, manually or automatically?

A few words about ‘mapping’. There is a lot of confusion in the IT space around this term and its variations. For example, ‘discovery and dependency mapping’ has become a popular phrase often used by many vendors. But what stands behind it, in most cases, is the automated discovery of applications, CIs, and their interrelationships – and not their mapping to business services, which needs to be carried out manually.

So our second tip is – when building your CMDB, make sure the mapping between CIs and business services is automatically created. Or else, you’ll be spending significant resources on manual updates.

Noam Biran
Director, Product Management

Abstract:

Identifying the root cause of IT problems is critical in managing the availability of today’s complex and mission-critical applications. However, this task is almost impossible using the commonly used tools and methodologies.

Join Noam Biran, Director of Product Management at Neebula, for a discussion of ways to improve application availability by focusing the problem resolution process on that actual cause of IT problems rather than on a never ending search for the root cause that takes a significant amount of the problem resolution cycle.

The webinar will include:

• A review of various methods for identifying the root cause
• The impact of root cause analysis on IT processes and organizational goals (e.g. increasing availability, reducing MTTR & MTBF)
• How to make the best use of existing tools
• New methods to assist in quickly and easily identifying the root cause of IT problems

A video recording for the webinar is now available. Please register to get immediate access.

^*These fields are required.

Ariel Gordon
VP Products

Monitoring tools are the cornerstone of any IT management solution. At their core, proudly stands the event console geared to alert the IT team of all issues requiring attention. BUT… these event consoles are very commonly misused resulting in significant degradation of service availability and prolonged Mean Time To Repair (MTTR).

Join Ariel Gordon, VP Product at Neebula and one of the industry pioneers behind Business Service Management (BSM), in a discussion on how to effectively use event consoles in combination with other tools to properly address the main IT monitoring use cases:

• Recognizing Issues by the NOC
• Recognizing the events signifying real problems that impact services and their derived events
• Prioritizing the events that require highest priority of attention
• Implementing a successful event correlation strategy
• Understanding the infrastructure components impacted by each problem for assignment of the events to the right team to drive immediate resolution (or how to avoid event ping-pongs that increase MTTR)

The webinar will suggest best practices for designing and implementing event consoles in a way that guarantees the maximum return on investment.

Or use the following link to register:
https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/545420382

Update: registration is now closed but you can watch a video recording of the webinar.

Responsibilities:

• Generate new leads and work from existing lists for Neebula Solutions working these leads through the sales cycle continuing though the close phase.
• Contact prospects to gather and understand business goals/challenges to aggressively position Neebula’s Solutions via telephone.
• Manage prospects through sales cycle including account strategy and planning, cold calling, prospecting, probing, needs, analysis, qualifying and working with Neebula’s Account Executives in negotiation and closing Neebula’s software solution and services.
• Provide advice on changes to programs, strategy and inside sales procedures.

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Qualifications:

• BA/BS Degree, Business preferred.
• Minimum four years enterprise software sales related experience, preferred SaaS solutions.
• Familiar with inside sales processes to use best practices to increase efficiencies.
• Proven telephone-selling skills.
• Ability to plan an independent call strategy, and work to that plan to overachieve incentive compensation.
• Ability to work independently and as part of a team.
• Strong cold calling skills.
• Exceptional communication skills – Speak articulately on the phone and able to build good rapport with contacts.
• Ability to develop relationships with senior-level technical and business decision makers.
• Proficient with MS Office and Salesforce.com.
• Able to work in a fast-paced, self-directed entrepreneurial environment.

Location: East coast

Key Responsibilities

• Go to Market strategy and planning
• Creating and writing the company collateral and materials for external PR activity’s
• Manage and coordinate all external marketing, advertising and promotional activities
• manage external public relationships
• Demand generation – manage the marketing programs that drive demand for Neebula
• Lead generation – be responsible for all lead generation activities, including cold calling team
• Sales enablement – develop the sales tools that support the selling process
• Product launch – plan the launch of new versions and releases and manage the cross-functional implementation of the plan
• Market intelligence -  be the expert on Neebula competition and how to crush them

Requirements

• 5+ years of software marketing at the senior management level
• Experience with Internet sales, SaaS marketing
• Experience in creating and writing marketing collaterals
• Experience in the system management market
• Excellent communication skills in English
• Excellent written communication skills in English
• Willing to travel

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.