BMC BPPM Architecture v9.5 – Lean, Mean, Analytics-Crunching Machine

BMC released the latest update to its ProactiveNet Performance Management (BPPM) suite in January of this year. The BPPM 9.5 Sizing and Scalability upgrade represents a tremendous increase in capacity without associated new hardware cost.

If you’re introducing BPPM for the first time, you will, of course, have to buy hardware, but if you’re upgrading from a prior version to 9.5, you can receive 9.5’s many benefits and enhancements without paying for any new hardware. In fact, you may actually be able to reduce your hardware footprint. You’ll be able to gain the new abilities and new capacity now by deploying 9.5.

Check out for our “Size, Scale and Hardware” presentation, where we will show you some enterprise examples of exactly how this release can dramatically reduce your hardware footprint, saving you thousands of dollars in system costs, and hundreds of man hours in administrative costs.

See how 9.5 compares to versions 8.6 and 9.0 with regards to sizing and capacity.

http://advantisms.wistia.com/medias/ua5li1146g?emb...

This new release makes it a great time to upgrade or add BPPM to your enterprise monitoring software options. The new features in 9.5 make it more useful than ever, and the capacity increases are incredible.

To demonstrate the vast improvements in size and scale in BPPM 9.5, here’s an apples-to-apples comparison of the last three versions of BPPM. Specifically, we’re looking at the benchmarks associated with a Large Hybrid BPPM infrastructure: Data, Event, and Service Impacts. These are the maximum benchmark counts, based on the current best practices deployment approach. As you can see, these numbers are huge.

• 1,700,000 Total Attributes/Parameters. Attribute/parameters are monitored items, such as the CPU % Utilization rate. This is more than triple 8.6 which had a maximum of 500,000, and demonstrates a 1:1 capability with the BPPM Integration Service Server in 9.5. BPPM 9.0 had a maximum 1,200,000 attributes. That means 9.5 allows 500,000 more attributes than 9.0 did.
• 250,000 instances per server, which includes your database instances, log files, processes, and service, which is an increase from the 65,000 on 8.6, and almost four times the number of instances. It doubles the number of instances allowed on 9.0 of between 120,000 and 150,000 instances.
• 20,000 enterprise devices, which are your systems and network components across your enterprise. This is double the 10,000 capability of 8.6, and equal to the 20K allowed on 9.0. This maximum supports the demands of most large enterprises.
• Up to 100 simultaneous end users, increased from 30 on 8.6 and 50 on 9.0. The number of supported users has doubled between 9.0 and 9.5.
• 40,000 intelligent events per day, up from the 2,000 per day on 8.6. This increase is off the charts.
• 350,000 external events, compared to 200,000 on both 8.6 and 9.0.

The most impressive part of the capacity and capability increases from 8.6 to 9.5 is that they come with no increased hardware requirements, as you might expect. This is virtually unheard of in the tech industry, in which new capabilities and capacities almost always require increased hardware capacity to go with it.

Think about one of the old household devices you have sitting around – perhaps an old iPhone or a computer that’s a few years old. Chances are, you’ve run across a piece of software or an app you’ve tried to install, only to find that your old hardware isn’t capable of running the new enhanced software. If you want to run the app, you’ll have to get a new iPhone. BMC, on the other hand, has managed to create a new version that works with your old hardware, so your enterprise won’t have to foot the bill for hardware upgrades just to run this software.

Let’s take a more specific look at the hardware needs for the BPPM versions. All require 64-bit architecture. Additionally, the requirements across all three versions are pretty similar, hence not needing to upgrade hardware:

• Windows 2008 R2
• Intel Core i7
• 2×4 Core, or 8 core total
• 3.067 GHz on 8.6 and 9.0; 2.2 GHz on 9.6. That’s right – it actually went down on 9.6 despite the capacity increases.
• A recommended 32 GB of memory for Data, Event, and Service Impacts.

If you have a deployment of 8.6 or 9.0 and are running close to the maximum number of monitored instances, now would be a good time to start designing your migration path to a 9.5 architecture. In summary, this upgrade can gain you tremendous technical capacity and capability, without incurring the cost of new hardware.

If you would like to see more BPPM 9.5 Content for other new BPPM 9.5 features, hands on presentations, and a series on "Understanding BPPM Analytics", be sure to checkout the blog I write for here.

http://blog.advantisms.com

I hope you find this information useful!  If it is well received I'll be sure to have follow up posts.

Have a  GREAT day!

Start using BPPM Analytics and become a monitoring genius!

Performance Management of your business services requires an ability to understand past behavior of all your key monitoring components. Do you know if your current alert thresholds are the result of a persons’ quick guess or assumption? Does your monitoring repeatedly generate large amounts of false alerts, and you find yourself struggling to find a solution?

Once you understand how BMC’s BPPM Analytics works, using Signature Thresholds andIntelligent Thresholds, you’ll have just what you need to look like a monitoring genius.

Doing what you’ve done before, will not work for you, going forward

It was not long ago, when everyone had to rely on guesses or assumptions, for specifying alert thresholds. When enterprises consisted of very few devices, you could rely on an individual’s expert knowledge to guide you. In most cases you might actually get most of the alert settings correct. The likelihood of having incorrect settings however was still likely, but with fewer devices to alert on it wasn’t a chronic problem. That simply is not the case any longer. Using the same approach today or tomorrow will quickly put you in the hot seat, and your monitoring reputation in jeopardy.

If your engine light comes while you’re driving over and over again without any issue found with your car, will you continue to trust it? Of course not – why would you? The same is true with your businesses performance management monitoring. If you continuously alert incorrectly, causing your support teams to be notified falsely over and over again, the impression will be the same as a bogus check engine light. In a very short time everyone will lose faith in your monitoring.

Using BPPM Analytics to manage your Big Data

With enterprises today consisting of many thousands of devices, we are truly in the age of overwhelming Big Data. Managing that Big Data takes intelligence in an automated manner, working at the machine level. This is why you hear “Analytics” mentioned just as often as “Big Data”.

Luckily you don’t have to be an expert in the past behavior of the monitoring. Using BPPM, it is done for you automatically. BPPM’s Analytics capabilities, tied to Signature and Intelligent Thresholds have an out of the box (OOTB) capability to notify you about performance abnormalities that are associated with key monitoring components.

Start Using Signature Thresholds and Intelligent Thresholds

BPPM Analytics takes the raw monitoring data and uses it to form historical averages that are then used to establish a normal “Baseline” of operations. These baselines are then used with two types of new thresholds. The two new types are Signature Thresholds and Intelligent Thresholds. These words are thrown around allot, but if asked, could you explain what they are, or ask your team to implement them specifically?

If you said no, you aren’t alone. Advantis is here to help. We’ve found this to be very common in fact, and it’s why we are taking these steps. The good news is, since you’re here reading this, you are only a few minutes away from gaining an informed understanding of these items. We help managers, directors and executives understand these principles to allow them to make informed decisions around their monitoring. Time is precious, and this knowledge is even more valuable.

We recently put together a video demonstration to help you take the first steps to understand these new abilities. No sales pitch or confusing jargon. It’s all spelled out plainly and simply. After watching this presentation, if you still have questions, you’re one click away from answers.

So take a moment to watch, and let us help you, look like a monitoring genius!

Our Video demonstration of BPPM Analytics and what you need to know in order to use it.

Video Presentation of Understanding BMC BPPM Analytics

What are the 5 user specific types of dynamic BMC BPPM Baselines available for you to use with Signature Thresholds? What makes them different and how would you use them? We cover that here.

http://www.advantisms.com/bmc-bppm-baselines-part-2/

And what if you want to keep some of your absolute thresholds, but make them more intelligent and dynamic? We show you how to upgrade your static thresholds and make them BPPM Intelligent Thresholds with this post.

http://www.advantisms.com/how-to-setup-a-bppm-intelligent-threshold/

To find out more about the BMC BPPM product, be sure to check out our online blog located here.

http://www.advantisms.com/advantis-blog/

If you would like to get your BPPM design, implementation or upgrade started, simply click on the link below.

Contact Advantis

If you’ve been reading this blog, you probably know that BMC ProactiveNet Performance Manager (BPPM) is a centralized event management system that acts as a single-pane-of-glass for many IT Operations teams as well as other functional groups within IT organizations. BPPM attempts to bring together as much information as possible about the health of an IT organization from external tools to get an overall view of the environment.

One good way to measure the overall health of a complex system with many moving parts is by injecting synthetic transactions and measuring their response time. BMC Transaction Management Application Response Time (TM ART) is a tool that does just that. It runs scheduled synthetic transactions from remote locations against business applications and tracks the availability, accuracy and response time of those transactions.

Wouldn’t it be nice to see TM ART measurements in BPPM?

Fortunately, the TM ART integration to BPPM is native to both products – no customization needed. The integration works by way of a data adapter that connects from a BPPM Agent to the TM ART Central Server using HTTP(S). Data is retrieved on a scheduled basis for all of the TM ART projects that are configured and accessible in TM ART. The data is stored in BPPM, so Intelligent thresholds can be defined to trigger events against it, just like any other data source.

Analysis with TrueLog

Besides sending data to BPPM, the TM ART application also runs diagnostics during failures (availability and accuracy only) and captures those as TrueLogs in TM ART. Reviewing the TrueLog can go a long way toward identifying the cause of an event that was generated in BPPM. Typically, events have an associated TrueLog that demonstrates the transaction output errors or discrepancies. Since the TrueLog is such a powerful tool for analyzing transactions, here is how you can incorporate them into your events.

First, you need to take advantage of TM ART’s ability to execute actions in response to errors to generate a TrueLog of the transaction. This action is optional and must be enabled when creating or configuring the monitor. There are three options, as you can see below.

Once the Generate TrueLog option is enabled in TM ART, you can take advantage of the built-in context Diagnostic in BPPM for all TMART Intelligent Events, shown below:

Notice the name of the action called ‘Run Now + TrueLog’; it does exactly what it states. It makes a connection to TMART, Logs into the UI and generates a brand new True Log for the monitor in question. Since this is a manual action, the end user could be creating a new TrueLog at a different time than the event, which may or may not be very helpful. To get a more timely TrueLog from the Diagnostic, you may want to convert it into an Event Rule to run automatically whenever an event arrives from TM ART. From our testing, the automated diagnostic seems to run between 6-12 seconds after the original event in TMART.

Cross Launching TrueLog

If you follow the steps above, in the resulting TMART Execution Log area, you would see two TrueLogs – the one created by TMART and the one created by the BPPM Event Rule a number of seconds later. You may wonder if this duplication is necessary. So did we.

Although it might seem intuitive to turn off the TrueLog creation in TM ART and just enable the manual diagnostic or the Event Rule in BPPM, this will fail because the BPPM actions rely on the Generate TrueLog option. Therefore, the ‘Generate TrueLog’ flag can’t be set to ‘Never’.

A more effective approach is to add a context-sensitive link from the event in BPPM directly to the existing TrueLog in TM ART. This allows you to cross-launch from the event in BPPM to a very specific page in the Projects Execution Logs:

Example: https://< TMART Server >:< port >/bmc/DEF/Monitoring/Monitoring?pId=8&mainTab=4

The key variable in the above URL is the pID number (8 in the example), which you can usually parse from the mc_smc_alias slot using an MRL rule in BPPM. Once that value is known, the whole URL can be placed in the mc_object_uri slot and will automatically become an active hyperlink in any event with that value. The end result is a quick way to launch TM ART from an Event in BPPM and get to the TrueLog for analysis.

Your monitoring tools need to work properly, and to accomplish that, they must be upgraded periodically.

With your mountain of issues, horse-choking responsibilities, and meetings out the wazoo, it’s easy to miss upgrade deadlines. But, you still need to know that the right information about the status of your environment is reaching the right person at the right time, every time. Those upgrades keep your service performance consistent and operating smoothly.

BPPM Upgrades

If you’re using BMC’s ProactiveNet Performance Management (BPPM) software, you know that regular upgrades are necessary to keep this flagship product working effectively. Each version since 7.7 in 2005 has needed a significant upgrade to reach the latest generally available (GA) version which is currently 9.0.

One thing you may not know is that any version before 8.5 can’t be upgraded directly to 9.0. An enterprise using an earlier version must first upgrade to the 8.5 version, and only from that point can it be upgraded to 9.0. Also, the support BMC provides for BPPM is rapidly limited, then expired; staying up to date is the only way to have access to support.

Not even your mom will support you forever…

At this writing, version 8.5 will be unsupported after October 31, 2013. Those organizations still using version 8.5 need to arrange for upgrades before that time.

Moreover, version 8.6 can be upgraded to 9.0, but 8.6 will be changed to limited support this summer on July 31, 2013 … and will be completely unsupported after July 31, 2014.

So what are the options for an enterprise using a version nearing the end of its support?

Basically, there are two.

The first, and less expensive, is to initiate an “over the top” upgrade to 8.5, then another to 9.0. The down side of this approach is the monitoring time lost during the upgrade. Since monitoring is usually needed 24/7, it can be detrimental to go offline for the time needed to do the upgrade.

Each upgrade will result in lapsed monitoring time, for a number of hours.

Because of unknown factors such as the size of the database, the number of devices, rules and reports, as well as the number of thresholds that will be used, it’s difficult to predict the length of time monitoring will be disabled during an upgrade.

More Challenges

There are more issues, too. For instance, upgrading a BPPM Agent/ Integration Service (IS) before the server is upgraded makes the connection between the two obsolete. BPPM components aren’t backward compatible. By the same token, once the server is upgraded, BPPM Agents also have to be upgraded before the system will work. In a large environment, bringing all these components up to speed is even more difficult as well as time consuming.

Then add this to the mix: the extent of customizations can have a huge impact on the upgrading process. Some of the customized files will likely be lost and have to be restored. Best practices may require updates to other related native files, too. Customizations to the knowledge base must be accompanied by careful review and documentation prior to an upgrade.

All of these issues are about updates of BPPM alone. However, in most environments, BPPM is integrated with multiple other applications, such as Patrol, Transaction Management Application Response Time (TM ART), Configuration Management Database (CMDB), Blade, and Remedy. All of the tools in the given environment must operate smoothly together. There are strict version dependencies between each of these products that must align. In some cases, customers may be prevented from upgrading BPPM until CMDB and ITSM have been upgraded to a supported version.

So … the big question: What is the alternative? If upgrading leads to all these complications, how is the enterprise to avoid them?

The answer? A calculated migration.

The Benefits of Migration

A migration includes new hardware, installing the latest BPPM version, testing, then integrating, then slowly migrating system functionality to the new system.

1.) A significant benefit in this approach is the new hardware. The use of new hardware and possibly a new operating system or enhanced gold images create a far better platform for BPPM in the longterm.

There have been a number of enhancements added to BPPM between 8.5 and 8.6, not the least of which was the support for an external Oracle database. Changing from the native Sybase database is not possible during an upgrade, and once the upgrade is complete it isn’t an option to upgrade to Oracle later.

The only way to move to Oracle, if that’s a good decision for your organization, is to perform a complete install on BPPM.

2.) The other benefit of a migration over an upgrade is the monitoring outage discussed before. Monitoring outage with an upgrade can be several hours or more, but with the migration, the outage is usually not more than a few minutes.

During those few minutes it is true that it’s necessary to manage both systems at once, but that’s usually over a short time and your new system is up and running smoothly.

So here’s a list of the pros and cons of each approach:

Upgrade BPPM

Pros:

• No new hardware required (therefore less expensive)

Cons:

• No database changes allowed
• May require multiple upgrades to reach the final version that supports direct upgrade to 9.0 ( each upgrade is costly and time consuming)
• Unknown monitoring outage window
• Customizations can be lost
• Incapability of integrations

Migrate BPPM

Pros:

• Controlled upgrade strategy / timeline
• New fresh hardware / operating system
• Database changes allowed

Cons:

• Users / operators will have to watch two consoles until full migration is complete
• Incompatibility of integrations

You can see that the list of pros in the migration strategy outweighs the list in the upgrade approach. However, no two environments are identical so decisions need to be made based on the best approach for you, in your environment.

What is our primary use case?

What is most valuable?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What about the implementation team?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

What other advice do I have?

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

What is our primary use case?

What is most valuable?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and support?

How was the initial setup?

What about the implementation team?

What other advice do I have?

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

What is our primary use case?

How has it helped my organization?

What is most valuable?

What needs improvement?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

How was the initial setup?

What about the implementation team?

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

What other advice do I have?