Performance and Availability monitoring.
Putting all the infrastructure and application and various monitoring into a Service Context for Service Monitoring.
Performance and Availability monitoring.
Putting all the infrastructure and application and various monitoring into a Service Context for Service Monitoring.
Faster, more efficient, better views for the operators to view. A more centralized approach to managing the infrastructures. Improved app visibility features.
TrueSight Operations Manager is a combination of different components (applications) like Presentation Server, Impact Manager, and AppVisibility Manager and IT's Data Analytics, but it provides a seamless integration and a holistic view with Application and Infrastructure Health views.
It provides common administration, and a Single Sign-On Platform with RBAC, which eases the cross launch between multiple tools and saves the need to configure users for all the different components and improving monitoring views.
There are no broader areas of improvement. It would vary, environment by environment. As such, there are no outstanding bugs or defects that are not documented.
No. TSOM 10.7 is quite stable provided it is installed with the vendor recommendations, which are created by the experience drawn from customers and the complexity of the environment.
No issues with scalabilty. The customers where I have implemented this have ranged from small to very large. I have never faced any deployment challenges in any of these cases.
Excellent support from the vendor. Support technicians and developers are all available to help if there is an issue. Support cases are tracked and the resolution (of the same) is pushed to be done faster.
No, I have always worked with BMC Solutions for infrastructure and application monitoring.
Yes, the setup after the design of the solution was pretty straightforward. The vendor has a lot of free Webinars where they will explain the best practices to design a solution and the best ways to implement it. These guidelines can be used to build custom guidelines for the customer.
Implemented with in-house team, have been interacting with Vendor team as well with excellent expertise in Truesight Operations Manager.
I have not dealt with the pricing or licensing, so I cannot comment.
Not applicable.
It is quite an efficient tool. There are continuous improvements being performed to satisfy the customer needs, but like any other tool or automation, it has some issues.
TrueSight offers a global solution with possibility of end to end integration.
Monitoring applications and servers. We also monitor individual pieces of management software, like WebLogic.
Proactively monitoring 24/7/365 on all of our servers. This allows technical staff to focus on other areas and our operators can monitor the systems.
The tailoring of the knowledge modules has been particularly useful as I can streamline the agents to only report on critical events.
The knowledge modules could be more lightweight in size. At present, the installation packages can be quite large.
We utilize BMC TSOM to monitor our entire infrastructure and all applications that lie therein. Our infrastructure is hosted both in our datacenters and in cloud hosted services (AWS and Azure).
It has provided us with a single location to host all events to be viewed/monitored by our NOC. This has greatly helped them to streamline their processes.
TSOM's ability to consolidate alerts into a single location and provide filtering of alerts is great. It is very helpful to be able to apply rule-based routing to alerts as well.
We utilize BMC TrueSight Operations Management to proactively monitor all of our physical and virtual server environments. Coupled with Entuity for TrueSight Operations Management, we can have a holistic view of our Network and Server environments health in a single pane of glass.
It allows our operations team to have one single application to reference when investigating issues in our environment.
Signature baselines, which have allowed us to fine tune many of our events and significantly reduce the number of events generated.
I would really like to see out-of-the-box support for monitoring uninterruptible power supplies.
We use it to scan and monitor our server environment. This allows us to monitor devices which are introduced as they are spun up, to see that there are no unknown devices, then we can verify uptimes as well as patching as another source of keeping devices in compliance.
Allows reliable access to server hardware info, uptime statuses, current patching, and much more. This allows us to make sure we have an updated inventory, as we feed this into our inventory system along with info from Atrium CMDB.
The ability to pull hosts together to show what processes are running, so it can be used for change management.
More modules for less popular applications and better documentation. Documentation can be great at times, but lacking in other areas.
I have used the BMC product in two separate instances, the one was as a monitor of monitors for an ops bridge to have a single view of all monitoring tools reporting into one source, this worked extremely well.
The other instance was as a managed services looking at multiple different customers across South Africa.
I believe that the ease of use and UI is great. The ability to fulfill the role as a manager of managers is fantastic. We integrated a number of other monitoring tools into BMC.
I think the ease of deployment needs to be looked at. It would be great if the deployment was faster and easier.
We experienced no issues with stability on both BMC and HP.
Only issue we experienced with scalability was that the maximum growth needs to be catered for in the initial build. Planning needs to be done carefully.
Technical support from BMC was good, had to wait a little longer some times for a response which complicated things with the client.
The companies I worked for were BMC shops from start to finish, made use of Remedy, BCO, Control M etc. Companies wanted the best of breed.
The setups were not complex but there was a large amount of pre-deployment and planning that went into the solutions.
The solutions are not the cheapest but are robust and stable. License model is rather complex and BMC do often change the model.
Other products were evaluated, such as HP and IBM as well as various opensource solutions.
My advice would be do not cut on the planning time as well as testing time, UAT, SIT as well as FIT.
Also make sure that you have the correct infrastructure in place and also cater for the intended growth.
We do work as independent consultants, but mainly the focus is on a crisp and reliable base layer for Service Level and Business Service Management with a working CMDB. In order to map the data and events correctly, you have to have a solid foundation.
The Event Management is outstanding; still is the most interesting part of the product.
The sizing (which is difficult), the maintenance of it and the upgrade paths. This is a difficult area which is not easy to cover, as every client has a different approach of implementing the product.
Stability is mainly a sizing issue. The product needs to be correctly sized and architectured. For this, you need skill and experience. If you follow this advice, you will have no issues. If you implement without a plan or architecture, you will be lost.
This is related to stability. You need to know what you have, then all will go well.
Customer Service:
People buy from people. If your account rep is a good one, all goes well. You cannot answer that easily. I have seen light and shadow, as one could say.
Technical Support:
Support has room for improvement. Very often, you find yourself answering the very same questions over and over again. I would give it a 6-7.
Some of the clients I have came from other solutions; mainly because they were outdated they switched, or because they were discontinued. The same applies in the other direction, especially if the clients had the wrong account rep.
Initial setup seems to be easy. The deeper you go, the more you need to know about the product, especially about its agents. Some functions are under-represented, especially the Agent Consoles, which are a little too basic compared to the old versions. So you still use a mix of versions which leads to no savings in hardware at all. HA setups are complex (best to use VMotion). Ports are not that well documented. Again, experience is the point. If you know the products under the hood for a long time, you will do good; otherwise, you might run into problems. This is the same for lots of products in the area. If you know what you do, all goes well.
We normally do these kinds of implementations; I am a consultant, not a real end-user, as the clients no longer have the expertise on board (no matter which product they use).
Monitoring is like an insurance. If you have it, you feel safe. If you do not have it and run into an accident, you wished you had it.
Use conservative figures. In terms of hardware, monitored servers and also effort. The product is not cheap. But as with other products, you get what you pay for.
Before choosing this product, we evaluated other options, and we still do. Mainly, it ends in a mixture of tools, and using open source-based tools reporting up into it, like Zabbix, OP5, Nagios XI or something like that.
Estimate enough time for the implementation. Never trust anyone who tells you that you will be finished in three months. Calculate at least one year for all tasks.
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.
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:
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.
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!
Have you ever been frustrated to discover that your monitoring failed because one of your Patrol agents isn’t configured correctly? After you investigated you were told that someone sent you an email or called and left a voice mail, telling you it some set of systems was ready for monitoring, and you didn’t get them. Everyone knows how adequate email and phone messages are right?
Communication breakdowns involving your Patrol Agent infrastructure are nothing new. They’ve been around for many many years. I know them very well. Everyone is very busy, and that only compounds the problem. There are so many things that can go wrong with keeping all your agents configurations in sync and up to date. Wouldn’t it be nice if this could all be automated somehow?
There is a new ability you need to be aware. The BPPM 9.5 Central Monitoring Administration (CMA) Console. The CMA was introduced with BPPM 9.0, but it wasn’t flexible enough to be useful in very many situations. One of the key features in this new release was the Policy Management interface. Although useful, its ability to truly manage your Patrol Agent infrastructure outside of Patrol Configuration Manager (PCM) was very limited. Well, that all changes with CMA 9.5.
With the release of the 9.5 BPPM CMA Console, and the greatly expanded Policy capabilities, you’ve never been so close to real-time Patrol Agent configuration automation. Say hello to your new little friend, the BPPM CMA Configuration Policy.
http://advantisms.wistia.com/medias/nvn9c6862k?emb...
BPPM 9.0 introduced configuration policies for the first time with the CMA. A CMA Policy is suppose to replace the need for manually deploying configuration settings using Patrol Configuration Manager (PCM). Unfortunately, with the 9.0 policies you had little choice with respect to the policy “selector criteria”. The selector criterion is the mechanism that engages the CMA Policy.
You were able to specify the use of one item, the BPPM Tag, as the policy selector, which meant that you had to create a separate Policy and BPPM Tag for every possible scenario.
If you worked with the CMA in version 9.0, you know first hand how limited that was. Chances are you looked at it, scratching your head, and moved on.
The 9.0 CMA release allowed you to deploy a simple Policy with three configuration options: Monitor, Threshold and Server Policy Configurations. CMA 9.0 made these three administrative options available for the first time but the overall policy capabilities were limited and ultimately became more work to manage than continuing to use PCM. They’ve been greatly expanded with version 9.5.
The BPPM CMA 9.5 Brings Patrol Agent Configuration Automation
With the release of the 9.5 BPPM CMA Console, the Policy capability features available grew from three in version 9.0, to a total of nine.
The additional features include seven total monitoring Configuration Policy options, one blackout option and one staging Policy option. Nine in all, compared to only three before. And the Policy “Selector Criteria” specifications, the item(s) which engages the Policy, has gone from one, the BPPM Tag, to eight. The new added diverse selector abilities allow for creating simple, or very complex activation condition now. With all of those new features, CMA 9.5 allows for dynamic automation of your Patrol Agent configurations like never before.
Here are the 7 New BPPM 9.5 CMA Policies and a description of they can be used.
Monitoring Configuration – You can use this feature for filtering or turning the monitoring configurations off or on, based on your selectors. In the associated webinar, I construct one of these policies as an example, showing how they can be used to disable a specific monitor, for a specific OS, running in a specific environment.
Filter Configuration – This is a helpful addition to CMA 9.5. Filter Configuration allows you to specify what monitoring data is not meant to go into the BPPM database. With this new feature, you can specify the attributes and parameters that you want to stream into the BPPM console and see, without storage in the database.
Agent Threshold– This policy allows for setting traditional monitoring thresholds at the Patrol Agent Level. It allows you to specify the alert threshold settings you use to set and deploy within PCM or from the Patrol Console, down the agents. These can now be set, and take effect as soon as the agent checks into the BPPM infrastructure.
Server Thresholds – These thresholds are set at the BPPM server level. You can set Absolute, Signature and Intelligent thresholds within a policy based on the same selectors as the lower agent level.
Agent Configuration – This new policy has several capabilities. It allows for setting up Agent specific settings like the Default Monitoring account. You can also use this feature to specify Polling Intervals for the Patrol Knowledge Module (KM) Collectors. The KM Collector gathers the information at polling intervals, and depending on how you construct the selectors, you can now change these intervals within the CMA console now, outside of PCM.
Server Configuration– This feature is ideal for the policy options in Groups within the BPPM Operations Console. For example, if you have servers associated with an application named, “NewApp,” you can use this policy to group all the servers in one location within the Operations Console. By deploying a tag, “NewApp” to all the involved systems, the Patrol Agents check into BPPM, see the policy and automatically add the servers to the group you specify. If the group doesn’t exist, it will create it and place all the NewApp systems within that group for viewing, automatically.
Configuration Variables – This last option allows for the manual creation of any agent configuration variable you want or need that can be used by the agent. But the key feature of this one is in the ability to import your existing PCM configurations.
This new CMA brings real automation into the daily maintenance associated with your Patrol Agent infrastructure. Quit playing phone and email tag with your system and application administrators and see how to put this to work right now.
http://advantisms.wistia.com/medias/nvn9c6862k?emb...
To read about and see the CMA put a Patrol Agent Blackout into action, check this out.
Putting the BMC Blackout Policy to Work
To read about and see the CMA handle the Patrol Agent event streams and give you a brand new, centrally focused Event Management mechanism, check this out.
Simplified Patrol Agent Event Management
New Update!!
How to automate New Patrol Agent Package Deployments with CMA Policies. I'll show you step by step how to use a CMA Policy to automatically baseline your new Patrol Agents the moment they come up on the network, using your existing PCM configurations.
Automating The Configuration Deployment of Your New Patrol Agent Builds
To read more about (TrueSight) BPPM 9.5, be sure to check out the blog on the topic located here.
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.

I believe in the Enterprise customer base BMC is going to lead. As mentioned above BMC have the ability to simply integrate anfd view in the Manager of Managers. This is critical in environments where there are multiple existing and legacy toolsets. A single view is key to empower the resources that need only critical information displayed so that fast and effective response is gauranteed.