Get a leg up on the competition through increased service levels.In today’s highly competitive world, organizations are focusing their efforts on delivering new services at higher service levels using the latest technologies such as virtualization and cloud computing. To accomplish this, IT needs to leverage automation, collaboration, intelligence, and up-to-date data in such a way that valuable resources are used where they add the most value.

You face a number of business innovation challenges today.It sounds simple, but freeing IT personnel from mundane, day-to-day activities and assigning them to more strategic initiatives is no easy task. The fastest approach is to consolidate IT event management activities into a single operations bridge that reduces duplication of effort, allows quick identification of the causes of IT incidents, and decreases the time it takes to rectify IT issues. This is compounded by the fact that customers have more data, less information, and face increases in volume, sources and complexity of event and performance data.

Simultaneously, IT has to cope with cost pressures—do more with less, work smarter not harder and reduce TCO.

Automatically identifying, prioritizing, analyzing, and remediating IT incidents significantly reduces the amount of time your IT organization needs to spend on monitoring and managing the IT infrastructure.

However, consolidating events from increasingly complex IT infrastructures into a single event stream proves difficult for many organizations. One challenge is that different IT silos, such as network, server, and storage teams, monitor events using their own tools and processes. There is no single cross-domain view of

an event stream that includes monitoring of disparate technologies as well as products from multiple vendors. This leads to significant duplication of effort for both tier-1 operators and subject matter experts. Because there is no consistency from one team to another, they typically collaborate using manual processes. In addition, because separate tools do not work together, tasks that could otherwise be automated are not.

Another challenge that operations personnel face today—especially with the advent of newer technologies such as virtualization and cloud computing—is managing increasingly complex and dynamic IT ecosystems. What used to be straightforward has now become difficult to monitor and manage because of the challenges associated with understanding how an issue with one of these newer technologies impacts the business.

Today, it is critical to monitor such technologies effectively, because a failure in one area will most likely affect others. If you don’t understand the interdependencies within your IT environment, that failure can significantly impact your services and your competitive position in the marketplace.

How can HP Operations Manager i software help?HP Operations Manager i (HP OMi) software uniquely addresses the challenges discussed above. What makes Operations Manager i unique? It is the only product that dynamically and automatically discovers and correlates—even as the environment changes—two sets of data: event data that indicates infrastructure- or service-impacting issues, and topology data that ties the IT infrastructure to the business services that rely on it. And two types of data can be brought into Operations Manager i end to end monitoring—structured as well as unstructured, like log files—which allows for comprehensive insight when monitoring and managing business services. This data can come from HP and other 3rd party monitoring products.

Data sheet

HP Operations Manager i SoftwareAutomate infrastructure management so you can innovate business.

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Using this rich set of information, Operations Manager i applies various techniques and advanced logic to determine the real cause of an incident, provides advice on the likely business impact, and makes recommendations on how to prioritize remediation activities. Because Operations Manager i event correlation rules and impact calculation rules always use the latest discovered topology data, they always provide an accurate guidance to operations staff—even if the IT infrastructure changes.

What’s more, because this data is now consolidated and correlated into a single modern operations console, the administration burden typically associated with managing events is significantly reduced. That translates to less time and effort spent by tier-1 operators on day-to-day operational activities and by expert staff on maintenance of operational management solutions.

HP Run-time Service ModelThe Run-time Service Model—which comes with the Event Management Foundation—serves as a repository for all the discovered configuration items, including the relationships among them (topology) and dependencies between business services and IT infrastructure. The Run-time Service Model can receive discovery information from multiple automated discovery sources, which facilitates a complete and up-to-date picture of the managed environment, and enables sophisticated event-correlation and impact-analysis logic of Operations Manager i to deliver better operational and business value to the organization.

The Run-time Service Model is updated on a near-real-time basis whenever a monitored component or its context changes in any way. The resulting dynamic, accurate, and up-to-date view of how infrastructure components relate to one another speeds diagnosis and eases the burden of maintaining complex static rules and mappings, freeing expert staff to work on more strategic projects.

HP Operations Manager i Event ManagementHP Operations Manager i provides a cross-domain view of the entire IT environment—covering virtualization technologies, cloud infrastructure, third-party products, applications, servers, storage, networks, HP Application Performance Management (APM) monitors, and much more—via a single, modern Web-based user interface. This single consistent and holistic view of the entire IT ecosystem helps both operations teams and application support personnel decrease duplication of effort, increase collaboration across teams, and improve mean time to recovery (MTTR)—all of which promote more efficient utilization of operations staff.

In addition, operations teams can easily access customized visual representations of an event’s business impact and gain insights on how infrastructure and end user experience or application performance alerts are affecting business services. Armed with this information, they can determine which activities to work on first based on prioritization levels—in effect increasing their efficiency in handling incidents.

Figure 1. Operations Manager i is a single consolidation console for all IT events

Tablets and smartphones Custom event dashboards

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Run-time service model

Service watch Health perspective views

ArcSight Logger and ESM

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Agents and SPIs

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domain mgrs

BSM connectors for SCOM, IBM, Nagios

Open BSM connector interfaces

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Complete cross-domain visibility and correlation of IT infrastructure issues

Visibility into security events

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Once the cause of an incident has been identified and prioritized, it is important to enable tier-1 operations staff to address resolution of the issue in a consistent manner and, whenever possible, in an automated fashion. However, when manual activities are required, Operations Manager i provides operators with a number of tools, workflows and cross domain performance graphing, analysis and triage to guide and speed their activities, analysis and triage as well as instructions and knowledge-base links, which are embedded directly within event.

These facilities, along with automated incident resolution, promote streamlined and consistent incident management, and reduce errors, rework, and incident escalations by tier-1 operators. The ultimate outcomes are a reduction in operational cost and higher IT operator productivity, more time for expert staff to work on strategic initiatives, and improved business service availability.

HP Operations Manager i Event Correlation TechniquesIn complex dynamic environments, one of the biggest challenges is how to manage the large number of events that originate from a variety of sources. Within this sea of data, the requirement is to identify the events that have a significant impact on business services. So while it is essential to minimize the number of events

that appear in the Event Browser, maximum efficiency is gained by highlighting the events that, if unmanaged, could cause a breach in service level agreements (SLAs) and generate incidents in your help desk system.

Event correlation plays a vital role in automatically reducing the noise and allowing IT to focus on those issues that really matter to the business service and IT objectives. Operations Management i correlates events automatically using the following forms of event correlation:

• Suppressing duplicate events

• Closing related events automatically

• Stream-based event correlation

• Topology-based event correlation

Suppressing Duplicate Events

A new event may be a duplicate of an existing event. As new events are received, they are checked against existing events. If duplicates are found, new information, such as a change in severity, is used to update the existing event, and the new event is ignored. The advantage of correlating events using duplicate event suppression is that it reduces the number of events displayed in the console, but without losing any important information.

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Closing Related Events Automatically

A new event can automatically close one or more existing events. When a new event arrives, a search is made for existing related events. Some specific information contained in the new event is used to match the new event to any existing events, and the new event closes the existing event.

Stream-Based Event Correlation

Stream-based event correlation (SBEC) uses rules and filters to identify commonly occurring events or combinations of events. It simplifies and accelerates event management by automatically identifying events that can be withheld, removed or need a new replacement event to be generated and displayed to the operators.

The following types of SBEC rules can be configured:

• Repetition rules: Frequent repetitions of the same event may indicate a problem that requires attention.

• Combination rules: A combination of different events occurring together or in a particular order indicates an issue, and requires special treatment.

• Missing recurrence rules: A regularly recurring event is missing, for example, a regular heartbeat event do not arrive when expected.

Topology Based Event Correlation

HP Operations Manager i Topology-Based event Correlation (TBEC) utilizes detailed, comprehensive, and automatically updated discovery and relationship information to analyze alerts and events, and ultimately determine the event that is most likely the cause of an incident. Operators are presented with a clear representation of which event they need to investigate and what symptoms can be ignored, which then helps them determine the team best suited to resolve an incident. With TBEC, there is less need to guess at the cause of an incident or spend time chasing symptoms—so operations staff can fix issues faster, handle more incidents, escalate fewer issues to expert staff, and collaborate more effectively to resolve problems—all of which ultimately help make incident management more efficient.

From an expert staff perspective, TBEC assists in streamlining work by allowing correlation rules to be defined only once. Because these rules are based on configuration item (CI) types, not on components themselves, they can be automatically applied to each new CI as the Run-time Service Model dynamically discovers and captures it and its interrelationships. With no need to update correlation rules according to the changes in the IT environment, ongoing rules maintenance is significantly decreased.

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In addition, TBEC guides subject matter experts in the creation of new rules, thus ultimately reducing the amount of time they spend on maintaining operational solutions. For example, expert staff can create new TBEC rules by simply selecting events in the browser, where the topology behind these events is used as a starting point by Operations Manager i.

IT Operation efficiency is increased when the human interface of tools is simpler. As shown in figure 2, HP OMi provides glance efficient information, allowing fast construction of service watch and event dashboards in which IT Staff will typically group information specific to their priorities, giving them at-a-glance perspectives on these without needing any programming and maintenance. The power of event correlation means they gain quick access to causal indications, and isolate other events as symptoms, vastly improving their analysis. Since domain experts with differing responsibilities will use their own dashboards but based on the same correlation engine, a common version of the truth of IT health, overall operational efficiencies can improve vastly.

IT Operators need to gain access to perform their management tasks from anywhere. With the proliferation of mobile devices finding their way into everyone’s lives, HP OMi simplifies access yet renders its power through modern, colorful interfaces on tablets and smartphones. As shown in figure 3. Operators gain access from where they are, practically anywhere in the world and can visualize events, drill down to health views, and perform actions to repair IT issues. All this without programming and no fiddling to gain access through corporate VPN backbones.

Tools that enhance Operation Manager i capabilitiesMany IT organizations need a single view of the entire IT ecosystem—a cross-domain view that encompasses all the technologies being used, whether old or new, including not just HP tools but also products from other vendors. Rich information in this holistic view—for example, an incident’s cause within an event stream, how it was diagnosed, and how it was remediated—needs to interoperate with other tools in the IT ecosystem. The following is a selection of related solutions from HP and HP partners:

Enriched Management with OMi Content Packs

Content Packs tailor the Operator’s OMi environment to recognize and provide enhanced management of specific applications. OMI 9.20 includes IIS topology-synchronization rules, and creates IIS Health and Event Type Indicators fed by monitoring. It also provides new view mappings for Web Server and FTP Server CITs. The Content Pack for SAP environments provides indicators, view mappings for SAP ABAP and J2EE deployments and a topology synchronization package. For SAP discovered CIs features include SAP CCMS alerts monitor, SAP Java Web Application Server Monitor, and SAP Performance Monitor.

Systems Management

HP Operations Center helps you monitor, diagnose, and prioritize infrastructure problems based on business impact and supports consolidated operations. An integrated operations bridge consolidates event and performance data from physical, virtual, and cloud sources to reduce duplicate monitoring and boost productivity. HP Operations Center consists of HP Operations Manager, HP Performance Manager, HP Reporter, HP Glance, Agents, HP SiteScope and HP Smart Plug-Ins.

Figure 2. OMi Health Perspective Views

Figure 3. Operations Manager i event dashboard

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Intelligent Operations

Unifies searching, reporting, alerting, and analysis across any type of enterprise log data, making it unique in its ability to collect, analyze, and store massive amounts of data generated by modern networks. ArcSight Logger supports multiple deployment options and can be deployed as an appliance and as software. It integrates with HP Operations Manager, HP OMi, and NNMi, giving IT operators universal event logging for faster triage, insight into their data and event enrichment.

HP Application Performance Management products

With the increased use of cloud computing, it is important for you to understand your customers’ experience and also how your business services are tied to and rely on which components in your IT environment. Through a common look and feel, HP Application Performance Management (APM) software—such as HP Business Process Monitor (BPM) and HP Real User Monitor (RUM)—are integrated with Operations Manager i, providing a foundation for collaboration among your organization’s IT teams. And when these products are tied together, you also get consistent and transparent information on event streams and causal incidents—along with recommendations for resolving those incidents.

Service Intelligence products

HP offers Service Intelligence products that further enhance Operations Manager i capabilities, including HP Service Health Reporter, HP Service Health Optimizer, HP Server Health Analyzer, and ArcSight Logger—the latter two providing the most benefits when used in conjunction with Operations Manager i. ArcSight Logger feeds pertinent events from unstructured log files to Operations Manager i, allowing for more comprehensive troubleshooting capabilities, as now both the structured and unstructured data is consumed by Operations Manager i. HP Service Health Analyzer,

on the other hand, generates events with additional context, which is then provided to Operations Manager i. This additional context, such as similar incidents and recommended run books, facilitates faster MTTR. Since Service Intelligence products use the common RTSM and performance management database, they exploit data directly. For example, HP Service Health Reporter exploits event and availability data that is managed by HP OMi, providing increased Return on Investment of the management platform.

Automated workflows and service desk integrations

Managing business services goes beyond just monitoring. It means managing the entire lifecycle of an event, which includes automatic submission with service desks and automated remediation using run books.

HP Operations Orchestration software allows for the execution of automated process steps—IT process workflows or “run books”—which are called by Operations Manager i. With more than 4,000 out-of-the-box workflows, Operations Orchestration enables automatic remediation of recurring incidents—with no intervention from operations staff or subject matter experts. Where no automated remediation flow exists, tools—all in context of a selected event—are presented to users via Operations Manager i, providing a consolidated list of possible actions to take. These capabilities—speeding incident resolution and promoting consistent remediation—when integrated with Operations Manager i, allow your expert staff to work on initiatives that drive business innovation.

Operations Manager i also integrates with HP Service Manager and third-party service-desk offerings to automatically create and synchronize trouble tickets and third-party notification systems to notify IT staff (for example, via paging and SMS) for greater incident-handling efficiency.

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HP defines a solution called Closed Loop Incident Management process (CLIP) as one which helps you transition from reactive to predictive operations management, prevent unplanned service interruptions, and keep service quality high. It consists of four integrated HP products: HP Operations Manager i software, Service Manager, Operations Orchestration, and Universal CMBD. It enables your IT staff to overcome the drawbacks of event and information overload, lack of linkage between events and service model, and manual ticketing, troubleshooting, triaging, and remediation.

Integrations with third-party monitoring tools

Operations Manager i consolidates IT monitoring across domains and third-party tools for comprehensive monitoring, at the same time protecting existing monitoring investments. For example, HP offers off-the-shelf Integration Adapters for Microsoft® Systems Center Operations Manager (SCOM), IBM Tivoli/Netcool, and Nagios, allowing for more sophisticated integration between these specific third-party monitoring tools and Operations Manager i.

A complete solutionHP provides a comprehensive curriculum of HP software courses, which provide the training you need to realize the full potential of your HP solutions and achieve better return on your IT investments. For more information about educational courses, visit hp.com/learn.

HP Financial Services

HP Financial Services provides innovative financing and financial asset management programs to help you cost-effectively acquire, manage, and ultimately retire your HP solutions. For more information on these services, contact your HP sales representative or visit hp.com/go/hpfinancialservices.

HP ServicesHP provides high-quality software services that address all aspects of your software application lifecycle needs. The wide range of HP service offerings—from online, self-solve support to proactive mission-critical services—enables you to choose the services that best match your business needs. For an overview of HP software services, visit hp.com/go/bsmprofessionalservices.

Start managing smarter.

HP Operations Manager i enables you to deploy a consolidated IT operations bridge that delivers tangible business value. By combining advanced logic and a comprehensive, automatically discovered model of the IT infrastructure, the software takes the guesswork out of infrastructure monitoring.

HP Operations Manager i helps you transform operations to power business innovation. To learn more, visit hp.com/go/omi. For more resources on HP Operations Center: product downloads and our blog, visit hp.com/go/opc and hp.com/go/bsmblog. Further details concerning Service Intelligence can be found at hp.com/go/si.

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4AA2-3879ENW, Created December 2008; Updated November 2012, Rev. 5