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Slide 1: Quality of Experience Monitoring and the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL): A Governing Force for IT Service Management (ITSM) A White Paper Prepared for Coradiant August 2005
Slide 2: Quality of Experience Monitoring and ITIL: A Governing Force for ITSM Table of Contents Executive Introduction ......................................................................................................................................................................1 QoE as a Baseline ..............................................................................................................................................................................1 The IT Infrastructure Library ...........................................................................................................................................................2 Key ITIL Processes – with QoE ....................................................................................................................................................3 Service Support ..............................................................................................................................................................................3 Service Delivery .............................................................................................................................................................................3 TrueSight Product Sidebar ...............................................................................................................................................................4 Conclusion – Summary ......................................................................................................................................................................4 About Coradiant ..................................................................................................................................................................................5
Slide 3: Quality of Experience Monitoring and ITIL: A Governing Force for ITSM Executive Introduction IT managers, executives and technical professionals are faced with changing roles that present both challenges and opportunities. The challenges that virtually all of today’s IT managers must address are to become more aligned with business objectives while delivering a broader and more effective set of IT application services. Moreover, IT must do this by increasing levels of efficiency with often constrained operational resources. To add to this challenge, IT managers and professionals must cope with an increasing array of new technologies. The opportunity behind these requirements lies in the fact that business services are increasingly dependent on IT services, and in many cases business services – whether they involve e-commerce, supply-chain management, or internal order entry processes for sales – are all but synonymous with business-applications. A growing number of these are becoming Web-based. Service Oriented Architecture will take this equation one step further, with modularized Web-based application components to mirror business requirements and processes even more closely. By stepping up to this opportunity, IT can assume a more fundamental and strategic role within the enterprise, one that empowers the business rather than taxes it with overhead. In the face of these issues, there is a growing interest in best practices in order to help guide IT towards more effective service management through more efficient processes. The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is becoming a de facto standard in providing guidance on processes and process interdependencies and has become a positive catalyst for change in many IT environments. Its seven libraries in support of more effective IT Service Management (ITSM) stress crossorganizational cooperation to enable more optimized service management with a customer-centric focus. Underlying many of ITIL’s objectives are two critical parameters for assessing service effectiveness. These parameters are quality and cost. Through active insights into quality and cost, IT planners can make better tradeoffs in achieving infrastructure optimization, while IT operations can proceed with a more accurate baseline for troubleshooting and assuring critical business application services. Quality, or Quality of Experience (QoE) is especially important in both troubleshooting and optimization, as well as providing insights into compliance issues related to service usage and privacy requirements. As such, QoE, which is at once multidimensional and dynamic, can be a foundational baseline for assessing IT effectiveness vis-à-vis a number of critical ITIL processes. Without an accurate picture of QoE for a given service, by contrast, IT can only speculate about its effectiveness in supporting the business. QoE requires a flexible and open-ended approach to customer needs, rather than a preconceived set of technical metrics that may or may not truly apply to customer satisfaction levels. One approach to defining meaningful QoE is customer dialog. Listening to and learning from IT service customers will always be a cornerstone of successful ITSM. Another requirement, which is far more technologydependent, is the effective monitoring of real user and infrastructure behaviors as they directly impact service quality. Continuous observation of application service performance as the user experiences it is key to QoE – and no series of synthetic transactions can fully substitute for, or in themselves adequately answer, this requirement. At the same time, observation of user behavior, in terms of who uses what services how often and when, and in terms of aborted transactions that indicate a failure in service performance – are also critical in establishing and measuring meaningful objectives for effective QoE. This report clarifies how Quality of Experience can become a critical baseline, and even effective governing force, in enabling successful IT Service Management. QoE as a Baseline Quality of Experience is a contextual approach to establishing and enforcing effective service level objectives and creating meaningful service level agreements. It can also inform on how to optimize the IT infrastructure vis-à-vis business services, in that optimization can only be understood in terms of its impact on quality. EMA has defined the following key areas as useful in establishing QoE: ©2005 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 1
Slide 4: Quality of Experience Monitoring and ITIL: A Governing Force for ITSM • Service availability – includes mean time to repair (MTTR) and mean time between failure (MTBF) • Service responsiveness – is primarily the response time that the end user experiences in interacting with an IT service. In the case of Web-based applications, this will require understanding how component transactions, and ideally, end-user sessions contribute to overall service quality. Service responsiveness can be tested through synthetic transactions, but it can only be effectively documented through accurate and continuous observation of real user transactional experience. • Service consistency – is the consistency with which a service is available and responsive to the end customer. For instance, the averaged response time between two service offerings may both be .8 seconds, but service A typically varies from .5 to 2 seconds, and service B ranges from .2 to 10 seconds. As service customers interact with IT services based on expected rhythms, service A will be significantly more satisfying than service B. And once again, monitoring for consistency will require ongoing and accurate observation. • Service appropriateness – requires making sure that the end customer services are appropriate to their needs. • Flexibility and mobility – can empower end customers and increase satisfaction levels, as long as it’s done within the realm of appropriateness to need and value to the business. For some IT application services, for instance, mobility and consistent responsiveness may be more important than sub-second response times. • Security and compliance – end user privacy and security in exchanging information is another positive informer on QoE. • Cost-effectiveness – will become increasingly important not only to the overall business, but also to departmental clients in an environment where accountability and efficiency has become paramount. Each service may have a different weighting for each of these value parameters, and it should be stressed that this list is not meant to be in any way exhaustive. Other value parameters may well crop up in dialogs with IT service customers. Finally, IT managers should not assume that these weightings will stay constant, as business requirements change and the end-customer base may shift or expand, for instance, as through mergers and acquisitions. Once an IT organization has begun to understand and measure real-world QoE, it is prepared to embark on a successful IT Service Management initiative. But to do this, an IT organization must once again step back and assess how it works as a total organization in support of critical service processes. The IT Infrastructure Library The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), at www.itilitsm-world.com provides guidance, training and documentation in support of critical IT processes for enterprises seeking a more service-centric approach to management. ITIL contains seven libraries which provide guidelines for defining and assessing multiple processes and their interdependencies. Very briefly, these are: • Service Support – which reflects the day-to-day operational requirements for assuring a service. • Service Delivery – which is more focused on the business and planning side of service management. • Application Management – or processes directed at managing the lifecycle of an application service from development or customization through QA and deployment and finally through retirement. • Security Management – which addresses confidentiality, integrity, data availability and security-related compliance concerns. • Planning to Implement Service Management – which involves implementing the critical service management processes for Service Delivery and Service Support. • ICY Infrastructure Management – which is focused on infrastructure and service provisioning. • The Business Perspective – which is directed at understanding business priorities. Studying ITIL and learning about these processes in more depth is a solid step in moving towards more effective Page 2
Slide 5: Quality of Experience Monitoring and ITIL: A Governing Force for ITSM service management. However, making these processes come alive in a real-world context also requires an astute and creative approach to combining organizational, process, and technology investments in a synergistic manner. When organization, process and technology are at odds, no set of edicts, no matter how well intentioned, can in themselves bring about positive change. In making real and valid assessments, understanding and capturing QoE, as well as costs, can help IT managers to define exactly where they are in terms of technology, Service Support Incident Management – involves managing problems as they occur, including trouble ticketing and help desk support, as well as real-time root cause and fault diagnostics. Effective QoE monitoring supports Incident Management by providing a customer-centric context for alerting on service conditions with a clear eye to service impact. QoE technologies should also be able to provide diagnostic capabilities to help isolate the performance or availability problem across infrastructure domains (network/systems, applications). Here QoE technologies should be able to offer valuable historical insights into how and where problems are occurring that are impacting critical business services. QoE insights are fundamental for Help Desk personnel in understanding the reality behind customer complaints and in helping to accelerate incident management processes. Service Desk requirements for more strategic interfacing with IT customers can be informed and clarified through QoE. business satisfaction, operational efficiency and service performance. A more detailed look at how capturing QoE maps to supporting critical IT processes can better explain why it will separate the winners from the alsorans in making IT service management count. Key ITIL Processes – with QoE The tables below are designed to highlight the key processes within ITIL most directly enhanced by effectively monitoring Quality of Experience. Problem Management – focuses on proactive analysis to better understand the context for resolving persistent problems across the infrastructure. Service Desk/ Help Desk – is ITIL’s only organizationally specific process, and specifies processes relevant to the support of customer-facing constituencies. Service Delivery Service Level Management – includes processes to inform on questions such as – are service levels being met? Are they realistic? And are they appropriate? Availability Management – includes processes to help determine if the infrastructure is in place to support appropriate levels of availability. Without realistic and pervasive QoE metrics, SLM can become a shill game of presumed technology objectives without customer relevance. Accurate and ongoing QoE insights are the heart and soul of all effective SLM planning. Here QoE solutions should provide the ultimate baseline for service availability and performance against which infrastructure readiness can be assessed. Insights through QoE observation can also support actionable plans for improving availability readiness. Service QoE data combined with service cost data are the only two fundamental parameters required for effective infrastructure optimization. This is true both in predeployment testing as well as in production conditions. The objective is to optimize based on assuring appropriate levels of quality. Much as with capacity planning, QoE provides the ultimate quality baseline against which costs can be meaningfully assessed. ©2005 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Capacity Planning – asks the question, “is the infrastructure optimized for service delivery?” Financial Management for IT Services – involves planning and budgeting for services. Page 3
Slide 6: Quality of Experience Monitoring and ITIL: A Governing Force for ITSM In addition, QoE monitoring applies directly to two other IT process libraries already described above: Security and Application Management. • Security: QoE solutions provide ready insights into service performance degradations that can be the hallmark of security-related issues and outside intrusions. Some, although by no means all, QoE solutions provide detailed insight into compliance issues surrounding data privacy, as specified by a number of legislated initiatives, such as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) in the financial vertical and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in the health care vertical. • Application Management: Whether for use by application developers, QA and test, or production-level service management, QoE solutions provide both the metrics to baseline service level acceptability, as well as accelerating problem resolution across multiple domains (network, systems, application, data base). application and content levels, and can process up to 3,000 requests per second analyzed in real-time. At the heart of TrueSight’s analytics is its Adaptive Classification Engine with its Watchpoint technology. Watchpoint allows IT managers and administrators to focus on those parameters of a Web-based application service most relevant to business and operational priorities. Watchpoint parameters support such categories as application content, business function, user or user group, performance evaluation criteria, operational ownership, etc. Complete real-time data can be stored for 90 days and can be accessed upon request for drilldown interrogations via Web requests. TrueSight’s User Analysis Toolkit is designed to support incident and service level management specifics. TrueSight can also share SNMP (v2 and v3) traps with major management platforms vendors such as HP, IBM, CA, BMC and Micromuse. TrueSight is deployed as a passive monitor that connects into network taps, mirror ports, or load-balancer pools. As such it has been deployed in under 30 minutes. Coradiant’s TrueSight is not designed as a complete enterprise management solution and is strictly focused on Web-based applications. However, TrueSight does provide a powerful monitoring capability for QoE, incident management, and SLM, with policy-based enablement for security. It can support virtually all of the ITIL processes indicated in this white paper. As such, TrueSight is an excellent choice for a first, automated window into Web-based application issues with a clear and continuous eye to relevant QoE behaviors. TrueSight Product Sidebar A new strategy for monitoring Web-based application QoE is evolving with tools that view the web application experience from the users’ point-of-view, and monitor actual, delivered QoE from a Web-based application perspective. One of the industry leaders in this new segment is Coradiant. Coradiant’s TrueSight is one of the very few solutions in the enterprise management marketplace truly capable of capturing real-world user experience as it relates to application service performance. TrueSight provides granular data capture for correlating how user experience relates to components of a Web-based transaction, and, from a diagnostic perspective, exactly what and where something went wrong. TrueSight also offers distinctive policy capabilities for security and compliance in order to enable customer privacy while protecting providers from liability and theft. More specifically, from a QoE perspective, it should be pointed out that TrueSight provides a full transaction history for Web-based applications, monitoring 100% of real-user traffic in real-time. Its Transparent Session Extraction Engine (TSX) captures network, session, Conclusion – Summary It isn’t really open to debate – IT organizations simply must evolve to become more effective in supporting critical business application services. If they don’t evolve, they run the risk of facing outsourcing alternatives reactively rather than proactively, and they’ll almost certainly impede the effectiveness of the businesses they support. But how do you “evolve?” Rather than hope for ad hoc responses with an eye to Darwinian selection, many IT organizations are beginning to examine best practices to provide guidelines for processes that unite IT organizations and IT disciplines. Within the area Page 4
Slide 7: Quality of Experience Monitoring and ITIL: A Governing Force for ITSM of best practices, the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is becoming a de facto global standard by providing a common language and context for addressing IT’s core mission of business-aligned service management. However, ITIL is by its own admission, limited. It offers a focus on processes that, in themselves, can become informed by, and enhanced through, effective technology investments. One of the most critical criterion for selecting effective technologies in support of ITIL and IT Service Management (ITSM) is support for Quality of Experience or QoE. QoE, along with cost, are the two core parameters for assessing IT effectiveness in support of ITSM. But managing to QoE demands fluid, dynamic, and ongoing awareness of customer as well as infrastructure behaviors. As such it requires an open mind to customer dialog, and a willingness to explore advanced technologies capable of adapting to, and capturing, the change and complexity that are an increasing part of monitoring business applications today. For the astute IT manager, managing to QoE presents an opportunity as well as a demanding challenge. By tuning management insights to real user experience, IT becomes more empowered in understanding not only its own infrastructure and services, but the business behaviors its services must support. A rich capability for managing to QoE can not only make an ITIL initiative more effective, it can become a catalyst and accelerator for enhancing a host of IT processes and disciplines. Understanding real user QoE provides a dynamic bridge between the IT organization and its business customers that can inform on everything from troubleshooting, to service level management, to capacity planning, to security and compliance. As such, QoE resides at the very heart of effective IT Service Management, and can often be the single most potent catalyst in helping IT to achieve a new stature in relationship to its business clients. About Coradiant Coradiant’s unique, user-centric approach to datacenter performance monitoring quickly delivers accurate operational information in business-relevant formats. The company’s award winning technology gives IT operations and network managers a real-time understanding of the user’s web experience without the complexity, cost and risk of traditional performance management approaches. Coradiant, Inc. Tel: 1-781-895-1006 Toll free: 1-877-731-7277 Fax: 1-781-895-3233 sales@coradiant.com For more information please see www.coradiant.com. ©2005 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Page 5
Slide 8: About Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. is the fastest-growing analyst firm focused on the management software and services market. EMA brings strategic insights to both vendors and IT professionals seeking to leverage areas of growth across e-business, network, systems, and application management. Enterprise Management Associates’ vision and insights draw from its ongoing research and the perspectives of an experienced team with diverse, real-world backgrounds in the IT, service provider, ISV, and publishing communities, and is frequently requested to share their observations at management forums worldwide. Corporate Headquarters: Enterprise Management Associates 2585 Central Avenue, Suite 100 Boulder, CO 80301, U.S.A. This report in whole or in part may not be duplicated, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or retransmitted without prior written permission of Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All opinions and estimates herein constitute our judgement as of this date and are subject to change without notice. Product names mentioned herein may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective companies. ©2005 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Phone: 303.543.9500 Fax: 303.543.7687 info@enterprisemanagement.com http://www.emausa.com 959.080905