ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES®
Analyst Corner
June 2009 EMA Analyst’s Corner:
Consolidated Event Management: Why It’s more Interesting than You Think
It’s funny how much high tech seems to be a slave to fashion, given its reputation for being unfashionable. Like it or not, high tech is full of the equivalents - of, well, American Idol or Britney Spears. This year it’s Twitter and Cloud Computing – the latter often being too cloudy a concept, invoked with more magic than meaning. But this article is not about the “fashionable crowd” or even the “fashionable cloud.” Instead, I’d like to revisit something nearly as old as IT, itself: event management.
The truth is that event management has quietly been evolving beyond niche diagnostics towards becoming a foundation for more unified decision making and remediation, albeit well out of the limelight. There are a number of reasons for this, many of them fairly obvious. First of all, event management in its various forms (“event automation,” “event de-duplication,” “event consolidation,” “root cause analysis,” etc.) has remained a staple of IT management practice for a good thirty years plus. Secondly, sharing events among management solutions is a lot easier to do than, say, enabling the modular data sharing and normalization required for CMDBs and Configuration Management Systems. You might say that it’s a parallel track – a kind of poor man’s integration system that’s become richer through advanced analytic technologies, modeling technologies, and self-learning heuristics. It’s also complemented and enriched by CMS initiatives and, in the end, may even support consistent objectives in terms of process improvements and organizational maturity.
Once you begin to see event management in this light – cross-domain event consolidation and event management – it begins to take on a new face. Cross-domain event management can allow for networking, systems, database, and application managers to derive unique but consistent insights from multiple, established sources of information. By bringing insights from different data gathering and domain-specific sources together for collective analysis, it can begin to approximate the analytic equivalent of a CMS – supporting better collaborative processes and empowering more informed decision making. And when coupled with the disciplines and cohesion of a CMS, consolidated event management can profit from a whole new dimension of reflexive insight – coupling information on service interdependencies and change with dynamically changing performance and availability conditions across the infrastructure.
Some of you may want to tell me that this doesn’t sound all that new. After all, weren’t many of the initial network management platforms based on a combination of topology and event management – sometimes with active attempts to capture service and even application interdependencies? Of course that’s true. In some respects, the Network War Room (or the IT Operations Bridge) was an early prototype- or precursor -- to the CMDB/CMS. It was a place where many things had to come together – without so much granularity and support for process, but with more consistently absolute requirements for timeliness and performance-related detail.
I would suggest that the way to start to optimize on the advances in consolidated event management is to view management solutions in a layered approach. Try to view data gathering, modeling, configuration and topology, and capturing application interdependencies – as foundational enablers. Then consider data storage and data access— as a related set of enablers – which as a collection of technologies very nicely reflects ITIL v3’s notion of a CMS. Above these layers are analytics (where event management most naturally resides), automation, visualization, and business alignment. In the past, and still very much in the present, many or all of these functions were/are packaged together in single, siloed tools, each optimized for different professional users in different domains. What’s coming to pass – albeit over a period of years – is the gradual decoupling of these layers into separate areas of focus and integration, so that best of class functions in, say, event management and analytics, can draw from a wider pool of data resources to solve problems more relevant to critical business services versus boxed in perspectives confined to the myriad isolated components supporting that service.
Seen in this light then, event consolidation across domains represents a critical mass within the “analytics layer” – made more powerful with advances in a wide variety of heuristics – to harvest better, more cohesive sources of information about changing infrastructures, services, and potentially even consumer behavior and market conditions. A lot of advances in the next three to five years will hopefully explore how to exploit these linkages – not only technically, but also within the processes, organizational structures and “mindsets” within IT, so that collaborative decision making becomes more informed, more effective, more efficient, and significantly more native to who we are.
