BSG in IT360 – a Business Services based Container for IT Infrastructure – Part 1

Today’s Medium and Large Enterprises have scores of network devices, servers, applications. These elements are monitored as independent entities which in turn provide health and availability status. You have tabular and graphical display of various parameters against time, or a ratio, or a % and so on, for each of these independent entities. The logic is that as long as the individual entities are up and running and meeting the individual standards, the IT infrastructure is supposed to be working well. All elements show an uptime of 99%, say.

Let’s take a situation when “just that 1% failure” happens in succession – one element after another. This sums up to several hours of downtime of a IT service like, say, a mail service or a CRM application service and so on.  How does one track such a service rather than a “uptime of 99%” for individual elements? Obviously, it is on the monitoring tool.

The monitoring suite that is used should have the ability to group the “the service associated elements” into containers; such groups or containers then being monitored from a service perspective; a feature that retains the individuality of the elements and also that which supports a IT Service.

ManageEngine IT360 supports this concept using the BSG feature – the Business Service Groups. This facilitates bringing together of various IT elements into groups which has a bearing on a particular IT Service. BSGs are used to group devices, servers, applications, bandwidth, etc., that are associated to a particular business service like a CRM application, ERP, etc.. You create a BSG and associate network devices, servers, applications, etc., that form a part of the IT Service. Not only that, you may also associate a select list of services, applications, DBs, etc., running in a server; a select list of interfaces of a particular device, etc..

You also have the option of assigning owners to a given BSG who will have access based on assigned roles [admin user / operator user / guest user, etc.]. You can also create a location based BSG.

Once done with the above, a BSG is created. The following are then displayed, by default:

1. A Summary widget
2. Health & Availability widget
3. Recent Alarms widget
4. Tickets created against this BSG
5. Top Applications by response time
6. Top Servers by CPU widget
7. Top servers by response time widget, etc..

Having created a BSG, you will need to set alarm rules / notifications for the same. That defines the performance boundaries of the IT Service….

BSG Health – Alarms & Notifications & Actions

ManageEngine IT360 allows you to define alarm rules, for Critical and Warning states, based on the following conditions:

• Any of the device / monitors condition
• All of the devices / monitors condition
• A Select List of devices / monitors condition

Based on the above, you may configure the following Actions for the Critical State / Warning State:

• Send a Email
• Send an SMS
• Log a Ticket
• Send a Trap
• Execute any other action like a script, etc..

You may invoke such Actions for Clear State also.

BSG Availability – Alarms & Notifications & Actions

ManageEngine IT360 allows you to define alarm rules for a Down State, based on the following conditions:

• Any of the device / monitors condition
• All of the devices / monitors condition
• A Select List of devices / monitors condition

Based on the above, you may configure the following Actions for the Down State:

• Send a Email
• Send an SMS
• Log a Ticket
• Send a Trap
• Execute any other action like a script, etc..

You may invoke such Actions for Up State also. In addition, IT360 also supports creation of device dependency in a BSG.

You now have a fair idea of what a BSG is capable of, as supported in IT360. That’s it for now. I shall cover a few more points in part 2.

Now, do you think IT360 aligns to the concept of Real-time IT?

K. Lakshmi Shankar