What tools of management and control can we offer to business process owner and revenue owner?

Problem statement: all new fancy Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools still target IT staff - developer and administrators. Maybe a business application owner at best.

Such strategy and tools work well for companies with simple, or shall we say streamlined, operational model, such as online retail or online service providers. They measure performance of IT systems and their end-user experience and derive important business and operational metrics.

Yet in such industries as banking, telecommunications, manufacturing and healthcare, operational models consist of long-running business processes, which automation span multiple IT-systems and business applications, and last not minutes, but hours, days and weeks. From banking loan issue to triple-play service provisioning to processing customer service complaints, these take up 90% in the continuum of customer service and care. Their impact on business bottom line is much greater than brief interactions of customer with your IT-systems.

Thus, the objective is to implement the same principles of monitoring and control, objective SLAs and KPIs to long-running and cross-application business processes, to provide real-time picture of process- and revenue performance, integrated with IT and business-transaction monitoring provided by classic APM tools.

That is the mission of Advanced Monitoring Engine (AME). Now up to version 2.5, our technology provides 100% real-time business-process visibility and guarantees alignment of IT-, business- and operational KPI for organizations of any size.

Data Acquisition

AME comes with large and very flexible set of data adapters.

They “understand” many standard systems of records and are able to retrieve data from virtually any standard data source, using industry standard and compliant protocols and drivers.

Data access design and coding emphasizes on speed of reading the data and low load of the source system. AME supports the following protocols and drivers:

1. ODBC
2. JDBC
3. XML
4. REST-API
5. Web-Services
6. CSV
7. Hadoop
8. Mongo DB
9. Logs and other unstructured data

AME constantly performs self-monitoring, and when speed and amount of data starts to increase significantly, automatically alerts support team.

Analytics and big data processing

All raw source data needs to be automatically “put together” to identify business process steps of each individual process instance and properly calculate business metrics and KPI compliance.

One of the unique differentiators of AME is the ability to define a calendar of KPI thresholds and have them applied hours, day-by-day or based-on any other schedule. Another approach is to have historic baselines to be calculated, applied to KPI instead of fixed values.

Advanced Visualization

AME can work standalone or integrated with IT-monitoring system, called “umbrella”. In integrated deployment, monitoring system serves as “home page” with consolidated dashboard and drill down into reports and views provided by AME. Each business process visualization consists of one process-specific dashboard and three report.

In stand-alone deployment both reports and dashboards reside inside AME.

Dashboards and reports are dynamic and include color-coded status of KPIs.

Mobile Device Support

Version 2.5 comes with the support of Apple and Android mobile devices. Native app provides secure access to static and dynamic reports with the following added features:

1. Dynamic report analysis (sort, filter, etc. on the fly)
2. Drill-down
3. Favorites
4. Save report for offline viewing
5. Export to Excel, PDF or CSV formats

Integration with APM and Business Services Management

AME is a first-class citizen in the following APM and IT-Monitoring systems:

• AppDynamics (metrics, no topology)
• Microsoft SCOM (metrics and objects, no topology)
• DELL Foglight (metrics, objects, business-process topology is built manually)
• HPE BSM (metrics, CIs, and automated business process topology)
• Riverbed Steel Central (metrics and objects, business-process topology is built manually)
• Zabbix (metrics and objects, no topology )

Deployment and support

AME is distributed as a Virtual Appliance (OVA file format) that you import into a virtual environment. AME supports the following virtual environments:

• VMware ESXi Version 5.0, 5.1, 5.5, and 6.0
• Microsoft Windows Hyper-V 2008R2 or later

AME comes with:

• User guide
• Backup-restore manual
• Admin guide for configuration of logging, security and self-monitoring

CPU, Memory, Disk Space Requirements

The virtual appliance includes a virtual machine configured with these minimum resource requirements:

• Memory: 4 GB
• CPUs: 2 cores
• Disk space: 60 GB, Storage must be capable of high I/O Operations per Second (IOPS) and throughput (MBps). If possible use, local RAID of 6 or more 15K RPM or SSD drives. A fast SAN (not NAS) direct connected via FibreChannel or 10Gb Ethernet is acceptable.

Supported Browsers

The analysis server interface supports the following web browsers:

• Microsoft Internet Explorer 11 and later
• Mozilla Firefox
• Google Chrome

Monitoring and support

AME includes self-monitoring component that reports vital metrics and events to an integrated APM system. Types of data being monitored and reported includes:

• Internal storage and its usage growth
• Host metrics, such as CPU, Memory, Network and Disk IO
• Timing and speed of data collections from data sources

In addition, configuration changes and security events can be forwarded to external syslog server.

Price and TCO

AME is distributed as turn-key solution. AME pricing is licensed-based and cost of a license includes customization to implement monitoring of specific business processes.

AME is licensed per business process. License cost per process depends on process monitoring complexity (Biz-process category) and specified in the table below. Minimum purchase price is $40,000.00. Additional AME licenses purchased without minimum price limit.

** Prices do not include local taxes and fees

Annual support cost is 10% of license fees and includes support and administration, product updates, bug fixes, and MINOR modifications and adjustments to business process monitoring.

Minor modifications include:

• Addition/change or removal of business process steps and transitions <=25% per year
• Addition/change or removal of dashboard or reports <=25% per year
• Unlimited threshold, alert and notification changes
• No data source changes
• No metrics calculation changes