Use case: Monitoring the infrastructure in the context of an application

BMC TrueSight Operations Management provides infrastructure monitoring from an application perspective, enabling IT Operations at-a-glance views into how infrastructure, applications, and users are related and impacted by events. You achieve application context through definition of application models for your critical applications.

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Application context scenario

IT Operations has responsibility for monitoring the infrastructure that supports their service offerings. When the performance degrades on a device, an event is issued and responded to; however, the cause and impact of that event is not readily understood. Often, that impact is only understood from customer calls to the Help Desk or defects issued on the service.

From an application-centric view, IT Operations views the health summary for critical applications and quickly observes the back-end infrastructure impacting an application and end users. In the same page, they view the nodes that compose the application, such as web or application servers and databases, and understand how monitored devices or device groups impact the application. Finally, to determine the right specialist for resolving the issue, IT Operations conducts a first-level investigation by locating the root cause event of the issue.

The application specialist assigned to resolving the issue researches the problem through evaluation of performance metrics, application tracing and diagnostics, or cross launches to BMC IT Data Analytics for log analysis.

Application context workflow

An application model gives IT Operations the ability to determine the impact of events on end-user transactions (that is, response time and errors) and on the infrastructure nodes (devices and groups) associated with an application. This workflow is an end-to-end example of how BMC TrueSight Operations Management is used from detection of the service disruption to resolution.

Some parts of the application context workflow depend on the data providers in your environment, such as BMC TrueSight App Visibility Manager and BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management.

User	Action	Reference
IT Operations	From an application dashboard or the Applications page, monitor and observe an important application that is in a critical state.	Consolidating data views with dashboards Viewing an application
IT Operations	(App Visibility Manager) In the Application View tab, observe the impact to the end users and the application tiers.	Investigating application issues with the Application View
IT Operations	View the application model and observe the node impacting the application.	Application models Viewing an application model
IT Operations	Select the critical node to view the associated events or devices below the model. (You can also click the Events or Devices tabs.)	Managing and monitoring events Monitoring devices
IT Operations	Perform probable cause analysis on the event.	Performing probable cause analysis on an event
IT Operations Application Specialist	Assign the impacting event to a specialist. Acknowledge the event	Performing event operations
Application Specialist	(App Visibility Manager) Use the Application View to diagnose applications that have exceeded their performance or availability thresholds, or drill down into transaction traces.	Investigating application issues with the Application View
Application Specialist	(Infrastructure Management and BMC IT Data Analytics) Cross-launch to BMC IT Data Analytics to investigate the logs associated with the application.	Cross-launching to BMC TrueSight IT Data Analytics
Application Specialist	After the Application Specialist restores the application to the acceptable level of performance, the causal event is automatically closed in an automatic model. In the dashboards and application views, the state of the of the application returns to normal.	Performing event operations

Application context setup

BMC TrueSight App Visibility Manager automatically generates models for the web-based applications that are monitored by App Visibility components. Models are generated by user transactions on monitored applications that are actively (over the last 24-hours) in use.

With BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management, you can manually create application models from your devices and groups.

Manual application models can also be based on synthetic transactions, or on end-user monitoring. These features require App Visibility components.

The following tables outline the steps for setting up application context, assuming you have installed and configured the components that enable this use case. For information about the products and components that you need to deploy for application context, see BMC TrueSight Operations Management basic deployment.

Automatic application models with application transactions and SLA threshold events

Product

Activity

Reference

BMC TrueSight App Visibility Manager

Deploy App Visibility agents on the application servers that you want to monitor.

Installing an App Visibility agent for Java

Installing an App Visibility agent for .NET

BMC TrueSight Operations Management / BMC TrueSight App Visibility Manager

Configure application discovery to create automated models.

Configuring application discovery

BMC TrueSight Operations Management / BMC TrueSight App Visibility Manager

For application transactions, define thresholds for service-level agreements.

Configuring event thresholds (SLAs) for automatically discovered applications

Manual application models with infrastructure events and devices

Products	Activity	Reference
BMC TrueSight Operations Management / BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management / BMC PATROL	Deploy agents and and set up monitoring policies to generate events.	Monitoring configuration best-practice process
BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management	Set up devices.	Creating a device
BMC TrueSight Operations Management (manual groups) BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management (synchronized groups)	Set up groups.	Setting up groups for monitoring
BMC TrueSight Operations Management	Manually create the application model and define how the status propagates between the nodes.	Creating an application manually

Automatic or manual models with synthetic transactions

Products	Activity	Reference
Borland Silk Performer Synthetic Transaction Monitoring for BMC Software and BMC Synthetic Transaction Execution Adapter (TEA) Agent	In addition to the BMC TrueSight App Visibility server, deploy Borland Silk Performer and synthetic TEA agents on computers that simulate an end user accessing the application that you are testing.	Installing a BMC Synthetic Transaction Execution Adapter Agent
BMC Synthetic TEA Agent	Configure agents and execution plans to define the synthetic transaction scripts, where they run, and when.	Setting up and managing synthetic transaction monitoring

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