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 the 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.

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	(Optional) In the Application view, 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.)	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	(Optional) 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	(Optional) 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 using transactions from actively used applications. If BMC TrueSight App Visibility is not installed and configured, you can manually create application models from your BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management devices and groups. Manual application models can also be based on synthetic transactions.

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 component 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 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 machines 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