The Power And Use of FireScope Unify ESB

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1 The Power And Use of FireScope Unify ESB Executive Summary An important differentiator for FireScope Unify is its ability to acquire and collect both unstructured and structured data that exists within our customers domain and then transform that data and relate it to their critical services. This capability is very important and adds tremendous value for our customers by helping them understand the performance, importance and value of their critical services and the business impact they can have on the overall strategy and operations of their business. Therefore having domain expertise in the way in which we provide this valuable capability is paramount to our success. The FireScope Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) provides strong heterogeneous visibility into the data that describes the behavior of an organization s critical service(s). Its primary capability is in support of our Subscribe Normalize - Publish integration model that offers FireScope Unify users the ability to collect disparate unstructured and structured data and relate it to a critical service in a way that benefits their organization, all without the need for costly programming or on-going integration services. Normalization means that the data collected is transformed from bananas and apples into apples and apples and then aligned with the appropriate configuration item or service. Additionally, by utilizing the FireScope ESB you can facilitate service-level visibility and determine service performance, root cause analysis, business activity monitoring, regulatory compliance, and business intelligence in a deep and meaningful way. The purpose of this document is to validate and substantiate that our customers, partners and employees should all be confident of the competitive advantage and enterprise capabilities of the FireScope Unify ESB and its ability to consume structured and unstructured data, transform it into information and allow it to scale accordingly. The innovative way we have implemented the ESB into FireScope Unify allows everyone to benefit from our highly scalable deployment model, as well as, relate both business and IT operations data into powerful service views that give unrivaled knowledge as to the true value and performance of any organization s services.

2 FireScope ESB Use Cases A leading global financial services firm uses FireScope s ESB to collect and publish data used in managing the business impact of it s Low Latency Trading System globally. This system supports collecting multiple types and data points as it relates the business data such as trading volume and latency with the underlying IT assets that provide the Low Latency service. They are extending it to bring in market data and other related data to support the needs of the traders and trading system. It is important to note this is a critical system with an extremely high-transaction volume. Suncorp, one of the largest financial services firms in Australia now manages its entire Guidewire ClaimCenter s environment - including storage, servers and applications - using FireScope. Many of the data points are collected via the ESB and then related to the Guidewire service. This approach gives Suncorp a Business Services View, which is a single view of all performance metrics and issues that provides it with a clear management advantage. They had previously tried doing this with one of the Big Four s products and failed to have any success. Wells Fargo s needed to gain greater visibility into their Bill Pay, and Online Banking applications. Without that visibility they were blowing delivery timelines and wasting >$2M of professional services trying to identify root cause for the failures. Before the FireScope, they spent $600K on one of our large competitor s software plus another $400K on services, only to realize it would not meet the need. With only one FireScope delivery person utilizing Unify and its simple ESB capability and agents to collect various types of data, they were able to provide the required visibility in two days. Additionally, that same person was able to provide additional service group views and dashboards for 80+ mission critical online banking customer applications in another 5 days.

3 Key FireScope ESB Features Natively speaks the languages (protocols) that you don t, such as TCP, FTP, http, http/s and JDBC. Database support includes Oracle 10g & up, Sybase 10 & up, MS SQL Server 6.5 & up MySQL 5.03 & up. Leverage many of the ESB capabilities without custom programming. Most of the configuration is done through wizard-based UI. Extensible to a large variety of data sources. Currently includes 20+ transports. Secure access to data is ensured as it is highly integrated into Unify s role-based (LDAP) security model. Easily supports data collection from legacy solutions with ESB integration. Integrates with popular monitoring frameworks via SNMP traps or SMTP Scalable Multi-Threaded model can support a large number of data source collection points and data thoroughput. Competitive Advantages Opens data integration to the many numerous data points that live within a given enterprise. Many other products require extensive integration and on-going maintenance due to versioning and changing data schemas. No need to purchase product add-ons to leverage ESB capabilities. Most of our competitors offer a limited native capability around data collection and charge additionally for it. Flexible and extensible architecture of ESB means that future expansion is easily supported. Others take a more rigid approach to expansion of capabilities and are likely to charge for it. Data integration is achieved through wizard-based configuration without costly custom programming or extensive integration, thereby dramatically reducing time to value and return on investment. Supports an extensive number of data source collection points and employs a multi-threaded architecture that allows for enterprise-level data thoroughput. Many of our competitors only support Web Services, which are not designed to support large volumes of data, or proprietary integration points that require expensive integration and maintenance. Utilizing our multi-site approach data collection, data from multiple sites can be aggregated into a single repository at a corporate or enterprise level. Our competitors either do not provide this capability or only snapshot views By leveraging our Analytics product in unison with Unify s ESB capability the customer now has the ability to do capacity planning around a business service, helping them to avoid under or over investing in infrastructure to support a critical customer facing business service.

4 Proper Use High Level Approach (Deeper detail is provided in documentation and training workbook) One of the real strengths of the FireScope ESB approach is its simplicity and wizard-driven approach to integrating heterogeneous data collection points into FireScope Unify in unusually quick timeframes. The configuration of individual data collection points is painless, as it is driven more by strong design and forethought as to how the collected data is to be related to a configuration item/attribute associated with a service within FireScope Unify. While lots of different types of service-related data is potentially appropriate to collect through the ESB, it in no way means that all data should be. It is critical to work with the customer to understand through strong use cases how the potential data relates to the service and brings value to them. Customer use perception, performance and scalability of their FireScope solution is largely dependent on the total amount of activity (amount of data and collection intervals) that FireScope Unify collects and supports, as like any other transaction-based software it is bound by the top-end of the hardware, regardless if it is virtually or physically supported (more detail about activity and scalability can be found in The FireScope Unify Activity and Scalability Guide). Therefore, a structured and thoughtful approach will greatly enhance the overall usability, performance and the customer s experience when using FireScope Unify. The bullet list below describes the high-level steps to configuring and collecting either unstructured or structured data from a single data collection point (additional detail in diagram below). Note the simple and structured approach to configuration though this example: 1. Discuss and determine with the customer the data to be collected and its relation to the service. A real determination can be made if the data is needed and can it be related to the service at this point. If it is not clear as to its value or fit then it would be wise to leave out for now and then re-visit later. It is important to customer satisfaction to have strong performance and views during the initial engagement. 2. Once, it has been determined what data is to be collected and how it relates to a business service, then ensure the appropriate service, a configuration item (CI) and it s attributes are setup within FireScope to accept and act as collectors for the incoming data. 3. Using the wizard, define your transport and how FireScope will be collecting or receiving data (e.g. direct database connection, TCP socket, multicast, ftp, web services, etc ). Provide connection and login credentials if required to access data. 4. Continuing through the wizard, define and map the payload (define query if pulling from database), then set how the data is formatted and collected into the appropriate configuration item or attribute of a configuration item. This is also where you set collection intervals and data retention periods or accept defaults. 5. You are now done setting up your ESB connection, now check and ensure the attributes are collecting. If any issues arise, then click on ESB and re-check your configuration. Check your data and you are done with the ESB connection setup. 6. Next, go into the CI associated with the appropriate service and make sure the attribute is collecting the data as planned. 7. Once you are satisfied with the data being collected, then you can use it in service views, service level and alert notifications or for business impact scenarios.

5 Suggestions, Notes And Limitations Not all data sources are appropriate or should be considered; they should relate to the performance business impact of the given service and be substantiated prior with the customer. Need to have versus nice to have, since it can affect satisfaction, overall performance and perceived value. The 3rd party or external data source must be able to expose or provide a mechanism to retrieve the data and relate it to a service or CI (asset). There is no magic pixie dust here this is an absolute requirement. Support for the number of data source collection points is directly relational to overall activity (total amount of data and collection intervals) for a given virtual or physical appliance. Often times just adjusting the collection intervals on a given collection point can have performance enhancing results. Key Points Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is an important differentiator for FireScope Unify, enabling collection of structured and unstructured data related to the performance of their critical services. Configuration achieved through web-based wizards, lowering costs for customers by eliminating extensive professional services engagements. All data collection in FireScope Unify utilizes ESB, ensuring consistent, well performing data collection and normalization. External data can only be collected and stored for use as part of a service, if it can be successfully related to a service as a configuration item attribute. An example of this is: Your are monitoring a host (London Server1) as part of a service view and you collect the memory and processor utilization though the SNMP (an ESB Transport) and it is appropriately collected, stored and shown as attributes in a configuration item named London Server 1 in FireScope. It is now related to the service via the configuration item and is able to be retrieved and shown in a service view or dashboard. (For more information please refer to Unify documentation or training workbook.) Related Resources FireScope Enterprise Service Bus Best Practices This document describes best practices and considerations to ensure optimal performance of data collection using the FireScope ESB. The FireScope Unify Activity and Scalability Guide The activity and scalability guide describes the key considerations used in determining the proper sizing of a FireScope Unify deployment. FireScope Integration Guide This document describes the various out-of-the-box integration capabilities and use cases available with FireScope Unify. FireScope Enterprise Services Bus Techbrief This tech brief provides a high-level overview of the capabilities and business value of the FireScope Unify ESB.