Dell IT BusIness InsIghTs

DELL POWER SOLUTIONS | February 20081 Reprinted from Dell Power Solutions, February 2008. Copyright © 2008 Dell Inc. All rights reserved.

W ith over 1,600 applications and 12,000 servers

distributed worldwide, the IT infrastructure that

keeps the Dell business operations—including

24/7 online ordering, just-in-time custom manufacturing, and

world-class customer support—up and running can be a chal-

lenge to manage. To help enhance visibility into and simplify

the management of its vast IT infrastructure, the Dell IT group

recently designed and deployed the Dell Business Service

Management (BSM) Dashboard, a visual tool that integrates

the output of several best-of-breed management tools into a

single unified dashboard. The BSM Dashboard provides a

comprehensive view of the health and well-being of the Dell

IT infrastructure in real time, and has enabled Dell to enhance

IT efficiency, increase uptime for critical systems, and provide

executive-level visibility into its global IT environment.

Disparate monitoring systems limited visibility into IT infrastructure For years, Dell IT relied on several best-of-breed systems

management tools to monitor and manage the networks,

servers, applications, and database servers that comprise

the company’s global IT infrastructure. Although these indi-

vidual management tools were very effective, they provided

visibility only into their own specific segments of the IT infra-

structure. As a result, Dell IT had no way of viewing the health

and well-being of its IT infrastructure as a whole.

In particular, without integrated monitoring systems, Dell

IT was unable to model or view the dependencies between IT

components, which limited its ability to diagnose and resolve

problems efficiently and effectively. For example, if a problem

occurred in a database server, the database monitoring soft-

ware would generate an alert. If the database server problem

negatively affected dependent applications, the application

monitoring software would also generate alerts for those

applications. The lack of integrated monitoring systems would

make it difficult for IT staff to identify that the application

alerts were caused by the database server problem. As a

result, IT resources would be assigned to all of the alerts, even

though there was only one underlying cause.

In addition, Dell IT had no standard way of relating IT

system components to the business processes they sup-

ported. This lack of visibility into the business impact of IT

issues made it difficult for Dell IT to prioritize problems to

help maximize critical system uptime. Instead, IT staff would

rely on in-house knowledge to determine which applications

were the most critical to the business. Although this ad hoc

method of problem prioritization was often effective, it

depended on staff with personal knowledge of the interde-

pendencies between the Dell business processes and the

applications that supported them.

Dell decides to build an integrated IT monitoring dashboardTo help address these problems, Dell IT decided that it needed

a way to unify monitoring system data into a single visual

dashboard that would enable IT staff to view the overall

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How Dell SimplifieD iT managemenT by DeSigning a buSineSS Service managemenT DaSHboarD

To help simplify the management of its large and complex IT infrastructure, Dell designed and deployed the Dell™ Business Service Management Dashboard. This innovative visual tool helps enhance IT efficiency, increase uptime of critical systems, and provide executive-level visibility into the global Dell IT environment.

By Joshua DaviD

Tom PainTer

Frank Tang

2DELL.COM/PowerSolutionsReprinted from Dell Power Solutions, February 2008. Copyright © 2008 Dell Inc. All rights reserved.

structure and health of the Dell IT infrastructure

at a glance. In particular, Dell IT wanted a tool

that would utilize the output of the monitoring

systems already in place; allow IT staff to model

the dependencies between individual IT sys-

tems, define business processes, and model the

dependencies between those business pro-

cesses and the applications that support them;

display the Dell IT infrastructure and its current

condition visually in real time; and integrate with

their knowledge management, diagnosis, and

troubleshooting tools.

Dell IT evaluated products from several ven-

dors and found that although several excellent

dashboard tools were available, none met all

of the Dell requirements. In particular, many

dashboard tools did not allow Dell IT to easily

integrate the output of monitoring systems

already in place, and many did not support the

definition or display of business processes and

their related IT system dependencies. As a

result, Dell IT decided to build its own inte-

grated IT monitoring solution.

After a careful design process, the Dell IT

group decided to build a unified dashboard

using the C# language within the Microsoft®

.NET Framework. For the dashboard user

interface, the group chose the Adobe® Flash

Professional multimedia environment. And for

storage of underlying monitoring system data,

IT system structure and dependencies, and busi-

ness process information, the group chose the

Microsoft SQL Server™ database platform.

This tool—the Dell BSM Dashboard—

integrates the output of several underlying Dell

monitoring systems, including Empirix® OneSight™,

Oracle® Enterprise Manager Grid Control, and

Microsoft Operations Manager systems. Then,

using business process and IT component depen-

dency models, it displays that data in a hierarchi-

cal view from high-level business units down to

individual IT components. The top-level view dis-

plays high-level business processes such as

manufacturing and online ordering, with color

codes used to indicate status in real time (see

Figure 1). By clicking on a process step, IT staff

can view the structure and status of the applica-

tions, database servers, and other IT components

that support that step (see Figure 2).

The BSM Dashboard also includes features

enabling administrators to model the depen-

dencies between system components through

a simple, easy-to-use visual interface. This inter-

face also allows administrators to define busi-

ness processes and model the dependencies of

those business processes and the applications

that support them.

Dell BSM Dashboard enhances IT efficiency and accelerates problem resolutionBy providing a comprehensive, integrated view

of the health and well-being of the Dell IT

Figure 1. Dell Business Service Management Dashboard showing high-level business processes

Figure 2. Dell Business Service Management Dashboard showing individual IT components

Dell IT BusIness InsIghTs

DELL POWER SOLUTIONS | February 20083 Reprinted from Dell Power Solutions, February 2008. Copyright © 2008 Dell Inc. All rights reserved.

infrastructure in real time, and displaying not

only the current health of individual systems

but also the dependencies between them, the

BSM Dashboard helps dramatically reduce the

time and effort required by IT staff to diagnose

problems, enhancing IT efficiency and accel-

erating problem resolution.

For example, in Figure 3, both the Order

Broker application and the GRID database server

are shaded red, indicating that they have

encountered serious problems. Without the BSM

Dashboard, Dell IT would have had no standard

way of identifying this dependency, and would

have likely assigned resources to both problems.

With the BSM Dashboard, however, the depen-

dency between the database server and the

application is immediately obvious: because the

Order Broker application depends on the GRID

database server, the application-level problem

is likely caused by the underlying database prob-

lem. As a result, Dell IT could first assign

resources to the database server problem; if

resolving that problem did not also resolve the

application problem, it could then assign

resources to the application problem.

In addition, by displaying the dependencies

between business processes and the IT compo-

nents that support them, the BSM Dashboard

allows IT staff to easily assess the business

impact of IT problems, enhancing prioritization

and helping increase uptime for critical sys-

tems. For example, if several applications expe-

rience problems at once, the BSM Dashboard

can show both the current status of each appli-

cation and which business processes depend

on them, helping Dell IT choose which problem

to focus on first. Figure 4 shows this type of situ-

ation: although the Symphony, B2B, and Order

Broker applications are all experiencing prob-

lems, the Symphony application supports not

only the Submit Order business process, but

many other processes as well. Dell IT could

therefore prioritize it first, helping immediately

mitigate the problem’s impact on a large number

of business processes.

Furthermore, this visibility into the health

and well-being of Dell business operations and

the IT components that support them enables

Figure 3. Dell Business Service Management Dashboard showing hierarchical dependencies between IT components

Figure 4. Dell Business Service Management Dashboard showing hierarchical dependencies between IT components and business processes

4DELL.COM/PowerSolutionsReprinted from Dell Power Solutions, February 2008. Copyright © 2008 Dell Inc. All rights reserved.

executive-level staff to make informed opera-

tional decisions. For example, when the Dell

Web site experiences performance problems,

phone traffic to the Dell call center typically

increases. With the BSM Dashboard, such a

performance degradation would be prominently

displayed, allowing an executive to quickly

notice the problem and take appropriate action,

such as deploying additional resources to

the Dell call center until the problem has

been resolved.

Dell IT plans to continue increasing efficiency through the BSM DashboardSince its implementation, the BSM Dashboard

has enabled Dell to dramatically simplify and

increase the efficiency of its IT management. In

addition, the BSM Dashboard currently inte-

grates with the company’s knowledge base to

enhance problem resolution capabilities.

In the near future, Dell IT plans to increase

efficiency even further by adding several fea-

tures to the BSM Dashboard, including links to

the company’s trouble ticketing system (BMC

Remedy) and to server management tools. To

increase the scope of its monitoring capabili-

ties, Dell IT is also in the process of integrating

several additional monitoring systems into the

BSM Dashboard. By continuing to develop the

capabilities and scope of the BSM Dashboard,

Dell IT hopes to continue enhancing its monitor-

ing abilities while providing high levels of

uptime and integrated, flexible visibility into its

global IT infrastructure.

Joshua David is an IT manager in the Dell IT

Operations organization, overseeing the Global

Application Monitoring and IT Operations Tools

Development team. Joshua has been with Dell

for more than 2 years and has 16 years of IT

experience, including roles as an architect,

database administrator, and project manager.

Tom Painter is vice president of global opera-

tions in Dell IT, where he has responsibility for

Dell’s global networks, telephony, data centers,

service desks, databases, desktops, and serv-

ers. Prior to his role in Global IT Operations,

Tom was responsible for establishing the Dell

IT systems engineering organization and the

consolidation and globalization of IT applica-

tion support. Tom joined Dell in 1992 as a sys-

tems engineer.

Frank Tang is the product manager for the BSM

Dashboard and an application management

analyst in the Dell IT Operations organization.

He has been with Dell for nine years, and for the

last six years has defined the application moni-

toring strategy at Dell.