Chronicles of a Wandering Mind

Are Service Management and Cloud Computing mating? Indeed they are, and it should not be surprising. In the previous post, I had argued that, putting the latest industrial jargon aside, service management is the essential enabling paradigm in today’s IT organizations.

Each entity in the IT organization to define the services they deliver, measure availability, performance and quality of these services, and expose this information in both human and machine consumable forms.

How does cloud computing fit in to this? Cloud computing providers are also service providers, whether these services are infrastructure or applications or anything in between. Higher level business services consist of combination of services provided by external and internal service providers.

Cloud computing providers are typically external. The services they provide are more easily recognizable, and since they are external providers, the need to monitor and report on services they provide is more apparent and acceptable. As a result, adoption of cloud computing will enforce the need for service management and service management will smoothen the path to cloud computing in the enterprise.

In the last post I’d argued that the instead of wholesale approach, letting each entity to use whatever tools they want but expose the service management information through standard, agreed on interfaces is more likely to succeed in BSM projects. Cloud computing enforces this notion of Service Management and APIs.

A typical, relatively sophisticated business service has number of components managed by different IT groups. Even when all the components (infrastructure, apps, etc.) of the service are provided by entities internal to the organization, it’s proven to be quite difficult to implement a solution that can monitor all the components and assess the impact of problems on the business service.

What happens when some or most the components rely on services provided by external providers? It becomes even more unrealistic to presume that you can monitor them all. Instead, it is more feasible to require service monitoring information to be exposed via APIs so that they can be consumed by the BSM application.

Obviously this is not a new notion, it’s software development 101, but it applies to operations as well, and to move into service management paradigm where services can be black boxes, having access to information via established APIs become essential.

Monitoring the cloud must focus on enabling management of the services provided by the cloud as part of higher level services. Traditional monitoring methods will not work. Tell the customers how their services are performing, not just with pretty charts but also through APIs so that services from the cloud can be managed like services provided internally.