ITIL and monitoring

I'm relatively new to BMC Performance Manager but I've learned a lot in the past year or so about the capabilities and how it fits into the Infrastructure and Application Management Route to Value. So this post talks about a white paper my co-worker Bill wrote, BMC Performance Manager - Cornerstone of your ITIL Implementation. (Look at that, our white papers no longer require a webform registration before you can download them!)

I like that he includes realistic scenarios. Scenarios help me understand the real issues and problems that need to be solved by businesses. With BMC Performance Manager for Servers, you can manage the health and performance of different operating-system environments and applications. BMC Performance Manager helps you close in on ITIL Availability Management objectives and, when used with other BMC Software products, also helps companies with other ITIL processes, such as Incident Management and Problem Management. This white paper describes how you can use BMC Performance Manager for availability management. Here's an example scenario from the white paper.

A company uses SAP for supply chain management and BMC CONTROL-M for scheduling SAP jobs. When there is an unscheduled outage of the SAP system due to excessive paging that makes it unavailable to suppliers, BMC Performance Manager automatically detects the problem and initiates recovery procedures.

Unless BMC Performance Manager reports this unavailability, CONTROL-M is not aware of this outage and would continue to schedule jobs to SAP.

Because the SAP system is not active, business processes managed by CONTROL-M could fail, resulting in long recovery time that impacts SAP users' productivity. When an unplanned failure of an SAP application is detected by BMC Performance Manager and then reported automatically to CONTROL-M, the operator can use the data provided by BMC Performance Manager for Problem Investigation.

What do you think about this scenario? Sound like something that could happen in your environment? Let us know if we're on the mark, and share any harrowing experiences you have.