2,000 of the world's leading IT professionals. Four days of intensive education, discovery and intelligence-gathering. Shouldn't you be there? Last spring nearly 2,000 Executives, IT Managers and Technical Specialists from around the world attended BMC Software Assurance 2000 in Las Vegas. Together, they traveled from six different continents, with 79% of that audience saying they would definitely return to our user conference in 2001.

Building on last year's success, BMC Software Learning Universe is designed to be the premier user conference for education, discovery and valuable interaction that will make a fundamental difference to you and the future success of your business. The focus is on education with over 250 in-depth technical sessions to help you:

• Optimize relationships with key BMC Software developers and executives.
• Leverage the full range of BMC Software solutions.
• Connect with industry peers and BMC Software developers and executives to learn and build upon best practices.

You'll also get an exclusive look at the next generation of BMC Software solutions and understand, first-hand, our 24x365 commitment to keeping you ahead of change.

Learning Universe will offer attendees outstanding educational programs and hands-on access to cutting-edge technology. Attendees will interact with industry-leading consultants from BMC Software to learn how the strategic application of current and future products and solutions can improve their business.

Deadline for presentation submissions to become a BMC Software Best Practice Awards winner.

SiteAngel provides customers with the information they desire about their customer's experience at their web site. SiteAngel enables them to define the "critical paths" through which the customer will pass, as well as to determine the frequency with which these paths are evaluated. This simulates the "end-to-end" customer experience. In addition, when they review a path to see if it's the one they want, they can set notification criteria and choose how they are contacted (by email or pager) when their web site is not meeting these notification criteria. SiteAngel also enables them to choose if they want to receive reports on their web site's service quality by email or if they want to check them online.

In the words of Eric Ralls, Vice President of e-dea! Works, "Utilizing SiteAngel 2000 is like having an employee who does nothing but sit at a computer and navigate throughout the Web sites, testing every link and searching for problems 24 hours a day, seven days a week, at only a small fraction of the cost of staffing a similar position."

It uses the concept of "Critical Paths". The critical path is the series of links that a web surfing customer would follow in a typical e-commerce scenario. For example, the customer arrives at the web site, and then enters a product to search for in the site's web engine, which pulls up a catalog listing for products. The customer then selects a product, decides they want it, and starts the sales transaction. The SiteAngel accurately re-creates each individual step in this process at regular intervals, testing for page load times, accurate page content, page availability, and connectivity.

The first contact that customers have with the SiteAngel 2000 service is through the complimentary evaluation. Potential customers may sign up for a 30-day free trial of the service by going to http://www.bmc.com/siteangel and clicking on the "Complimentary Evaluation" link. Once the customer has done this, they will be presented with some information about the trial. After filling out a customer information form, the customer is sent an e-mail with a URL to go to that will activate the account and instructions on how to activate their SiteAngels. Two Angels are available for evaluation purposes.

Once the customer has logged on to the website for the first time, they will be presented with a welcome screen that lets them know that they will be walked through the initial training of the SiteAngel. Upon clicking "Next>" they are asked what name they want to give the Angel. This can be any name the customer desires to use for the Angel, although the name chosen should be descriptive enough so that the customer can determine which angel is which. They will also be prompted for the beginning URL.

Once the customer has provided this information and clicked the Teach My Angel button, a new browser window will pop up with the URL that they began with. This window will have no controls (forward, back, reload, etc.) or menu bar on it. The title bar will say "Teaching SiteAngel - " and then the name of the site they are visiting. This is not a standard browser window, but is in fact a special browser that was spawned by the SiteAngel data center as an interface that the customer will use to 'teach' the angel it's critical path.

This browser window works like a normal window except that it intercepts and records all the steps taken by the customer down their critical path. This includes information entered into search engines, order quantities, everything that the customer enters (this includes Credit Card numbers, login information, etc.). Each Angel may be taught up to 50 separate steps.

When the customer is finished defining their Critical Path, the teaching window is closed using the X in the upper right hand corner of the window, and the customer is returned to the original SiteAngel window. In this window, the customer has the choice of reviewing the critical path (the recommended choice), immediately beginning the collection of data, re-teaching the angel, or canceling the process, and returning to the page where they named their Angel.

Reviewing the critical path allows the customer to make sure that they have taught the Angel to follow the path that they want it to follow. It also allows them to make sure that there are no errors along the Critical Path that they have chosen to follow.

This is the Visual Playback window. This is the window that the customer uses to review their critical path. In the upper left hand corner of the web page’s top frame are the buttons used to control the playback

This is the Angel Configuration screen. This is the screen that is used to set the name of the Angel, how often it attempts to execute the Critical Path Playback, the status of the Angel, and the operational goals for the Angel.

The name for the angel can be any series of alphanumeric characters that the customer desires. Most people will want to name their Angel something that will give them an idea of the critical path they have configured the Angel to use. The name of the Angel can be changed at the user’s discretion without having to re-teach it.

The Frequency option allows the customer to tell the Angel how often to play itself back.

After teaching their Angel and reviewing the critical path, the SiteAngel will begin to collect the data for the generation of the Customer Satisfaction, availability, performance, and other reports generated by the service. This brings us to a discussion of what factors we are measuring in order to generate the reports.

What data is collected for reporting?

The SiteAngel responsible for each Critical Path records the customer's web site responses at each step of the critical path, and collects data including:

· Socket connect time for each page

· Server response time for each page

· Download time of each page

· Byte count for each page

· Accumulated socket connect time for all the resources on a page

· Accumulated server response time for all the resources on a page

· Accumulated download time of all the resources on a page

· Total concurrent resource download time

· Total byte count for all the resources on a page

This data is collected, stored, and then an algorithm is run on it to determine the Customer Satisfaction percentage values. Easy to read summary graphs are also dynamically generated based on the information collected by the SiteAngel. The primary factor SiteAngel uses to determine customer satisfaction is the "Availability" of the web site. Availability is a measure of time that all of the steps in the customer's defined critical path are within their set criteria for performance. Availability problems occur when there are problems at any point along the customer's Critical Path(s).

There are four things that can go wrong in a situation where customers are having an availability problem.

1) Response errors are situations where the page does not load due to an Invalid Response. This could be due to an internal server error (500 series HTTP response), or it possibly was due to the server not responding to the initial connection request before the timeout period had expired. (i.e.- browser sends request to server on port 80, but the server does not respond correctly to the connection request.)

2) Content errors are due to the angel not receiving the page that it is expecting to get from the server. These are the pages that the SiteAngel observed during the teaching phase. Content notification criteria (for example- "this text must exist on the page" or "this text must NOT exist on the page") can also be defined for each step in the Critical Path.

3) The performance errors occur when the total page load time does not take place within the time the customer determines to be their threshold for notification. The total page load time includes HTML load times, image load times, etc., as well as the time that it takes the server to respond to the GET request and send the page to the client. When this timeout value is exceeded, you (Customer Care) and the customer are both notified with an email (and the customer may also receive a text page, if they so elect) that lets you and the customer know where along the path things went wrong.

4) Connection problems occur when the server does not respond at all to ANY page requests made by the client. This is where some confusion for the customer might enter into the situation regarding availability errors since the error message generated by the Data Center uses the term "Availability Error" to mean that there was a connection problem. This means that the site (or Step) was not reachable when the Angel attempted to test the critical path.

SiteAngel offers a very useful reporting interface. Depending on the needs of the customer, the reporting interface can be used for instantaneous, on-line report viewing, or it can be configured to send the customer periodic Customer Satisfaction summary reports via e-mail.

Using the Angel reporting tool, the customer is able to pull reports for specific hours, days, weeks, months, quarters, or years. There are two reporting tools. They are the Report Overview (fig. 3), and the Technical Details report (fig. 4).

The five Overview Reports that can be pulled are:

• Total customer satisfaction
• Critical path performance versus goals
• Page performance versus goals
• Availability
• Failure resolution time versus goals

On the Technical Details page, the customer is able to view the statistics for each step along their critical path. The statistics that they may view are the performance of the page, the number of failures for that page, and the time to resolution for any problems that were detected on the page.

To view the reports for each page on the path, the customer should click on the ‘+’ next to the critical path that they wish to review reports on. This will expand out the table containing the steps on the critical path for that angel. By clicking on the icon for the step/report combination that you wish to view, the graph in the right hand pane will be updated.

BMC Software offer a number of alert notification solutions inluding PATROL Alarm Manager, PATROL Operations Manager and Phone Point. Proxima Technology, suppliers of SLA management solutions and the developer of PATROL Alarm Manager, are set to release a new version of their Java based alert notification product, alarmmanage at the end of this month. alarmmanage introduced a number of significant benefits over it predecessor, PATROL Alarm Manager. These included the ability to receive alert messages from management tools as well as PATROL. Other benefits include a new graphical interface, drastically improved filtering, support for wireless application protocol (WAP) and a new architecture to greatly simplifies implementation.

"Our new architecture has proven to be a major selling feature," said Mark Shoebridge, Director of Support for Proxima Technology. "You only need to install alarmmanage once, centrally, and then it establishes connections with remote PATROL agents to retrieve event messages. This means you can be up and running in a matter of minutes and you can do this installation without having to wait for scheduled downtime."

The next release, version 3.5, extends the input feeds for alarmmanage to also include HP OpenView and CA Unicenter. It also introduces some enhancements to the GUI and allows you to set up personal notification preferences. Proxima Technology are inviting organizations to participate on stage II beta testing and applications can be made to: support@proxima-tech.com. The current production release version of alarmmanage is available as a free upgrade to all PATROL Alarm Manager users who are current on maintenance. It can be downloaded from: proxima-tech.com/products PKMalarmmanage.asp.

According to Enswers, an analyst firm, "One vendor that recognized early the market's challenge of managing e-business applications is BMC Software. This recognition led directly to the company's ‘service assurance’ marketing messages in 1998, followed immediately by its ‘e-vailability’ marketing initiative announced in 1999." BMC Software recognizes the importance of

service availability and enables clients to tackles this difficult issue using their PATROL product. 90% of the Fortune 500 use BMC products. Yet many companies find that improving service means managing more than just their resources. These companies have expanded their focus to include managing services.

Consider the case of one leading e-tailer. This e-tailer used BMC PATROL to monitor and manage its diverse set of systems and applications. While BMC PATROL had yielded very positive results, the e-tailer wanted to further improve service availability. In the client’s environment needed a scalable, end-to-end service view, and choose Managed Objects’ Business Service Management software Formula®. Formula complements products like PATROL. One key IT executive at the e-tailer noted, "When we saw that Formula was able to come in and completely leverage [our existing management toolset], we were very excited. Its object-oriented approach will enable us to quickly provide a business-centric view of our infrastructure."

To leverage BMC PATROL along with the e-tailer’s other management tools, Formula integrates and consolidates their data. From this single point of control, it clearly depicts the relationship between IT resources and the services they support. The Business Service Views™ product provide a simpler way to identify and resolve problems before they impact key business processes, which will enable the e-tailer to improve service delivery across its infrastructure. The executive observed, "With [Formula®], our first line of support will see exactly how IT resources combine to support business services. Now, our first line of support will understand the impact of any particular problem on an overall service. This proactive approach will mean even better service for our customers." Clearly, a business-centric approach can be quite valuable when it comes to improving service. No doubt, that’s one reason Business Service Management has become such a hot topic among IT professionals. But what does Business Service Management exactly entail? How does a company achieve it? And how does BMC PATROL fit into the picture?

E-business has made IT the cornerstone of service delivery. That’s why IT is now asked questions like, "How does this outage impact the trading floor?" or, "How does this downed router affect customer service?" with Business Service Management, IT can answer these kinds of questions. Of course, Business Service Management brings its own set of challenges. For one, managing the delivery of business services doesn’t mean ignoring the health of individual resources, such as the network and its components. To fill both roles, IT must be able to abstract the status of individual lines of business, and enable granular access to individual technology components for diagnosis and repair. This is where PATROL fits into the solution. Also, line-of-business services often span across traditional management systems, different business processes or even multiple organizations. For example, an e-tailer’s order fulfillment process can span across customer relationship management, external suppliers and service providers, financial credit systems, order processing, and delivery. These challenges are the impetus behind Managed Objects’ three-dimensional approach to managing service delivery: Business Service Management³™ (BSM³™). It’s "cubed" because it extends across management systems, business processes and even companies. BMC PATROL is an integral part of achieving BSM³, which provides a wealth of valuable management data and functionality.

For more information, e-mail info@managedobjects.com or call 1-800-275-6014. For a copy of Managed Objects’ white paper, "Enabling Business Service Management^" visit www.managedobjects.com/documents/solution/formula/whitePaper.asp