the power of event chapter 3
TRANSCRIPT
Topics covered in this Chapter
● Event monitoring - the standard technology today● Enterprise viewing - a step beyond monitoring● Recognizing sets of events from the global event cloud -
a key to personalized viewing● Information gaps● Enterprise structure and abstraction hierarchies● Hierarchical viewing - the key to human control of the
enterprise
3.1 Today’s Event Monitoring Is Too Primitive
● Why is it difficult to get events that are relavant to the decisions we are trying to make?
● Part of the answer lies in the historical progression of problems that have arisen in running an IT-based enterprise, from the low-level network problems of yesterday, ascending to the high-level problems of today.
3.1.1 System Monitoring Focuses on the Network Layer
● Major headaches happen when the performance of the communication layer deteriorates, or parts of it fail altogether. This class of problems is generally lumped together under one category, network management.
● The bulk of the considerable commercial effort that has been put into enterprise system monitoring until now has been concentrated largely on the low-level IT layers.
3.1.2 Network-Level Monitoring Doesn’t Even Solve Network Problems
● Network managers have to figure out from the event logs and statistical views of the event traffic exactly what is happening.
● They are faced daily with the following kinds of issues.○ The network event logs can become very large and
difficult to handle in real-time.○ Tools to aid in picking out sets of related events are
needed.○ Causal tracking is needed○ Predictive monitoring is beyond the state of the art
3.2 An Example of Causal Tracking
● Our example applies causal tracking to monitoring a simple transaction protocol
● Many transaction systems, particularly those dealing with database entries, use a two-phase commit protocol to terminate multistep transactions.○ A polling phase○ A commit phase
3.3 Information Gaps 1/2
● Different people engaged in the operations of an enterprise need different kinds of information. This leads to information gaps between the kind of information people need to do their jobs effectively and easily, and the information they actually get.
Enterprise IT Layer Monitoring and Analysis
IT Manager
Supervisor
Corporate Management
Middleware andNetwork
Application
Business andOperation
3.3 Information Gaps 2/2
● An information gap generally has two dimensions:○ A vertical dimension, which is the difference
between the level of the enterprise at which events
and other data are monitored and the level at which the user is operating within the enterprise.
○ A horizontal dimension, which is the amount of
analysis needed to render the monitored information in a userful form for the user's tasks.
3.4 Problem-Relevant Information
● To bridge information gaps we need a technology for constructing problem-relevant information from whatever events we can monitor.
● How to get problem-relevant information1. Relevance to the problem of immediate interest2. Ease of understandability3. Ease of analysis4. Ease with which multiple views can be coordinated
3.5 Viewing Enterprise System 1/2
● A view of a system is a selection of information about what the system is doing currently or did in the past that is processed to abstract or extract those aspects relevant to a problem of interest.
● How to get problem-relevant information1. Relevance to the problem of immediate interest2. Ease of understandability3. Ease of analysis4. Ease with which multiple views can be coordinated
3.5 Viewing Enterprise System 2/2
● Each of these examples of a view has the following elements○ Each view has a problem of interest.○ Each view is event driven.○ The view are provided in humanly understandable forms using
graphics.○ Each view provides relevant events that can be used to drive
automated decision making processes.○ Most important, a view must be easy to modify, on the fly, to
incorporate new types of events, change the aggregation technique.
3.6 Creating and Coordinating Multiple Views
● Different people need different views.● Simply, this is because different users are interested in
different kinds of information about the system.● Not only do we need multiple views of a system, but
each user needs to be able to customize their own view.
3.7 Hierarchical Viewing 1/2
● A powerful technique to help in understanding a complex enterprise system is to seperate the system's activities, and the operations that implement those activities, into layers-called levels.
● This is called an abstraction hierarchy.● Viewing a system's behavior at different level is called
hierarhchical viewing.
3.7 Hierarchical Viewing 2/2
● To build hierarchical views we must first define an abstracttion hierarchy.○ Operational description: There must be general agreement on
what the activities and operations of the enterprse are.○ Hierarchical structuring: The levels must be ordered, top down,
and the events signifying operations at any level must be defined as sets of sequence of events at the lower levels.
● Hierarchical structuring is a foundation for building mulitple views.
3.7.1 An Example of Hierarchical Viewing
TransactionProtocol
Level
Abstarction
Financial TradeLevel
Drill Down