Understand BPPM As A Decision Maker - Part 1: Introduction

Recently I have received several questions regarding to the high level technical information to help determine if BPPM is the right monitoring tool for an IT organization and if so how resources should be planned.

Realizing majority of the information out there is more for marketing purpose, I thought it would be beneficial to address some high level technical key points in BPPM that marketing people don't know how to talk about and technical people don't want to talk about.

As you may have known, BPPM is not one single product but several products integrated (or 'stitched') together.  The core components of BPPM include PATROL, BMC Event Manager (BEM) & Service Impact Manager (SIM), and ProactivetNet.  Each core component was a separate product acquired from a separate company at a separate time in 1994, 2003 and 2007 respectively.

BPPM made its first release 8.0 in 2010.  In 2014, BPPM (BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management) was re-branded with a new name called TrueSight (BMC TrueSight Operations Management) after integrating with another acquired product 'TrueSight IT Data Analytics'.

Since BPPM 8.0, BMC has made several releases.  The current release is 9.6.  Between 8.0 and 9.6, BMC made major architecture and feature changes in release 8.6, 9.0, and 9.5.  When a new release contains major architecture changes, it means that you cannot take advantage of the new features available in the new release without re-implementing the most part of the existing BPPM implementation.

When trying to understand any monitoring software for your IT organization, there are primarily five aspects you need to look into:
1) Implementation (both new implementation and upgrade)
2) Development (adding or modifying features not available out-of-box)
3) Integration (integrating with other monitoring software and ticketing software)
4) Administration (configuration and troubleshooting on demand)
5) Operation (performing pre-configured actions repeatedly)

You need to consider all five aspects for technical information when making a decision on purchase and resource planning.  Of course, you need to consider other non-technical information too such as support, documentation, license cost, etc.

In the next few posts, I will go into depth sharing my experience on these five technical aspects with you.