The Open Group yesterday ratified a standard for a new set of APIs which it says will enable IT managers to relate application problems to their business processes for the first time. The standard, called the Application Instrumentation and Control (AIC) standard, was co-developed by JP Morgan & Co Inc and Computer Associates International Inc and will initially be implemented by CAI.
Rather than just using CAI’s Unicenter TNG management software to find out problems with specific pieces of hardware or applications, the new standard works at the application level and relates problems to business processes. Systems management software can tell you the servers have broken down or the database isn’t running or the router isn’t working but it can’t tell you anything useful about the effect that will have on your business, said Michael Reilly, chief technology officer at JP Morgan.
Reilly cited an example of a typical trading environment, which is dependent on multiple interconnecting systems – credit risk, market risk, surveillance tracking, execution, confirmation and settlement system and so on. While systems management software can warn administrators about technical hardware and software problems associated with that environment, there is nothing that can monitor the system in economic terms, he said, such as giving information about what it means to a business when a particular trade doesn’t go through.
Today it might say system 17 @ TCP/IP 3 is down, he said, but that doesn’t tell you anything about what is actually happening inside the application and how that will affect your business. He added: Ideally, what we need is a system that will say the links to the New York stock exchange are down, you have two thousand trades queued and $Xm worth of risk.
As a result, businesses are having to build their own proprietary applications to monitor their systems and relate that to the business environment, but each time a new application is added the code has to be rewritten and there’s no standard way for administrators to view that information within their systems management software, like CA’s Unicenter, Hewlett-Packard’s OpenView or Tivoli TME.
The idea of the AIC standard is to enable applications to talk directly to those management packages, Reilly said. It lets developers put a piece of instrumentation into the monitoring program code that will not only tell us where the problem is but what effect it could have.
The interface will initially be supported by CAI, which means information from the applications will appear on the same screen as the Unicenter systems management data. But speaking during a press conference yesterday CA’s senior VP of applied technology Sam Greenblatt, said he expects other vendors to support the standard within 18 months.
The technology could be used in any situation where a business is running mission critical applications whose break down could have an adverse effect on the company’s ability to carry out its day to day business, Reilly said. A trading floor is one good example but others could include manufacturing processes, he said.
Reilly said JP Morgan and CA had been working on the technology for the last four to five years when they decided to hand the specification over to the Open Group for ratification as an industry standard. At that point IBM, Tivoli and BMC added their comments, and changes were made resulting in the release of the specification yesterday.
In the future, Reilly said he could see a big market for the standard in the application service provider sector, where customers could outsource their applications and the day to day running of their systems to an ASP but gain real-time information about their applications and business processes via a centrally managed console on-site.
