Business Service Monitoring

While Horizon detects issues in your network by device, interface or service, the Business Service Monitoring (BSM) takes it one step further. With the BSM feature, it is possible to model high-level business service contexts around the technical Service Monitors provided in Horizon and quickly identify the most critical problems affecting them. To indicate which business service is affected by events at the technical service monitors level, a business service operational status is calculated.

As an example, let’s assume a company runs an online store. Customers log in, select items, place them in the shopping cart and checkout using a payment system. The whole service is provided by a few web servers and access data from databases. To monitor the status of the databases, a SQL service monitor on each database server is configured. For testing the web servers a HTTP service monitor is used for each of them. Covering the overall functionality, a Page Sequence Monitor (PSM) tests the login, shop, and payment workflow through the provided web portal. A possible representation of the whole system hierarchy is shown in figure Example scenario for a web shop.

01 bsm example scenario
Figure 1. Example scenario for a web shop

To be able to model this scenarios the BSM functions can be used. The Business Service Monitoring (BSM) feature includes the following components:

  • Business Service Monitoring Daemon (BSMD): Maintains and drives the state of all business services

  • Business Service Editor: Web application that lets you create, update, or delete business services

  • Topology View for Business Services: Visual representation of the Business Service Hierarchy as a component of the Topology User Interface.

  • BSM REST API: REST-based API to create, read, update, or delete business services