Business Service Management and its Benefits

Business Service Management (BSM) helps businesses in understanding how IT services can be used, benefited from and improvised. Through Business Service Management, IT managers can monitor applications so that they can foresee and deal with application outages. In large organizations, in case of an outage, it is important to know exactly which department is going to be affected in order to prevent major impact. IT managers also need to ensure that Service Level Agreement conditions are met by ensuring that all business-critical applications are available and error-free. Business Service Management helps IT managers in doing this by tracking, monitoring and managing the investment and operational part of the information technology to make sure that they are in the interests of business. BSM hence intersects the IT processes with the business processes in order to ensure that the IT infrastructure gives maximum benefit to the business.

Business Service Management solutions are not only useful to IT managers, but also business managers. Business managers can quickly analyze the business impact of downtime and deal with clients accordingly. IT managers can then take action to solve that problem and avoid a breach in Service Level Agreements. Using Business Service Management solutions, IT managers can see on a real time basis, where the problem has occurred and which departments will be impacted by it. With this information, IT managers can then plan on how to resolve the problem and which area to target first. This helps them ensure that conditions of Service Level Agreements are not breached.

Business Service Management helps organizations in many ways:

• Business managers can allocate resources efficiently with the help of BSM
• With a Business Service Management solution, business managers can understand the business impact of system failure
• Service Level Agreement conditions can be met successfully
• The root cause of the problem in any application can be pinpointed and a solution can be found quickly
• A Business Service Management solution can help avoid considerable loss in costs
• Businessmen can alert clients in case there is a critical outage
• IT managers can allot work according to priorities to get the problem solved quickly
• Business Service Management solutions give visibility to IT infrastructure, which can help with better management of business resources

Performance Testing: 3 Tips To Effectively Test Application Performance

Application performance testing is undertaken by companies to determine the performance, availability, speed and reliability of applications. IT departments usually undertake performance testing to note how applications perform under different types of workload. Performance testing of applications is used for different purposes: it can be used to identify performance bottlenecks, to ensure that the applications meet set criteria or to compare the performance of two applications. Performance testing of applications hence helps IT managers in IT service management and also to meet terms of service level agreements by ensuring application availability and reliability.

The following are three tips for performance testing that can make the process easier for you:

1. Set Specific Performance Criteria

Application performance criteria need to be set keeping the end users in mind. Without an idea of their expectations, performance testing may be rendered useless. Take inputs from end users regarding the problems they generally face and what they expect from applications. Companies dealing in various industrial verticals are increasingly using performance testing solutions to ensure that their IT service management meets customer expectations. Only if end user expectations are satisfied can the performance testing activities prove successful.



2. Take the Database into Consideration for Performance Testing

Simultaneous user sessions and their response timings are usually taken into consideration while undertaking performance testing. Load testing is also performed on applications to check the effect of multiple simultaneous user sessions. Such steps are essentially important for companies involved in IT service management. However, the database affects the end user experience drastically. For example, a transaction for a user can be very fast in case it is inserted into a table which is empty; however, the response time deteriorates once the table grows. Taking the database into consideration is hence vitally important for performance testing of applications.



3. Don't Overdo it

You need to take some points into consideration in order to optimize application performance. For example, before even getting involved in performance testing, optimum application performance can be ensured through scalable architecture and strong hardware resources. Performance testing of applications is then done by IT managers to double check that all applications are available according to the service level agreement requirements. However, you should not overdo it. Talk to end users about which parts of the application they use most frequently and concentrate on optimizing those parts for performance. Don't spend more time than required on performance testing of rarely-used application features.