Tideway Foundation, a network appliance that uses agentless collection methods, gathers application configuration data from servers and other data-center devices and stores that information in a database of configuration blueprints. It also tracks configuration changes and alerts staff to potential compliance breaches.

As sophisticated as tools such as Tideway may be, network managers need to be aware these tools can't perform magic without some upfront work and patience. ADM is an ongoing project, which can reap many rewards, but only with the right amount of commitment, Hall says.

"There aren't any huge roadblocks," he says. "It just takes time. You didn't roll out an entire data center in a day so you won't be able to easily see everything in one day. It requires a very focused effort, but no matter how you do it, you have to get it done because the information is a foundation for so many other initiatives."

Business intelligence brought to real-time events

For business managers, a delay in learning why a customer didn't receive requested merchandise, service or information isn't acceptable. That means waiting for IT to uncover the reason why, say, a Web server failed to deliver isn't an option.

Complex event processing (CEP) technologies promise to speed those answers and enable businesses to stay on top of the IT and application performance issues that pose customer satisfaction problems. The software combines event processing capabilities often seen in management applications with business process and intelligence tools to deliver information in real-time about the state of a business application, transaction or service. Data streaming features coupled with event processing capabilities are able to integrate data from multiple sources to deliver actionable information, says James Kobielus, a principal analyst at Current Analysis.

"Its evolution has been many years in the making and CEP is a core capability that enables real-time business intelligence and business activity monitoring. It makes it possible to respond to business events in real time and alert the appropriate people and feed the event information into automated workflows," Kobielus says. "CEP helps enable automated rules-driven responses to critical events."

Vendors focusing on CEP include Agent Logic, Aleri, AltoSoft, Coral8, GemStone, SeeWhy, StreamBase Systems and Vhayu. And other large vendors that work in SOA, middleware or business process management (BPM) technologies have been dabbling in CEP. Such companies, Kobielus says, have been beefing up their CEP offerings with strategic acquisitions and product upgrades. For instance, IBM acquired Data Mirror in September and BEA updated its WebLogic Event Server application earlier this year to better discern trends in event processes and help companies prevent performance issues or thwart threats.

For customers, CEP ties network and system components to applications and business processes in a way that enables IT to understand how all the pieces come together.

"I started in the systems management space, where we used to monitor the CPU of a server or the components. We didn't monitor the business processes, and we really couldn't tie the two together. In a lot of cases IT didn't even know the business processes it was supporting," says Eric Bruner, senior manager of systems development at Sallie Mae, a financial services provider in Reston, Va.

Sallie Mae recently received an Enterprise All-Star Award from Network World for Bruner's work in decoding the Web content and application issues plaguing the company by using CEP technology. Sallie Mae uses Coral8 software, which the vendor calls a "data-crunching engine" that can process events from network and systems management software, click streams, message buses and external applications. In the Sallie Mae configuration, TeaLeaf Technology's CX Web application monitoring software feeds customer online-experience data to Coral8. The goal is eliminating the wait between events and IT understanding of the potential impact.

CEP is an early adopter's technology, used in stovepipe fashion for specific applications, Kobielus says. Marketplace confusion and a lack of standards have inhibited CEP from becoming an everyday tool, he adds.