Today’s IT organization needs an integrated approach to BSM that combines a top down and bottom up approach to monitoring and spans both physical and virtual infrastructure. The goal is to manage every element of the service - including infrastructure, applications, transactions, end-user experience, virtualization technology, and services delivered via the cloud.

In practical terms, this requires a consolidated operations bridge that can help IT track and respond to infrastructure events occurring on the ground floor of IT (bottom up) and maintain service health in real time by monitoring the enduser experience (top down). This can enable IT to live up to increasingly demanding service level agreements and meet constantly evolving business needs. Requirements include an accurate run-time service model—as well as tools that enable collaboration, support automation, and facilitate cloud computing.