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apis or web services. Moreover, they
are equipped with advanced
functionalities, such as application
performance monitoring by simulating
the user experience using the
synthetic transaction monitoring
concept, service modeling, auto
discovery and many other capabilities.
furthermore, open source solutions
are widely used and popular among
popular data centers. there are
community forums you can utilize for
help and support in the event you
come across a critical technical issue.
open source monitoring solutions
differ in nature depending on their
capabilities. they range from primitive
availability monitoring tools, such as
nagios and icinga projects, to more
advanced monitoring solutions, such
as zenoss. nagios, for example, is a
primitive open source monitoring
software project that has been widely
used in different data centers, and
serves as the fundamental ground for
several other monitoring projects.
K. SUMMARY
in summary, the selection process of a
bsM solution is subjective, and highly
dependent on several factors defined
by the business needs and objectives.
this includes, but is not limited to the
nature of the data center operations,
business sector requirements and
objectives the center serves, solution
architecture, solution capabilities and
offerings, and the security factors.
IV. CONCLUSION AND
FUTURE WORK
our growing need to provide world-
class and highly available hpC
resources to serve saudi aramco’s oil
and Gas upstream operations has
given us the opportunity to study the
bsM industry and evaluate several
products. in conclusion, the bsM
concept leads the way data center
monitoring is delivered. it aims to
close the gap between it service [10]
organizations and the upstream
business of the organization.
Choosing the right software solution
for that purpose plays a crucial part in
delivering this objective. in this paper,
we provided some insights based on
our experience on how to choose a
cost-effective solution to an it
organization, with more focus on hpC
data centers in an oil and Gas
industry.
our future work includes expanding
our bsM model to include data center
facilities components, mainly
monitoring power and cooling
infrastructure. in addition, we are
working on evaluating the
performance of several enterprise
bsM solutions. this performance
evaluation, together with the
considerations provided in this
research, will further help
organizations to better address their
bsM business needs [9].
Abdullah Aldhamin is Computer Operation Systems Specialist at EXPEC Computer Center, Saudi Aramco.
He can he reached at
Bander Alotaibi is Group Lead - Data Center Support Group at EXPEC Computer Center, Saudi Aramco.
He can he reached at
[1] “Nagios,” [Online]. Available: [Accessed 13
January 2015].
[2] “Zabbix,” [Online]. Available: [Accessed 13
January 2015].
[3] ITIL, “Information Technology Infrastructure Library Official Website,”
[Online]. Available:
solutions/itil.aspx?utm_source=itil-officialsite. [Accessed 9 July 2015].
[4] “Capability Maturity Model Integration Institute,” [Online]. Available:
[Accessed 1 June 2015].
[5] “Microsoft Operations Framework,” [Online]. Available:
[Accessed 1 June 2015].
[6] “Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology,” [Online].
Available:
Center/COBIT/Pages/Overview.aspx. [Accessed 1 June 2015].
[7] R. Crosby, “Data Center Optimization: The Value of Business Service
Management,” 25 03 2008. [Online]. Available:
value-of-business-service-management.html. [Accessed 13 July 2015].
[8] J. Kowall, “Toolkit: IT Operations Monitoring Assessment and
Rationalization,” Gartner, 2012.
[9] E. Wilson, “Network Monitoring and Analysis: A Protocol Approach to
Troubleshooting,” p. 350, 9 January 2000.
[10] T. Schaaf and O. Appleton, “FitSM,” [Online]. Available:
[Accessed 6 July 2015].
[11] BizTech Magazine, “High Performance Computing’s Role in Energy
Exploration,” 18 July 2014. [Online]. Available:
energy-exploration. [Accessed 01 July 2015].
[12] Information Systems Audit and Control Association, “Control
Objectives for Information and Related Technology,” [Online]. Available:
[Accessed 05 August 2015].
[13] M. Rouse, “ITSM Definition,” TechTarget, [Online]. Available:
[Accessed 05 August
2015].
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank the EXPEC Computer Center (ECC) at Saudi Aramco for their invaluable support and contributions to conduct this research.
REFERENCES