Business Service Monitoring

While Horizon detects issues in your network by device, interface, or service, Business Service Monitoring takes it one step further. With this feature, you can monitor high-level business service contexts around Horizon’s technical service monitors, and quickly identify the most critical problems affecting them.

A business service operational status is calculated to indicate which business services are affected by events at the technical service monitors level. For example, assume a company runs an online store. Customers can log in, select items for purchase, add them to their cart, and check out using a payment system. The whole service is provided by a few web servers and access data from databases. A SQL service monitor is configured on each database server to monitor its status, and an HTTP service monitor tests each of the web servers. A page sequence monitor tests the store’s login, shop, and payment workflows using the provided web portal.

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 tests the login, shop, and payment workflow through the provided web portal.

A possible representation of the shop’s system hierarchy is shown below:

Example system hierarchy diagram showing relationships among users, workflows, and systems