Strategy: Tracking your Competitors' News

In an increasingly competitive world, what your competitors do is critical information that you cannot miss. Automating the collection of such information is an excellent way to ensure that you don’t miss any public news from your competitors. BMC Performance Manager is the right tool to achieve this goal.

Principle

Where can you find information about your competitors? The easiest way is to look at a business news Web site, like Reuters’ Web (www.reuters.com). In this example, we are going to configure BMC Performance Manager Monitoring Studio to look in the top 10 business news sites as reported by www.reuters.com and then search for news headlines that contain the name of the company we are interested in. If a headline matches our criteria, we will trigger a PATROL event with the headline.

Configuring BMC Performance Manager to track your competitors’ news

BMC Performance Manager Monitoring Studio allows you to easily track news about your competitors and report them in the operator console.

First, we must set up the analysis of the Reuters.com Web page that contains the information we’re interested in. In our case, we are looking at business news in the banking market. The URL on Reuters.com is: http://today.reuters.com/business/topnews.aspx?type=bankingFinancial.

Right-click the main Monitoring Studio icon in the PATROL Console > KM Commands > New > Web request analysis…. As in the previous section, just copy and paste the URL above in the wizard and leave other fields with their default values with the exception that in the final step, include the icon name and polling period. Set the polling period to 60 minutes. When you click [Finish], a new icon is created in your console representing this Web request which will be collected every 60 minutes. You can check that it is working properly by opening the ReturnOutput parameter which gives you the contents of the requested page.

Then, we must look in this Web page for news about our competitors. So we set up a new String search on this Web request analysis: right-click the newly created Web request object > KM Commands > New > String search…. The string search wizard shows up.

Let’s say that we are looking for business news about Bank of America and Wachovia. So, we setup the string search as follows:

The String search wizard also asks us when an alert should be raised. This String search object will have a MatchingLineCount parameter which will represent the number of lines in the Reuters.com Web page that match our criteria. It will also feature the LastMatchingLines text parameter that shows the last 10 lines that matched our criteria.

In our case, we don’t need to raise an actual alarm, simple information should be adequate. So, we configure the alerting as follows:

You will notice the Alert Action option. Configured as above, the String search will be triggering the execution of Alert Actions for each line in the Reuters.com Web page that matches our criteria. So, we just need to set up these Alert Actions to make them trigger a PATROL event with the news headline.

Once you have clicked on the Finish button of the String search wizard, a new String search icon is created under the Reuters.com icon. Then right-click on it > KM Commands > Set Alert Actions…. The Alert Actions wizard appears.

In the first step, select the MatchingLineCount parameter which we need to setup Alert Actions for, and then check the “Trigger a PATROL event” box in the list of the available Alert Actions:

The next step allows you to specify the string that will be displayed in the events which are to be triggered for every news headline related to our competitors in Reuters.com:

Summary

Here is a summary of what we have done in order to report news from our competitors in BMC Performance Manager:

We could have used any other business-related news Web site to retrieve the news we are interested in. We could also have configured Monitoring Studio to execute a command line or send a SNMP trap for each received news.