Posts from — April 2006

Regardles of what kind of IT Operations shop you work in, if you’re interested in any of the best practices frameworks, ITSM, IT Operations, continuous improvement, network and systems monitoring and management, etc. you should look at what Microsoft is talking about in their new Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI).

Get past the “dynamic” buzz word and what the trade magazines and analysts will talk about in the next week with new and renamed products. Look into this and absorb the information. Start with the DSI Core Principles and the DSI whitepaper. Should other vendors be thinking the same way? (I know we are) Does it make sense? Is it believable? Implementable?

There’s some great content in some of their initial documents. See these: System Definition Model, Model Based Management and Health Modeling.

I know it’s possible to implement similar things with other tools or internally develop new capabilities natively. Some of the stuff in the Health Modeling document reminded me of what I did in the past in OpenService NerveCenter with state models and with a home grown CMDB of sorts for service management.

How much should we as vendors be providing out of the box versus expecting you to develop it yourself? Should every system, application, router, firewall, etc. come with a higher layer management and operations model that plugs into these automated, dynamic frameworks? Should we be federating and integrating at that level instead of selling you just another specialized GUI or tool just for that component or solution? Could it be as easy as consuming some web service, XML document, etc. in an SOA environment??

Stop Doug, stop….the wife wants to watch Survivor…

I came across what looks to be a new IT Operations maturity model from Microsoft and appears to be a key of Microsoft’s new Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI) tonight. They’re calling it the Infrastructure Optimization Model and it contains four assessment levels and characteristics of IT organizations operating in each level. It looks very similar to other IT maturity models I’ve seen.

Here’s a snipplet:

“The Infrastructure Optimization Model from Microsoft helps customers understand and subsequently improve the current state of their IT infrastructure and what that means in terms of cost, security risk, and operational agility. Dramatic cost savings can be realized by moving from an unmanaged environment towards a dynamic environment. Security improves from highly vulnerable in a Basic infrastructure to dynamically proactive in a more mature infrastructure. IT infrastructure management changes from highly manual and reactive to highly automated and proactive. Microsoft and Partners can provide the technologies, processes, and procedures to help customers move up through the infrastructure optimization journey. Processes move from fragmented or nonexistent to optimized and repeatable. A customer’s ability to use technology to improve their business agility and deliver business value increases as they move from the Basic state up the continuum toward a Dynamic state, empowering information workers, managers, and supporting new business opportunities.

By working with Microsoft and using this model as a framework, an enterprise can quickly understand the strategic value and business benefits to the organization in moving from a “basic” level of maturity (where the IT infrastructure is generally considered a cost center) towards a more “dynamic” use, where the business value of the IT infrastructure is clearly understood and the IT infrastructure is viewed as a strategic business asset and business enabler.”

Infrastructure Optimization Model

…end snipplet…

Microsoft has done a good job linking in each level to customer and business benefits and IT cost, security risk, and operational agility benefits. IT organizations and staff can actually see what it takes to move from one level to another. What key steps and technologies are required and actual solutions and guides on how to implement their products. I’m all about making this stuff actionable - and believable - by the troops.

I don’t have much if any experience with Microsoft’s solutions, but this has many general concepts that can be used regardless of how your IT shop operates. It’s similar to our free IBM Tivoli Unified Process (ITUP) where we align various best practices frameworks to our solutions, workflows, scenarios, and operational roles. They’ve incorporated the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) which aligns nicely with ITIL. I’m curious what they have in store for workflow and process automation. I think they’ll need something here to reach that “Dynamic” level (they touch on it here some but looks to be at infrastructure level only still Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI)).

There’s some really good contend and ideas we should all think about in this IO and DSI stuff. I like their DSI Core Principles. I know it’s got a lot of similarities to our IBM ITSM story, I need to think about a side-by-side review of each. I think we’re climbing up and covering more than they’re talking about.

What do you think?

Funny how this blogging stuff works. The minute you post something, soon after I usually find something similar or something that enhances or detracts from what I was writing about. Fortunately, this one may greatly enhance my post!

I talked about having an arsenal full of instrumentation, data and information collecting tools in yesterday’s posting YGE, NW? Part IV: Mapping Events to What’s Important and Your Message. I mentioned using the normal NMS/EMS/OSS/BSS tools, logfiles, scripts, database triggers and stored procedures, etc. to help collect metrics and KPI/KPM and turn them into events for processing upstream.

I came across another potentially useful approach that may make this instrumentation and collection process significantly easier in the future by using Really Simple Synidcation (RSS) to create a service bus (not ESB). Their goals is to accomplish what has been reserved in the past large companies with large IT staff and large IT budgets - easy integration and sharing of data between applications, services, etc.

The company, RSSBus, is in pre-release mode still and has a white paper available discussing their approach aimed at greatly simplifying integration, access and sharing of information.

I think this has great potential for enabling “the rest of us” to instrument the business and use that important data and information to create rich dashboards and portals and maybe even powerful BSM/BAM/BPM implementations. Imagine subscribing to dashboard feeds, business activity monitoring feeds, etc. Something like Pageflakes could become the enterprise BSM dashboard portal fed by numerous business, technology, people, process and operations feeds. Could this be the start to Web2.0 solutions in these areas?

Some highlights from the whitepaper:

“With RSSBus, our goal is to offer a simple, easy alternative for the small organization with little to no IT assets, little to no professional development tools, and no professional programmers to use them.”

“What we are building is something different, a service platform for the rest of us, the nonacronym-speaking crowd. If you have bits of pieces of data that you would like to quickly exchange with and/or connect to other systems, if simplicity and ease of use is your most important consideration, please read on.”

“With RSSBus, our goal is to build general purpose software that connects or has the ability to easily connect to every system, data, or information source of any significance. Our core focus is to enable connectivity as simply and as easily as possible, and we believe our experience building networking software components and connectivity toolkits for the past decade, and the software assets we have created in the process, give us a unique advantage.”

I’m keeping these guys on my radar to see how their ideas and products develop. No indications as to availability, costs (open source?), etc. yet.

Found a unique SaaS play in the Enterprise Monitoring as a service area called TruePath Technologies. One of their very innovative solutions is the use of Google Calendar’s API for visualization of enterprise monitoring data, scheduling and communicating change requests, maintenance windows, etc. They’re also doing some neat portal stuff using Web 2.0 sites like Pageflakes, 24eyes and RSS feeds.

Probably not very scalable for high event volumes, but the idea of using this as a way to communicate critical events or change and downtime windows is nice. I’ve seen some other monitoring related uses of Google Maps for visualizing monitoring status based on location. It’s pretty useful for the visualization of WiFi hot spot coverage without spending huge $$$ on GIS mapping tools.

Is anyone doing neat Web2.0 stuff like dashboards, portals, ITSM, workflow, monitoring, etc. using emerging web development technology?

Looks like Microsoft has announced a new product called System Center code named “Service Desk” planned for 1H 2007.

From Arlindo’s Blog over at technet (http://blogs.technet.com/aralves/archive/2006/04/25/426305.aspx):

Features planned:

• This product will be focused on automating IT across people and processes including solutions for Incident, Problem, Asset, and Change Management with many new scenarios enabled via a powerful self-service portal.
• Critical to the Asset and Change Management functionality will be a CMDB (Configuration Management Database) built leveraging the System Definition Model
• A core set of automated IT processes that map to our ITIL based Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) will be included as part of this solution
• This product will provide deep integration with existing Microsoft technologies including SMS, MOM, Office System and Windows.
• We are delivering not only a product, but also a platform that will be easily extensible by customers and partners with solution packs, just like management packs and MOM.
• This initial offering will be targeted at new and existing MOM and SMS customers who are requesting this kind of functionality. I just saw a demo on this product where the IT team had found a resolution for a reported problem, the next step they did was creating a change request on the Service desk console.
• Using the workflow within this product (based on Workflow foundation), the system sended a request to the Change request manager with a link to the change request ticket. After approval the engineer can directly shedule the patch update onto the SMS system, when this is done the patch gets advertised through the SMS server.

PR: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/apr06/04-25MMS06KeynotePR.mspx

…snip…

Muglia announced the intention to deliver a service desk offering that will provide two key components to form the foundation for System Center: a workflow engine for facilitating industry best processes and practices, and the foundation for the Microsoft implementation of the configuration management database (CMDB). Consistent with Microsoft’s mantra of capturing knowledge in models, the System Center Service Desk solution will include workflow templates, following the ITIL-based best practices and processes, for a number of key customer scenarios. It will also deliver unprecedented integration with System Center Operations Manager and System Center Configuration Manager out of the box. By adding the asset and change management capabilities to the System Center portfolio and tightly integrating with System Center Configuration Manager, Microsoft is significantly extending the number of problem scenarios it can help solve for its customers.

Official Service Desk Blog: http://blogs.technet.com/servicedesk/default.aspx

Initial thoughts - Looks pretty similar to our ITSM & CCMDB messaging and capabilities. Maybe they’ll participate in the CMDB Federation and Integration Standardization group. We’ll have to see how this new product develops.

Now that you’ve identified the sources of what’s important within your environment and crafted that data and information into messages that prompt action and decision making, it’s time to think about getting this data and information into a manageable format for processing and visualization.

I’ve discussed what events are and shared some initial thoughts on building events for BSM here and included references to complex event processing (CEP), event driven architecture (EDA) and event stream processing (ESP) here. I still plan on diving in deep to the topic of building events and the idea of the Common Base Event and Common Event Format. I also want to introduce the Event Data Dictionary / Event Catalog which will be useful for capturing information about what events exist in your environment and why. Every event that’s generated should be done so for a purpose. There’s nothing that will turn your NOC or IT support group against you quicker than if you’re collecting data and generating events just for the sake of doing so because they may be available via and SNMP MIB or agent. They don’t need any more “noise” to deal with during the day.

There may be many ways to incorporate this data and information into the messages you’re planning to communicate. The approaches and their ease of use are going to be entirely up to the tools, applications and solutions you’re using. You may be able to establish direct connections with the datasource, perform screen scrapes, import spreadsheets, or even perform queries against the source. The general concept of this series of articles has been around the assumption that you have the ability within your environment to generate events. Generating events usually comes through some form of instrumentation, collection and evaluation against a threshold, state, rule, etc.

What I want to talk about here is instrumenting those sources of important information, data and metrics within your environment you’ve identified as you completed your Metrics Catalog. Some of these sources may be outside the comfort zone or capabilities of the average IT Operations group normally used to operating with SNMP, server and application monitoring agents.

Since you’ve identified the source of the important information or data, how frequently it gets updated, and how to access it you’re half way there. The next task is to identify the person(s) or group(s) responsible for that information source. This may be the owner, administrator or support group for the application, tool, file, spreadsheet, database, server, etc. that produces, evaluates, communicates or makes available that information or data. The task here is to establish the business need with the owner to instrument that source so that the important data or information is provided in a way that can be easily processed upstream.

Once you’ve established the business need, you can have a discussion about the best way to instrument the information source and generate those events. Discuss the various tools in your event generating arsenal with the owner and their technical staff. Cover the normal EMS/NMS/OSS/BSS solutions and their capabilities for collecting information and generating events. Discuss more generic approaches such as log files (application, system, etc.), scripts, XML/SOAP/WebServices, etc. Scripts can be written to parse logs or collect other information from applications, GUIs, command lines, etc. and pass those off to an event generation function. If you’ve been able to consolidate information into a database or corporate data warehouse, consider leveraging database triggers and stored procedures to collect, format and generate an event. There are certainly more sophisticated methods available here if your organization leverages an EAI or ESB technology. Just keep in mind that the goal is to keep it simple, efficient and effective. You don’t want to be blamed for causing a performance slowdown or outage to that important business application!

You’ll want to map the events you’re generating into the appropriate format of your internal systems that will process them. Be sure to capture the relationship between these event types and their purpose for communicating an important metric, KPI/KPM, etc. At a minimum, one of the fields in the event format should be the Metric ID from the Metrics Catalog. This will be critical in linking the events to their purpose. The more thought and planning you put into how you build these events the better. Consider the use of an enumeration schema to capture information. This can be parsed and evaluated later by other solutions such as dashboard, BSM, BAM, BPM, rules or workflow solutions. An example may be populating a field in an event like this: “A1-2-3″ which may represent Metric Source = A1 (CRM System), Metric ID = 2 (Customer Count) and Metric Update = 3 (Daily). The sky’s the limit here but do consider the impact these may have on your internal event processing solutions or those that will need to parse and evaluate the enumeration schema you create.

Spend some time testing and evaluating the effectiveness of the new instrumentation you’ve done. Follow up with the owners you identified and the business to make sure that the data, information, metrics, etc. you’re now collecting passes their “sniff tests”. They’ll have a fairly good understanding of what’s good or bad - they always seem to have a sixth sense about this. If you get the sense that this information isn’t accurate, useful or otherwise have them excited, immediately start to evaluate why and do whatever you can to remedy it. You absolutely do not want to be presenting bad information later!

Now that we’ve got these important bits of data, information, metrics, etc. being collected and processed by our internal systems and tools automatically, it’s time to think about visualizing our message effectively for our various audiences. Stay tuned for that topic in “You’ve Got Events, Now What? Part V: Visualizing the Message.

Catch up with the “You’ve Got Events, Now What?” series here.

At this month’s ITSMF Atlanta Local Interest Group (LIG) meeting last week, Gene Kim (CTO of Tripwire) presented on the Visible Ops methodology and some of the early results of an IT Controls Benchmarking Survey that has been ongoing for six years. The sample companies and insdusties covered in the study are very diverse and cover small to large sized IT shops. Goals of the study include understanding what top performing companies are doing in the area of IT operations, best practices and controls. A specifical goal is to learn which IT controls and best practices to focus on baesd on what these top performers are doing.

The study results are to be released in the next month or so. Keep an eye out at the IT Process Institute’s webpage here. You can access the presentation and early findings by joining the Atlanta ITSMF LIG here. ITPI has some additional information on the study and information on participating here.

I’m not quite sure where I sit with the whole Visible Ops idea yet. I need to re-read the book and think about it some more. It all seems like common sense to me - and I like common sense approaches to ITSM. I guess it’s getting the sales pitch separated from the content that I still need to do. I had a bad taste in my mouth with Tripwire in a previous role where multiple internal groups were out talking to vendors after attending a trade show. I can remember many of them taking the Tripwire pitch hook, line and sinker before any requirements were determined. I spent months reeling those groups back into line trying to get them to figure out requirements and processes first before technology and tools.

We kicked off the new and improved Atlanta Tivoli User Group last week with a special focus on the IBM ITSM strategy and technical solutions. This group meeting also included the former Micromuse customers in a new setting for them where they have a voice into the Tivoli organization.

Dan Tabor, Product Manager for Tivoli ABSM and Vinu Sundaresian, Office of CTO were our special guests. Dan gave an overview of the roadmap and launch plans in the BSM suite (RAD 3.0 launch in mid-year, TBSM/RAD merge, TSLA, etc.) and Vinu gave a great overview of the ITSM strategy including the CCMDB, Process Managers and a demo of TADDM 4.1.

I recall many “heated” debates with Vinu when I was at EarthLink and he was at Collation over application discovery technologies, approaches and solutions. It’s great to be on the same team now working towards a very unique solution in our CCMDB.

I encourge IBM Tivoli customers (and former Micromuse customers) to get involved in a local/regional Tivoli User group wherever they can. For more information, visit here.

The Atlanta Network and Systems Management TUG (ANSMTUG) is still the vendor neutral network and systems management TUG where the art and science of network and systems management is disucussed at local Atlanta companies. Check them out!