Posts from — June 2006

Think you’ve got what it takes to turn complex data into something easily understood by an executive? Got a special knack for creating dashboards, reports, charts or graphs? Do this in your day job or as a (weird) hobby? The Business Intelligence Network announced its 2006 Data Visualization Competition. Download the spreadsheet and take a look at this contest based on five different business scenarios.

I like scenario #4 and may give it a go:

“You are a consultant who has been hired by a U.S. commercial airlines to design a dashboard for its executives. The information that the executive team wants to monitor has been identified and now its your job to create the dashboard’s visual design. You must try to display all of this information in some manner on a single screen such that the executives will be able to quickly identify anything that needs their attention and then have the means to discern enough about the situation to decide if they can ignore it for now or must perhaps take some action. It is up to you to determine the appropriate manner, level of detail, and means to display each piece of information.”

Fore more information, visit here.

• IT-Director.com: BMC releases stand-alone CMDB
  (tags: BMC Atrium CMDB ITIL)
• ITIL Toolkits & ITSM Software Solutions
  * New * The ProcessWorx CMDBâ„¢ provides a foundation for IT organizations that want to establish or improve their Configuration Management process through a simple ITIL-based CMDB.
  (tags: ProcessWorx CMDB ITIL ITSM)
• Lockdown Networks Supports IBM Tivoli with Complete Network Access Control
  Lockdown Networks, a leading provider of Network Access Control (NAC) solutions that ensure all users and devices on the network comply with security policies, today announced support for the IBM self-managing autonomic technology initiative. Effective im
  (tags: IBM Autonomic Tivoli CBE events)

Bruce and Ismael have a bet on over whether a top down approach to BPM has ever worked. Anyone out there working on BPM or BPMS should check out Bruce’s post here and help him out!

• Agents vs. Agentless Redux
  The “agentless vs. agent-based” topic really bothers me of late as I continue to see vendors bombarding the populace with disinformation, if not outright lies and deception.
  (tags: systemsmanagement sysmgt agent agentless monitoring)
• Getting a handle on transaction mgmt. - Network World
  Transaction-management software measures transactions’ performance along the many hops an application makes between a user request and back-end systems. The software captures response-time metrics, application content errors and system workload details th
  (tags: transaction monitoring E2E transx application appmgmt application_performance service_management)
• EMC Thinks Big
  EMC Chairman, President and CEO Joseph Tucci is so confident in his company’s products, and the ability of its global services team to sell them, that he made one of his famous pledges Wednesday at the company’s analyst event here. Tucci promised EMC woul
  (tags: EMC SMARTS NLayers)
• SOA helps energy company keep the lights on
  Sun SeeBeyond eBAM Studio is a Business Activity Monitoring tool with dashboards with real-time alerts for exception or errors.
  (tags: Sun SeeBeyond eBAM SOA)
• Open Source Network Management Tool You Should Care About: NeDi | June 5, 2006 04:47 PM | By Harper Mann
  Documenting the network and keeping tabs on the equipment in your environment is the equivalent of doing the dishes, taking out the trash — i.e., the everyday household chore minutia that gets pretty tiresome over the long haul. It’s even worse when netw
  (tags: management monitoring network OSS discovery)
• NeDi - Network Discovery Suite
  (tags: network monitoring discovery mapping management OSS)
• Next phase in ITIL poker game :: ITSM PORTAL International Edition :: International platform for management of IT Services
  OGC have announced the selection of preferred bidders for the exploitation of ITIL. APM Group and TSO win, and ITSMF is out of the game…..
  (tags: ITIL ITSM bestpractices)

Charlie pointed this out on the erp4it list today…a big YIKES!

http://en.itsmportal.net/news.php?id=2229

-snip-

“As we’ve informed you before, the exploitation of ITIL (and other OGC frameworks like Prince2) will be outsourced to new parties by the end of the year, and the involved parties seem to be involved in a poker game. OGC now announced that they have selected two parties to negotiate further on ITIL rights. The biggest news is that ITSMF is not amongst these parties.”

-snip-

“It seems that there are a few dark clouds hanging over ITIL’s future. The January statement “that there will be one and only one acceptable outcome of the CAR bidding: the future management of ITIL will have to be an organization lead by the international ITSMF organization - not an organization where ITSMF is participating as an advisor, but one where ITSMF makes the decisions…” might prove to be false now, and there’s no saying where this will end.”

It’s good to see the folks running “N-Tiers without the Tears” posting again. In this post they talk about maturing into Quality of Experience (QoE) monitoring and the potential pitfallas associated with it.

The point they make is that for true end-to-end service monitoring, every layer and every component of the service must be instrumented and monitored in such a way to provide the right level of visibility and data/information at the right time for each audience. Such a simple thing to say, but a very difficult thing to accomplish. This isn’t due to a lack of technology capability, but due to those organizational/functional silos within IT.

In my past life, I ran no fewer than five different QoE tools to try and provide visibility into what our external and internal customers experienced. While I believe in using these capabilities to “tie” together all of the traditional monitoring, I spent more time defending the quality of the data than providing any realy value to the business with the tools. Every organization/functional silo in IT had to save face, defend their turf and find a way to point their finger and someone else in the service delivery chain.

One approach that can help understand QoE and provide a very simple way to dialogue with the business is called Apdex - or the Application Performance Index. Think of it as a MOS score (if you’re familiar with VoIP) or like your FICO credit score for service performance. It’s goal is to establish apples to apples way of assessing application and service performance based on the needs of those who use those applications and services. It will give you a way to normalize all of your data points collected from all of your QoE tools into one uniform assessment regardless of how one vendor does things compared to another. Check them out if you’re doing QoE or synthetic transaction testing.

• BMC at the Tipping Point? - Motley Fool - MSNBC.com
  Management says it’s on the verge of growth, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
  (tags: BMC)
• HP Unveils OpenView Network Configuration Manager
  Hewlett-Packard has repackaged a change and configuration management product from Voyence and renamed it HP OpenView Network Configuration Manager
  (tags: nccm network changemanagement configurationmanagement HP ITIL CMDB Voyance)
• Network Configuration Manager overview and features
  Automated network change and configuration management for your dynamic multi-vendor network. * Compliance and audit * Automated network infrastructure lifecycle management * Ease of use and manageability
  (tags: nccm configurationmanagement changemanagement HP CMDB ITIL Voyance)
• Application Services Library: Application Services Library - Development
  ASL’s goal is the professional development of application management This is achieved by offering a framework within which the processes of application management are brought in relation to each other. The framework also serves as a steppingstone for cate
  (tags: application process development appmgmt bestpractices)
• bisl.nl
  need to translate…
  (tags: business BusinessService BISL)
• HP taps Voyence for network configuration management - Network World
  HP Thursday announced it would later this summer release a network configuration management product based on technology the company has licensed from Voyence.
  (tags: HP NCCM configurationmanagement changemanagement Voyance ITIL CMDB)
• Techworld.com - Five issues you need to know about network provisioning
  Tips from an expert at US Airways West.
  (tags: networkprovisioning)
• Methodology Process Documentation Software
  Document your processes in the first software specifically designed to facilitate process description, analysis, deployment and continuous improvement. Create your own methodology that fits your organization’s specific needs perfectly. From scratch or bas
  (tags: BPM process Process_Automation bestpractices Nevant)
• OpenEMS - Optena: Knowledge Base
  Open Source Enterprise Management Services(OpenEMS) is not yet-another open source project — it is a whole new concept of Systems Management through Open Services to provide a very rich ecology of shared services and a very different economic model. Open
  (tags: OSS systemsmanagement sysmgt monitoring)

I heard something I really liked today at the Atlanta IBM Tivoli ITSM roadshow from one of our sales folks. When you introduce yourself or tell someone what you do for your company - simply add the phrase “supporting the business” afterwards.

Such a simple and powerful way for anyone in IT to really understand their purpose in life.