Posts from — April 2007

A full weeek of IBM Tivoli Services training and enablement kicked off here at “Camp Tivoli” (aka Renaissance Hotel) in Austin, TX this week. We had a full day of the rah-rah presentations, heard how well we did over the past dozen quarters, where we’re headed in 2007, etc. Good stuff, lots of recognition and even a presentation on how IBM Tivoli is planning for a potential pandemic crisis!

Looks like I’ll have a full house for each for the Tivoli Business Service Manager (TBSM) 4.1 lecture and lab sessions I’m co-presenting at this week. Over 80 of my peers will be drinking from the Business Service Mangaement firehose in our 75 minute sessions! Fortunately they can quench their thirst at the bar afterwards! (something I hear Tivoli has quite a reputation for )

They’ve got the standard IBM Tivoli product portal up now for TBSM 4.1. Links of interest here and on the resources page. Looks like you can even price/order the product online!

TBSM 4.1 References

• TBSM 4.1 Documentation Site
• TBSM 4.1 Support Site
• TBSM 4.1 Product Site
• TBSM 4.1 Features and Benefits
• TBSM 4.1 Demo (Flash)
• TBSM 4.1 Datasheet
• TBSM 4.1 Redpaper: ETA May 2007

What You Need to Know (WYNTK) on Tivoli Business Service Manager (TBSM) 4.1 Series

WYNTK on Documentation

WYNTK on Templates

**
** If you’re an internal IBMer, please look for the TBSM 4.1 & Beyond Wiki for more resources.
**

• SIMILE | Timeline
  (tags: ajax application timeline visualization web2.0 calendar)

• ProactiveNet Named a ‘Strong Performer’ in New Business Service Management Market Research @ SYS-CON Media
  “ProactiveNet is unique, as it provides BSM via an analytics engine that correlates massive volumes of performance data from across the entire infrastructure, narrowing the many potential causes of a service problem to a manageable few to speed problem re
  (tags: proactivenet forrester bsm business-service-management opinion analyst)

Templates are the core component and where everything begins within TBSM 4.1. Templates can be created for anything. If you want to model a standard three tiered application, create a template for web servers, application servers and database servers. If you want to model a business process, create a template for order entry, order validation, payment processing, order fulfillment. Don’t limit yourself to the IT component perspective!

Templates are used to describe the behavior or characteristics of something. We use rules in templates to assess whether these behaviors and characteristics are in a good or bad state or to bring in additional data, information, metrics, etc. that can provide insight into how something is performing. Templates can be simplistic and contain only one rule or can be very sophisticated with dozens of rules if needed to describe the behavior and characteristics of a complex entity.

Template rules (to be covered in additional WYNTK topics) are the “glue” enabling association of templates to other templates and linkage to data sources such as IT and business data and information. Templates can be created manually via the TBSM 4.1 GUI or automatically via the TBSM 4.1 API.

Templates ultimately become the basis for creating instances of the entity described in the template. Instances (to be covered in additional WYNTK topics) are the representative instantiations of templates and provide additional information and identification fields necessary to ensure that the instance is unique. In the example above, I’d create an instance of the web server template (webserver01), an instance of the application server template (appserver01) and an instance of the database server template (dbserver01). One of the template design goals should be to seek commonality and reuse opportunity. If this is accomplished, these templates could be used for creating instances throughout your environment and the number of templates to manage in TBSM 4.1 remains low.

You should develop a functional and unique naming schema for templates. This may be something very generic such as “server”, more specific such as “serverWindows” or very specific such as “serverWindows2003sp1”. This will help you tremendously when you’ve got a lot of templates developed in your TBSM 4.1 system. Consider adding a unique enumeration on the end of your template name “serverWindows2003sp1-028-01” as a key to tie back into your template documentation (028) and versioning information (01).

You should develop a documentation method for capturing key template information, why you created the template, version number, rules, formulas, etc. You’re going to need this as a core component of your documentation portfolio for each Business Service Management solution you develop in TBSM 4.1. You’ll be challenged in the future with the “Why’s this thing red?” questions and need solid documentation (and original requirements) explaining why.

You should develop a versioning approach for managing changes to your templates. This could be as simple as exporting template configurations from TBSM 4.1, parsing into template units and storing their configurations in CVS or Subversion. If you’re making a lot of changes or have a primary/failover environment, you’re going to want to think of this stuff to keep everything in sync.

You should develop testing use cases for each template and template hierarchy. These should include sample data that can be passed through the system(s) to test each state expected in the template or template hierarchy. You should have test files which contain event profiles, database tables that change key values being watched in rules and enough historical sample data as needed to run through any scenarios needed for any complex calculations performed or trending needs. Information about these test files should be referenced in your documentation and stored in your CVS or Subversion versioning solution.

Template (ultimately instances of templates) scaling and performance (number of templates deep, wide, number of and types of rules on a template, etc.) should be watched closely in larger environments where you have large models, large volumes of data source (events, databases queries) matching, etc. A performance and scalability whitepaper is planned in the near future. Your IBM Tivoli account manager or technical team should be able to get this for you. I do know that the testing and benchmarking group needs real world scenarios from the field to help improve their testing processes and feedback they provide into development.

I’d enjoy hearing your feedback on templates, how you are creating and using templates and opportunities where we can improve templates and template features in the future. We do need to establish a common repository of generic templates and rules to continue to improve what you get out of the box (in addition to the BSM_templates). If you’re interested in contributing generic templates/rules you’ve developed or working on a project to establish/manage a repository for these, please contact me.

• IBM Dashboard KPI Catalog
  Metrics matter. The better the organization’s system for metrics, the more their performance improves. Properly implemented, Dashboards - and the key performance indicators (KPIs) that populate them - bring the right metrics, to the right people, at the
  (tags: IBM Lotus Dashboard KPI)
• IBM WebSphere Developer Technical Journal: Using portal analytics with open-source reporting tools
  (tags: IBM Websphere Portal user-experience reporting logfile analytics)
• HP blends Mercury, Openview software | InfoWorld | News | 2007-04-24 | By Eric Knorr
  HP has also gone hog-wild with the term “service,” by which the company means a total solution that includes both HP software and consulting. New services unveiled include Demand and Portfolio Management, Application Transition Management, Business Servic
  (tags: HP Mercury Intgration ITSM servicemanagement)
• SolarWinds Acquires Network Monitoring Software Leader ipMonitor
  SolarWinds, a leader in network management software, today announced it has acquired privately held ipMonitor Corporation. Headquartered near Ottawa, Canada, ipMonitor has more than 5,000 customers.
  (tags: SolarWinds ipMonitor M&A monitoring)

• E-Commerce News: Web Services: Tricky Business: Building Fault-Tolerant Web Services
  It gives organizations advanced, real-time visibility of services and processes in a comprehensive service dependency model. It incorporates data from a broad array of IT resources and business support systems that contribute to defining a service
  (tags: IBM Tivoli business-service-management bsm tbsm4.1 pierrecoyne)

• IBM Dashboard Accelerator
  This accelerator for IBM WebSphere® Portal helps organizations reach performance data wherever it resides, delivering it as real-time key performance indicators via personalized, portal-based dashboards. It also provides alerts and tools to help users ta
  (tags: IBM Websphere dashboards bi bpm visualization)