Posts from — October 2007
What You Need to Know on Tivoli Business Service Manager: TBSM Design Patterns Pt. 2
A pure Architectural Model (Infrastructure) isn’t sustainable if your goal is to implement true value oriented business service management solutions. One of the key things that are missing from this design pattern is the contextual information required to understand the impact any of the technology buckets has on other technology buckets, services, applications, IT or the business. We also don’t have any understanding of the role the technology buckets or their contents play in service delivery. In this design pattern, one server is just as important and “faceless” as another. We simply don’t know that when a server turns red if it’s the most critical server in the ERP application or if it’s just a backup file server.
Maturing from the Architecture Model (Infrastructure) requires a few things. First, we MUST ensure that we have a solid foundation in the basics of infrastructure management and monitoring. We must know when an infrastructure component is up, down, performing as expected or not, at capacity or over capacity, operating with a fault or error condition, etc. This is fundamental “monitoring 101″ here. If it blinks green in the datacenter or somewhere in the network, branch office, or elsewhere, you need to know the fundamentals. To mature beyond this technology bucketing approach, the separation of function and purpose from the core component must happen. The application or other component installed upon a hardware/operating system platform must be equally as visible as is the hardware and operating system. If you can’t do this, you may want to think about your overall strategy, roadmap and approach towards business service management.
*soapbox*
This is something that you’ve got to define within your company and religiously ensure that your standards and expectations are followed. It continues to amaze me that most clients still struggle in this area. My guess is that better than 75% of clients I’ve worked with or heard about in the past few years don’t have a solid handle on these “monitoring 101″ fundamentals across their environments. I think this is partly due to the constant change with technology but we as vendors have equal if not more blame here with our constant updates, new releases, new acquisitions, etc. This does more harm than anything as the monitoring tool group’s are scarcely staffed these days and are often seen as low in the “value chain”. Simply put, most vendors don’t make it easy for our clients to get ahead and stay ahead of the other changes in the datacenter.
*soapbox*
As mentioned in the first design patterns post, most clients are starting out with models using broad based rules that match any event by node name. They may create a technology bucket consisting of “Application Servers” and have hardware/operating system and application server events (and others) all contributing to the status of that instance. A better approach to this is to have a template for the hardware/operating system (by type, version, etc.) and a template for the application server (by type, version, etc.). The application server “depends on” the hardware/operating system and is modeled using child dependency rules or other “loose coupling” concepts. I now have immediate separation, understand the relationships and can easily create separate service models, dashboards and scorecards for the hardware/operating system group and application server group as needed (horizontal service model) in addition to the traditional (top down/bottom up service model). SLAs, reporting, root cause, right click tools and integrations are other things much easier to do with this approach.
Each template contains the SPECIFIC rules that MOST DIRECTLY indicate impact or potential impact to the hardware/operating system or application/component installed onto the hardware/operating system. This is where a direct working relationship with the hardware/operating system and application/component SME’s is most beneficial for modeling behaviors on templates. Take the time to document what instrumentation is available from the monitoring tools group and the hardware/operating system and application/component deployment/support groups. I can almost guarantee that they have their own instrumentation and monitoring tools in place. Know what events you have access to, what causes them, what clears them and what they really impact under all scenarios (normal operation, low load, high load, when dependencies (direct/indirect) have problems, etc.). Leverage the instrumentation and events that would be the ones that the SME’s recommend and get woken up in the middle of the night for. Don’t use instrumentation or events such as disk space or other utilization events UNLESS you’re sure it will impact the operation of the application or component installed on the hardware/operating system platform. Iterate and test here until you get it right. Controlling false positives and false negatives begins here!
Using separate templates may not be something you see the need for at this time. The benefits of this approach will be seen as I discuss the additional TBSM Design Patterns. Not to leave you hanging on forever, this design approach enables the greatest flexibility and openness for the future. It will enable “loosely coupled” service models and a high degree of reuse required for modeling end-to-end services and complex composite applications. It will help you to avoid “the big ugly all encompassing model” that many clients struggle with today that’s always red and provides little value. It will allow you to accurately model virtually anything within your IT and business environment in the most realistic manner possible. You should start thinking about how to develop these building blocks that will give you a much finer level of visibility and control in building end-to-end service models for business service management down the road.
Up next, Architectural Models for COTS Applications/Databases and Custom Composite Applications.
October 31, 2007 1 Comment
links for 2007-10-31
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Eirteic Consulting and Watch4Net Solutions, a leading provider of performance management and reporting, today announced the Automated Performance Grapher (APG) migration for InfoVista users.
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InfoVista, which sells performance management software, is acquiring French-based Accellent, which sells applications network monitoring products, for $13.5 million Euros ($18.7 million).
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The number of pure-play network change and configuration-management vendors decreased again Tuesday as EMC announced it had purchased Voyence for an undisclosed amount.
**What is IBM going to do??**
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The agreement will simplify infrastructure management for customers using Foundry(tm) products and EMC Smarts(r) solutions by using technologies to rapidly automate the end-to-end management of advanced high-performance networking infrastructures.
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This release significantly expands the enterprise feature set and promotes usability across organizational silos by analyzing the environment from multiple perspectives: IT infrastructure, customer experience and business impact.
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Service Analyzer 2.0 is set to be generally available in mid-November, and pricing starts at $1,000 per server and $20,000 per service. Netuitive defines a service as composite applications such as online banking or payroll.
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The FireScope Web Monitoring feature will facilitate the complete simulation of the web user experience, delivering to clients an unprecedented level of visibility into the performance of business critical applications.
October 30, 2007 No Comments
links for 2007-10-30
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What’s unique about Aegis is was designed to be a vendor-agnostic, or perhaps NetIQ-agnostic, software platform.
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Web performance matters. Responsive sites can make the online experience effective, even enjoyable. A slow site can be unusable. This site is about online performance, how to achieve and maintain it, its impact on user experience, site effectiveness.
October 29, 2007 No Comments
links for 2007-10-25
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Analysts are prescribing to a BSM definition that takes business data and couples it with IT operations data in a manner that shows the true impact of IT operations on the business and vice versa
*What’s described is Level 0 in my maturity model for BSM*
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A case in point: Melillo Consulting, one of HP’s top OpenView partners in North America, has embraced an open source IT management platform from GroundWork.
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The four products amount to “a front end to back end view” of a business service, said Burns. “I haven’t seen how it comes together in reality, but it makes a lot of sense,” he said.
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This article presents an overview of tools, applications and techniques for visualizing data in charts and graphs. Among other things both free and commercial chart tools, services, desktop-applications and web-based solutions (Flash, JavaScript, CSS)
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The terms CSF’s, KPI’s, metrics, outcomes and benefits are sprinkled liberally throughout IT service management publications and articles. In this, the first of a three-part DITY, I will define each of these terms in the context of IT Service Manageme
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Open source means we take advantage of low cost and the real-world experience of thousands of other users, and this software has been proven in the enterprise business environment to be a solid and reliable network management platform.
October 24, 2007 1 Comment
Tivoli Netcool/RAD 3.0 Interim Fix 0002 Released
A new interim fix has been released for IBM Tivoli Netcool/RAD 3.0. Details below and fix available here.
This Interim fix addresses problems reported in RAD 3.0
* Fixes included in this Interim fix:
IY92708 - INCOMING STATUS RULES FILTER COULD NOT CHANGE BACK
After deleting advanced threshold filters and adding normal threshold filters, the Available filter fields and selected filter fields frames are greyed but and the blue buttons in between those windows show red “X”s such that the path to the file it is seeking doesn’t exist.
IY93545 - RAD SERVICETREE AND TEMPLATETREE TIMING OUT WHEN ATTEMPTING TO
When using Firefox - any version - to view the RAD admin page,the template tree is not loading.
IY94964 - REL NOTE: NGF_RESYNCADMINUSER DOES NOT UPDATE RAD_SLA.PROPS
When changing the admin user’s password via the ngf_resyncadminuser script, the password has to be manually changed in RAD_sla.props.
If the user doesn’t manually change the admin user’s password in RAD_sla.props then the service tree doesn’t show
IY95482 - Development Defects
IY96204 - CREATING CUSTOMIZED VIEW AND SVC POINT REQUIRES THE “DONE”
When customizing the starting service instance of a rad_tree viewpoint,the user has to click done twice for the change to be seen.
IY96775 - IN COMING STATUS RULE CREATE ENDS IN ERROR
When saving an incoming status rule, if the selected discriminator has two sets of parenthesis, the rule will not save, and an error appears.
IY97883 - REIMPORTING VIA RADSHELL A TEMPLATE THAT ALREADY EXISTS DOESN’T
After reimporting an export over current templates in the service model, new events do not match the service instance created from the existing templates.
IY99900 - RAD IS SLOW TO THE POINT THAT IT IS UNUSABLE
When starting RAD with a large environment in failover mode, transferring the cumulTimeSLA.xml file from the primary to the backup takes 20 minutes.
October 24, 2007 No Comments
links for 2007-10-23
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Well…let me tell you I have been doing this for a while and I am the creator of the technology for the FireScope solution and I completely understand
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BSM is both a strategy as well as, a framework for linking business processes and data with the critical IT services, so their true business impact both good and bad may be determined.
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Organizations also need to be wary of vendors that will use BSM as a strategy to kickoff costly services engagements where vendors seek to custom design BSM around a framework of products. “That is not BMC’s strategy”, noted Santullo.
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BSM is really all about integration. … At the end of the day, the BSM products link infrastructure performance to end-user monitoring and process automation.
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The company points to an IDC study which found that 41 per cent of IT professionals had not been aware of network issues until they were reported by end-users. This, said HP, is getting IT staff in hot water.
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Pepperweed developed RIBS as an easy, low-cost alternative to getting started with a business service management solution. Each module is focused on delivering immediate business value by bringing core business service mgmt capabilities on-line in days.
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We’ve set up an open source project hosted on Google projects, called Groovy4Netcool to share what we have. Groovy4Netcool can be considered more of a systems integration project than a typical software project.
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we’ve started looking at whether/how RapidInsight can be an alternative solution to provide a web based interface for Netcool…we’ve concluded that RapidInsight can indeed be a very good alternative as a web based interface for Netcool.
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RapidInsight is a flexible solution to rapidly implement active dashboards that present relevant information from disparate systems to users in near real-time
October 22, 2007 No Comments
links for 2007-10-20
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Zenoss Core 2.1 also adds advanced graphing capabilities and personalized dashboards.
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Chapter Two Preview: The Alignment of IT and Business
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TBSM 4.1 provides two solutions for automatically configuring services based on template rules. This STE is an introduction to the 2nd type: (ESDA)rules let TBSM dynamically import service hierarchies from any data source you can configure for TBSM.
October 19, 2007 No Comments
links for 2007-10-18
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My vision is to change how leading organisations, around the world, measure and manage performance – by 2030
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This landmark study, “Smart Decisions: The Role of Key Performance Indicators,” is the first of its kind to explore how organizations will “thrive or fail based on their ability to identify, define, track, and act upon Key Performance Indicators (KP
October 17, 2007 No Comments
