Posts from — November 2007

• Improving Telecom Service With a Customer’s-Eye View
  “For the first time now, IBM is providing a capability for service providers to take a view from the outside in, to begin to understand in an automated way how their customers are experiencing the products they’re bringing to market,”
  (tags: ibm tivoli netcool vallent cem user-experience serviceassurance sqm)

• Autonomic Computing Is Here, and It Works
  Now all it takes is a button push to check system availability and health, check the code, sequence it, schedule it, and push it out to the systems.
  (tags: IBM Tivoli Autonomic automation)
• DevCamp Tivoli - Collaborative Development of End-to-End BSM Solutions
  We landed on the idea of a scenarios based collaboration event focused on how one could solve real world problems using Tivoli products within the Business Service Management space. Something straight from the experts and practitioners out there. Somethin
  (tags: bsm, business service management, IBM, Tivoli, DevCamp, DevCampTivoli, ITM, Monitoring)
• IBM unveils customer service telecom software
  IBM Tivoli Netcool Customer Experience Management application is designed to let customer service representatives troubleshoot through a single dashboard andmanage user accounts in real time based on each customer’s device, location, service, and grouping
  (tags: IBM Tivoli TNSQM Vallent Netcool Wireless)
• Generating XML Data in Netcool/Impact from non-XML Data Sources
  Version 2.0 of IPLtoXML adds a set of functions which make it easier to generate the XML.
  (tags: IBM Tivoli Netcool/Impact Impact XML integration OPAL)
• Tivoli Monitoring for Applications
  Achieve higher availability and optimized performance of their mySAP.com and Siebel eBusiness Applications through effective and proactive management. Each application is represented by a dedicated module known as Proactive Analysis Component.
  (tags: IBM Tivoli appmgmt sap siebel opal)
• Wells Fargo Bank Opts for Corda CenterView(TM) Performance Dashboard for Its Consumer Credit Group
  Corda provided ease of deployment, robustness, fast response time and quality it needed to create a successful dashboard implementation. Plans to continue to develop dashboards for other departments, replacing individual reports that take time to deliver.
  (tags: Corda bi dashboards)
• Three holiday e-commerce misadventures to avoid
  When you follow a Business Service Management (BSM) approach, which is based on managing IT from a business perspective, you’ll know which machines are impacted by a change and you’ll be able to plan patches at times that won’t impact the holiday bu
  (tags: bsm business-service-management changemanagement configurationmanagement cmdb bmc)

Business Service Management (BSM) requires some level of visibility and insight into the core networks, systems, applications, transactions and processes happening across the IT environment. This visibility and insight requires some contextual understanding of how those things support and enable the key business services, applications, transactions, processes and activities that are critical to the business meeting their goals and objectives. The more emphasis on this contextual understanding we can establish directly from the source systems and applications, the easier and more efficient that operations, event and business service management can be in upstream solutions.

My findings and overall assumption is that most fundamental Tivoli monitoring is implemented in such a way that it’s only enabling the SME groups (SysAdmins, EOC/NOC, etc.) to identify, triage and resolve low level problems. I posed a series of questions to the only two Tivoli Monitoring gurus that I know about to try and gauge what could be done to better equip Tivoli Monitoring clients to implement fundamental system HW/OS and application/database monitoring so that it enables a client to implement true BSM solutions upstream. My intent from this dialog was to start a new series of blog postings called “The Top 10 Things and ITM Client Can/Should Do to Enable BSM and How to Implement Them”.

John “The Uber ITM Guru” Willis bit and we had breakfast to discuss. John’s got a lot of great ideas from what can and should be done from the ITM perspective. He mentioned a few of his clients that really get it and what they’ve done in the past to get there. We talked about the realities of client deployments today, politics, keeping up with constant changes and releases in the products and IT environment. Apparently the game really changed from ITM 5.x to ITM 6.x and things really need to be thought of in a different way making use of the Universal Agent. John’s answers continued to amaze me because of the level of effort it sounded like to do something as simple as this.

I kept coming back to a couple simple scenarios:

• How can I get something as simple as the the operating system name/version, server location, datacenter rack/row embedded in every event coming from an ITM agent?
• How can I get the business service/application that this server/application/database supports embedded in every event coming from an ITM agent?

We’d been discussing collaboration in the community via wiki’s, blogs, mailing lists, etc. for some time now. We landed on the idea of a scenarios based collaboration event focused on how one could solve real world problems using Tivoli products within the Business Service Management space. Something straight from the experts and practitioners out there. Something that shows what can/should be done from end-to-end using ITM 6.2 (and its dependencies) and TBSM 4.1.1 (and its dependencies) to create real world BSM solutions that any Tivoli client could implement.

Introducing DevCamp Tivoli. Our thoughts are that we’d meet before the annual Tivoli Technical User Conference (TTUC) called IBM Pulse next year. The conference next year is planned for May 18-22 so we’re targeting having this DevCampTivoli on Saturday May 17th. We’re betting on SME’s and Practitioners being able to fly in early for the conference they may already be attending and being able to participate in this event. Whatever the outcome of the DevCampTivoli is, we’d like to present that during a BoF session during the conference and on the OPAL site for everyone’s benefit. Listen to my first podcast ever on this topic with John here. Read over John’s blog posting announcing the event here. Visit the DevCampTivoli website and sign up!

More to come on this as we noodle through the concepts. Visit the site and sign up if you’d like to help out. We’re certainly interested in your input towards scenarios and development approaches within ITM 6.2, Tivoli EIF Probe, Netcool/OMNIbus and TBSM 4.1.1.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

• BMC ProactiveNet Analytics Protects Customers with Critical IT ‘Early Warning System’
  BMC ProactiveNet Analytics adds an analytics layer to BSM that alerts IT operations staff about impending performance abnormalities, thereby reducing the time from problem detection to resolution by up to 90 percent.
  (tags: BMC proactivenet bsm business-service-management analytics)
• Optinuity Enhances Run Book Automation: Optinuity’s upgraded Run Book Automation package aims to reduce trouble ticket volume
  New APM (Autonomic Policy Management) capability to its software, which combines RBA, job scheduling, policy management and adaptive local monitoring to create an automated, closed-loop process for correcting problems in complex enterprise applications.
  (tags: Optinuity RBA autonomic runbook automation ITPA)
• IBM Tivoli Monitoring for IBM Tivoli Network Manager
  Monitor the availability and performance of Tivoli Network Manager servers. It extract useful metrics about the health of your Network Manager Server and provides useful historical data that you can use to track trends and to troubleshoot system problems.
  (tags: IBM Tivoli networkmanagement ITNM Precision ITM monitoring OPAL)
• IBM Redbooks | Deployment Guide Series: IBM Tivoli Monitoring V 6.2
  Deployment guide for IBM Tivoli Monitoring V6.2. We cover planning, installing, and configuration of IBM Tivoli Monitoring V6.2 for small, medium and large environments.
  (tags: IBM Tivoli ITM monitoirng systemsmanagement redbook johnwillis)

• Velocent Systems Offers Dashboard to Monitor Wireless Carrier Networks
  The VSE is able to collect up to 130 end-to-end Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in real-time, and now with its KPI Mediation Device (KMD) technology it offers reporting software that compiles customer data in a user-friendly dashboard
  (tags: VelocentSystems wireless monitoring networkmanagement kpi dashboards)
• Velocent Systems
  Velocent Systems’ Service Level Agreement (SLA), Customer Experience Monitor (CEM) and Business Intelligence (BI) solutions address the technical challenges of existing and next-generation wireless data networks in a business-focused manner
  (tags: velocentsystems wireless customerexperience user-experience kpi monitoring serviceassurance)
• HP Announces New Software and Services to Fully Automate the Management of Business Services
  The HP Automated Operations 1.0 software suite is composed of IT Service Management, Business Service Management and Business Service Automation solutions and integrates assets from HP OpenView, Peregrine, Mercury and Opsware.
  (tags: HP bsm business-service-management automation itsm)

• Netcool/OMNIbus 7.2 Docs
  (tags: IBM Tivoli Netcool OMNIbus Documentation)

• FireScope President Mark Lynd Launches Blog Series on BSM
  “This blog series is an effort to clear up the confusion and discuss key concepts, best practices, and innovations around BSM and point out critical elements that need to be addressed when considering BSM.”

  * *PR on Blog Postings??? **

  (tags: Firescope bsm business-service-management)

• Actix unveils new release of Radioplan automated optimisation solution
  Radioplan 3.8 several new modules and the integration of key features from the Actix Cellopt ACP product line, operators can proactively balance mobile traffic across network resources ensuring the optimum user experience and maximum network efficiency.
  (tags: actix radioaccessnetwork ranmonitoring monitoring networkmanagement wireless)
• Actix Launches Next Generation NSM System to Automate RAN Performance Engineering
  It enables optimization of the network engineering process and more intelligent and effective management of the workflow through that process to bring large-scale automation to highly fragmented systems in the network performance arena.
  (tags: actix radioaccessnetwork ranmonitoring monitoring networkmanagement wireless)
• Paglo debuts IT search engine as a service
  Paglo is taking the wraps off of what it claims is the first search engine for IT. The Paglo Crawler continuously indexes corporate networks to discover devices, networks and other IT assets as basis for search queries.
  (tags: Paglo discovery search networkmanagement systemsmanagement)
• Paglo: A Web 2.0 approach to IT
  Paglo is essentially an IT search engine that indexes a ton of information about the network you are managing.
  (tags: paglo discovery networkmanagement systemsmanagement)
• Event Integration Facility connector for Tivoli Directory Integrator
  EIF is a standard mechanism to communicate with IBM monitoring products such as TEC and Omnibus. This EIF connector for TDI enables a TDI user to build solutions that can both send and receive EIF messages, enabling powerful integration scenarios.
  (tags: IBM Tivoli EIF TDI integration events netcool/omnibus netcool tec OPAL)