TBSM 4.1.1 quietly made its way out the door as an incremental release a couple weeks ago. This release mainly incorporates a few new features and capabilities, new bug fixes, interim fix roll ups and updating various internal (Webtop/NGF, ILOG) and external dependencies (NCSM). Most importantly IMO are the documentation updates and fixes. The new documents are all online here.
TBSM 4.1.1 is one of the first Tivoli products to adopt components of the Tivoli Common Reporting (TCR) capability. TCR is based upon the Eclipse BIRT project. TBSM 4.1.1 includes the TCR BIRT runtime component which is used to render the various out of the box reports included within this release. The intent of this initial release of reports is to enable legacy Tivoli Business Systems Manager clients to have a similar reporting capability to what they have in their current deployed versions of the legacy TBSM product. The reports are linked off of an NGF layout selectable from the main page selection box. There are various reports available each with a few choices for time boundaries.
The TBSM 4.1.1 TCR reporting feature is installed via the advanced install. You’ll need to install the included Business Service Manager Agent (ITM IRA agent) as well if you plan to use BIRT and the reports as intended in this release. Reporting support out of the box REQUIRES use of ITM and TDW. If you do not have this or do not intend to install it, you will be unable to use any of the out of the box reports for service health, outages, etc. included within TBSM 4.1.1 today.
The TBSM 4.1.1 TCR BIRT components are certainly available for use against other databases. If you already have a database with historical events, KPI/KPM or other supporting data for your TBSM solutions then investigate installing the additional JDBC drivers, downloading the Eclipse BIRT Report Designer application and creating your own custom reports. I’ll do a WYNTK on this later, it’s all very easy to implement and use, especially if you’ve ever worked with other reporting products like Business Objects, Crystal Reports, etc.
TBSM’s TCR, BIRT and overall strategy for reporting, charting and graphing visualizations needs significant improvement. A non-ITM/TDW solution for making use of the out of the box TCR BIRT reports within TBSM 4.1.1 is needed immediately. Full exploitation and exposure of ILOG charting and graphing should be the strategic direction for “near real-time” visualization needs. TCR and BIRT are perfect for the “near term historical” reporting. Areas for improvement in an upcoming IF or future release could be full report launch in context from any tree, service viewer or event to respective reports and an intuitive way to build these launch in context (LIC) integrations that requires no coding. Things may change significantly in this area now that IBM has announced its intentions to acquire Cognos.
A new feature called the Urgent Services Viewpoint has been introduced to the NGF Viewpoint library. This would be added to your custom NGF layouts and serve as a pre-filtered list of service instances whose status has exceeded a given threshold (Unknown, Maintenance, Marginal or Bad). By default, only those who are in a Bad state are shown. The Urgent Services Viewpoint is a good start and gives us some nice filtering and sorting, but ideally this needs to be much more flexible. Users should be able to add their own things to the hot list, the threshold for what appears on the hot list should be configurable by template type, content mapped into the columns should be configurable (for example, map in the trouble ticket number from an instance (from a service instance additional property or Netcool event)).
As many clients still use the default out of the box layouts today, there may not be enough real estate to add another viewpoint. Having something like an Urgent Services “Filter” that could be selected and applied OVER the normal Service Tree (not a View Definition for the canvas, but a similar capability for the Service Tree) so that only those Urgent Services are shown may be an interesting alternative. As I said, good start, but hopefully this will evolve over time.
We’re finally starting to uncover more of the magic under the covers within TBSM 4.1.1 now by exposing the Web Services and XML capabilities. While the capability has been there in the underlying embedded product, it’s just now that its use is starting to get legitimized. In this initial TBSM 4.1.1 release, these two powerful Data Source Adaptors (DSAs) will be made available to those willing to venture into internal Impact policy land. You’ll be able to write custom Impact policies to interact with those data sources to enable metrics collection, service modeling, custom dashboard and layout content, etc.
Use of TBSM 4.1.1’s Web Services and XML support requires work under the covers. There isn’t an exposed GUI to help with configuration and use and this is an area that must be improved in a future fix or release so we keep as much XML and policy hacking away from the new user. The use of these DSAs is discussed in the TBSM 4.1.1 Customization Guide but also look for Netcool/Impact documentation such as the Impact Policy Language manual, Impact by Example manuals and the individual Web Services and XML DSA manuals.
Should you upgrade? As I have yet to see any early release or formal performance and scalability testing results for TBSM 4.1.1 it is hard to say if there will be any significant improvements in those areas to justify an upgrade. Regardless of that, I’m always in favor of upgrading to ensure that I have all of the latest bug fixes applied. I have high hopes for the update done to ILOG under the covers, but I don’t think we’ll see much here in TBSM 4.1.1. Realistically, only you can judge the level of effort that it takes to make the upgrade within your environment from the product, politics/process and dev-test-qa-release to production process. The next major release of TBSM will require significant planning and preparation. You may not need any of these new features or capabilities in TBSM 4.1.1 today so it may be worth the wait.
TBSM 4.1.1 Tips
If you’re doing testing back and forth between TBSM 4.1 and TBSM 4.1.1, be sure to clear your Java cache each time. There are significant differences in the core Java files between these to versions and not using the right ones can cause problems. This is due to the ILOG updates.
The “Go” Button appears to be back on by default. This can be turned off. Visit here to fix this.
Investigate the Business Service Manager Agent documents for information on what the agent is collecting and writing back to TDW for the BIRT reports. Mimic this by creating your own policies to insert similar data into a database of your choosing. Load the appropriate JDBC drivers and modify or create your own reports similar to what’s out of the box today. If you want to review/hack the out of the box reports, they’re stored in $NCHOME/guifoundation/webapps/birt-viewer. I have no idea what an ITM IRA agent is or does so if someone can figure out what’s happening there I can help on the other parts.
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Hi Doug,
I have a few queries on Historical reporting in TBSM using ITM agent and TDW:
1) What exactly does the ITM agent for BSM do w.r.t reporting? 2) What kind of reports can we expect from ITM-TDW?
3)Is it mandatory to have the ITM infrastructure or is it just the ITM agent that will be installed?
4) Can we use only TDW to archive OMNIbus events ( also events enriched by TBSM ) and use BIRT to create event based reports?
Please let me know
Hey Sanil,
The ITM agent is an IRA based agent that is used exclusively to send key data to the ITM/TDW environment. There are numerous OOB reports that provide insight into service instance status, outages, SLAs, etc. It is mandatory (and stupid) that the ITM/TDW infrastructure is in place. I’ve yelled at TBSM Dev about this and that we should be able to point this data to any database. The ability to archive events in TDW requires the TDW Gateway and associated schemas .This is to be released with 7.2.1 if I recall correctly. You’ll then be able to point TCR/BIRT to TDW and report on all things there.
HTH,
Doug
Hey Doug,
Thanks. Absolutely correct, its a whole lot of new infrastructure just for reporting, and the fact that we need to manage the TEMS, TEP, TDW etc for the TBSM reporting service to function is additional complexity. Thanks for the heads up on TDW gateway etc. Cheers!
Hi Doug,
I can not find the way to influense on events TBSM 4.1.1 is sending to ObjServer.
e.g. I do not want all instances to send TBSM events and I would like to modify a bit Summary (name of template in Summary field confuses my customer).
Have a suggestion help where I can do modifications?
Thanks!
Cheers!
Maja,
Yes, this can be done. It may be best for you to develop a more specific use case and/or scenario and I can then walk you through the best options to do this. In general, you always have the ability to create triggers and automations within OMNIbus that act on events. If you have Netcool/Impact, you can use that as well. There are configuration changes that update each and every event that TBSM generates as well.
Let me know some more details and we can work it out.
Tks,
Doug
Thanks Doug!
Yes, I did it using triggers.
But I thought I can infuence TBSM events on the origin – in some file of TBSM. I’ve searched for the file, but no results.
I suppose there must be some code similar to rules files, but didn’t find it.
So, I am very interested in Your last statement:
“There are configuration changes that update each and every event that TBSM generates as well.”
What I want to achieve:
1. I do not want TBSM alarms from all service instances
2. I want just alarms regarding status od service instance (not alarms where in summary is mantioned name of template and IncomingStatRule, because that confusing my customer (and really, just person working with TBSM needs to see this- common operator in NOC shouldn’t be interested in some tbsm templates, if You agree on this with me … )
I did achieve what I wanted using database triggers, but I would have better control if I knew where is that “TBSM’s rules file”.
Thank You!
Regards,
Maja
If you want to control the generation of status events this can be done by commenting out the line in
%NCHOME%\guifoundation\webapps\sla\policy\RAD_ServiceEventUpdater.ipl
that does the AddDataItem call. This is line 9 in a standard file. Use /* */ to comment out the line as follows:
/*
AddDataItem(Type, ObjectToCopy);
*/
You’ll have to generate additional IPL to filter out or keep what you want. Keep in mind that a side effect form this is that you will not see status events from showing up in service details section of your TBSM layouts.
Post what you create when you get it working!
Doug
Doug,
I have TBSM 4.1.1 installed without ITM/TDW. I would like to install BIRT Report designer and create charts and invoke in Iframes in tbsm. Please advise on the necessary components and drivers if any and the source to download. Thanks much!
Responded direct.