Posts from — March 2008

That one day, a typical American tourist from Atlanta, GA would be walking along the Great Wall of China and be able to send Tweets along the way? I’m not impressed by the technology, but just the fact that I was updating Twitter from the GREAT WALL OF CHINA! My perceptions of China have changed forever and I believe the future of the WORLD will change significantly based on what China does.

The leading mobile provider China Mobile has more customers than the entire population of the USA, well north of 375M. The last I heard, the largest mobile provider in the USA had less than 50M. Everyone is using a mobile phone here in China. I rode on a boat through the city of Zhouzhuang and the “granny” who was the [insert the word for boat operators like in Venice] on her mobile heading back up stream for more tourists. There is a mass collision of hyper growth and significant poverty in the areas that I have seen over the past two weeks. That hyper growth bleeds into poverty stricken areas throughout Shanghai and Beijing. Cellular phones are everywhere. Handset technology that is very “cool and hip” with the younger generations today blows ours away.

I challenged my IBM host yesterday to think about what China would be like when his two year old son turns 15 or 20. The largest bank in China (ICBC - 1984) and the largest mobile provider in China (China Mobile - 2000) were founded in radically brief timeframes compared to similar US companies. The Chinese government is considering establishing a market for start up companies to get funding, build their businesses, IPO, etc. What will China look like in 15 years? What will China have to do to operate successful companies at this hyper scale that is very unfamiliar to most US companies? How will technology have to adapt? What technology needs to be created? What software will need to be developed to manage 500M - 1B mobile users, mobile content, mobile applications (banking, etc)?

I don’t think that the acceptable answer will be segmentation, regionalization, geo-localization of technology. This is the answer for technology that can’t scale. If you’re following John Willis as he dives into cloud computing, might this be a possible answer? Maybe we need to think in terms of how we all learned about the solar system here and orbiting planets around the sun. If the utility compute cloud is the core of the hyper scale architecture of the future, each orbiting “planet” around the compute core is more compute clouds for hyper scale applications, and then more for hyper scale transactions, and hyper scale services. Additional compute cloud “moons” would be hyper scale resources for managing at mass scale. Sometimes there are multiple “moons” required to provide more fine grained mass scale management, additional services, functions, etc. Wow, I’m rambling here but my mind is in some sort of hyper mode thinking about all of this stuff. Can you name a US company that could on-board (acct mgmt, provisioning, billing, etc.) over 7M new customers in a single month as China Mobile did in January 2008?

China is big. China will be bigger than we can ever imagine. I think we need to be seriously reconsidering how we do things today to prepare for what China will require in 3, 5, 10 + years. China needs progressive, abstract thought leaders who can challenge the status quo to help them continue to meet hyper growth requirements. China needs highly skilled practitioners and business partners who can help show them the way. From there, they’ll dedicate their own resources to carry things forward. (what’s possible when you have THOUSANDS of skilled resources in development centers…ANYTHING).

Step 1: Go to your company portal and find the organization chart for the CIO, VP of IT, Director of MIS or whatever. Identify all of that persons direct reports

Step 2: Identify the person(s) that puts together each direct reports daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly status or metrics report. Establish a vision and “What’s In It For Me” (WIIFM) for joint success (make them feel like an owner) with each of these people around what you can do together with a custom dashboard and scorecard solution for their boss based on TBSM. Your goal is to obtain access to their reporting content, metrics, KPI, etc. Be sure to come away from your meetings with a good understanding of what is reported on, why and what’s good, marginal, bad, trends, etc.

Step 3: Build a simple top-line service model (maybe with an additional layer) resembling the organization chart and general categories of the content reported on in each direct reports organization.

Step 4: Build the necessary scorecards and custom canvas based dashboards and layouts for each direct report.

Step 5: Create a single consolidated custom canvas dashboard and layout for the person you identified in step one. Using your knowledge of what is being reported on and why, come up with the appropriate propagation rules and scenarios to flow information and state upwards. There may be a handful of very important things to pull up directly from a lower layer to the top layer. Highlight any of these on the top level dashboard so they stand out. Remember, have lots of white space and less is more!

Step 6: Go back and review each direct reports area with the person(s) you worked with in step two. Make sure EVERYTHING is accurate and that the person(s) you worked with will back you up.

Step 7: Set up meetings with each direct report and each of the reporting person(s) you worked with to show off your collaborative work. Work through one or all of the direct reports to establish the same meeting with their boss to review the work, assess value and see where this work takes you. Be sure to have your own proposals for expansion in each meeting (see BSM Strategy and Roadmapping). Also be sure to identify and potential roadblocks you may run into so this person can mitigate them. Always position this as win-win and WIIFM for each person.

Step 8: Okay, an extra one. Enjoy your new found success!

A quick note on some new TBSM v4.1 IF’s.

One is a LA fix available from TBSM L2 support only for updates to Webtop under the covers of TBSM v4.1. (Tivoli Business Service ManagerV4R1 LA Fix 0001(4.1.0.0-TIV-BSM-LA0001)).

TBSM v4.1 IF010 available here.

* APARs that are included in this Interim Fix:

IY99094 ISM REPORTS FAIL TO LAUNCH FROM RAD UI

ISM Report Launched from RAD has no info in it. The new window pops up to display the graph and info? but there is no info on the graph.

IZ09057 DATA FETCHER STOPS WORKING DUE TO LOST DATABASE CONNECTIONS.

Data fetchers fail to access their specified data source. Message ‘Exception Executing Query’ may be received. Logs report ‘Exception while executing database operation after trying twice. Exception: Io exception: Broken pipe’.

IZ09754 “INSERT ACTION FUNCTION” FOR RADSHELL FUNCTION IS NOT WORKING.

When trying to insert the RadShell function into a custom policy via the Impact policy editor the following message is returned:
HTTP Status 500 -

IZ12362 CUSTOM CANVAS THE TAB TITLES ARE NOT ALWAYS CORRECT

When clicking on a custom canvas that is not tied to a service instance, the context of the Edit Service tab shows either ‘false’ or the named value of the previously clicked service instance, template, or tied custom canvas.

IZ12986 SQL 2005 DATA FETCHER INTERFACE NOT WORKING

MS-SQL 2005 doesn’t not work with the datafetcher or the ESDA rules.

IZ12777 SERVICES IN SERVICE VIEWER NOT AUTOMATICALLY SIZED TO THE WINDOW

When viewing or creating a custom canvas, the size of the object added to the custom canvas is not automatically fit to the size of the canvas.

IZ14265 AFTER INSTALLING PATCH 1 “IMPACT.POLICYLOGGER.MAXLOGSIZEBYTE”

The $NCHOME/log/RAD_policylogger.log file grows unchecked in TBSM 4.1.

We’ve heard of the massive infrastructure construction underway in Beijing to support the upcoming 2008 Olympics, but are China’s key businesses ready? Are the largest banks in China ready for the massive increase in tourist use of ATM banking? Are wireless providers ready for the massive increase in handsets in the Beijing area? Are they ready for the information hungry Olympic crowds seeking near real-time video clips of that gold medal moment or the ever so popular medal count contest? Can Beijing’s traditional network infrastructure, satellite TV and fiber optic infrastructure support hundreds of news outlets seeking to rebroadcast this content into the farthest reaches of the planet?

I’m sure that China’s Olympic planners are well on top of many of these areas. I’m sure many of the largest companies and government run organizations within China are preparing as rapidly as they are in Beijing. I wonder if they’re taking advantage of this opportunity to rethink how they’re doing things? I wonder if they’re planning on not only throwing additional capacity and infrastructure into their business services and applications environments, but what are they doing to leave a great impression with the visitors to the 2008 Beijing Olympics?

When I use the ATM machine outside of the opening ceremony pavilion in August, will I get the same level of service and quality of experience that I do at the local bank branch in Atlanta, GA? Will my transaction complete when 1,000,000+ other transactions are fighting for the same back end resources? How will these companies know if there are problems? How will they ensure that this ATM machine is performing as expected and that my transaction for 5,000 RMB is equally important as every other transaction? What will the potential revenue loss or image and reputation impact be when I can not complete this transaction and I move to another bank’s ATM machine?

More to follow…

—Anyone know how to post this in translated Chinese characters? All I get is ???? when saving.—-

• TeaLeaf debuts customer experience dashboard
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  (tags: tealeaf application_performance user-experience performancemgt dashboards)
• Back to Basics: What is Web Analytics?
  A third sector measures the responsiveness of popular websites.
  (tags: user-experience performancemgt keynote tealeaf analytics)
• Configuring SSL on SM and TBSM
  Support technote on this lovely topic we can’t seem to get any simpler…one can only hope the TIP based v4.2 will be esaier.
  (tags: IBM Tivoli TBSM NCSM SM SSL)
• Determine installed versions and Interim Fix levels on TBSM 4.1 install
  handy for answering the first question you’ll get from support
  (tags: IBM Tivoli TBSM implementation fixes installation)
• TBSM ThinClient can’t get toolbar back.
  This is one way, but what if it doesn’t work? See the forum for detail on how to use the RADSHELL API or the database directly to fix.
  (tags: IBM Tivoli TBSM toolbar)
• Threshold Filter section showing the data type as “Varchar”
  Anytime you make a change to alerts.status, you must run these commands to resync TBSM.
  (tags: IBM Tivoli TBSM netcool/omnibus)
• ManageEngine Blogs
  The Leader in Low-Cost Enterprise Management Software
  (tags: manage-engine adventnet esm monitoring)

• Moving Beyond Technology-centric Management to Dynamic Business Service Management
  This alignment can be achieved through a unified approach that delivers business-level insight, built on a unified service model and an integration platform that provides intelligent automation for the entire service life cycle.
  (tags: bsm business-service-management it-business-alignment CA)
• OpTier’s CoreFirst Software Named as SIIA CODiE Awards Finalist for Third Year in a Row
  CoreFirst automatically maps business services to the IT infrastructure in production and test environments to help organizations better align IT with the needs of the business

  ** Anyone use this in production? How does it “automatically map” things? **

  (tags: OpTier btm transx-monitoring transxmgmt businesstranxmgmt)
• What ever happened to network management?
  In many of these platforms, politics have gotten in the way of effective integration, leaving network management and its potentially transcendent technologies (analytics, discovery, etc.) in a virtual limbo between foundation and stepchild
  (tags: ema monitoring networkmanagement)

There’s lots of debate on what a service is. Let’s keep things simple for this discussion and call a service an aggregate of services, sub-services, processes, transactions and IT technology that provide some value or purpose for the business. A service can be decomposed into some more specific functional areas, sub-services, processes or transactions, groupings of technology, capability, or activity. Modeling these is fairly straight forward and is similar to the approaches outlined so far in this series.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately on how clients try to model their services, how IBM Tivoli thinks about services and how the industry as a whole has been thinking about services. There are probably a dozen efforts underway to come up with some standards based modeling approach for this. New buzzwords arrive in my feed reader every week such as the Common Model Library (CML), Shared Information/Data (SID), Common Information Model (CIM) and vendor specific ones such as Tivoli’s Common Data Model (CDM), Microsoft’s System Definition Model (SDM) and Service Modeling Language (SML). There are a few very interesting approaches that you may want to reference as well in your modeling of services. One is IBM’s Component Business Model (CBM), Service Oriented Modeling and Architecture (SOMA) and the other is the TMF’s Telecom Applications Map (TAM) (aka Applications Framework).

I believe in all of these efforts and I think they can provide value and help meet the needs of practitioners trying to implement management, monitoring and BSM. Every company is different, every service is different, and every organizational silo in your company will describe business services and applications differently. Your approach for modeling services within your organization should be unique and fit the needs you have. The value that these efforts all bring to you right now is a starting point and potential source for establishing a common service model approach and language within your company. Your goal should be to review these and see if you can use portions to create your own unique service modeling approach.

I see a few different design patterns from clients modeling services within TBSM. These are the n-tier pattern, the composite pattern, and the top line pattern. These design patterns tend to be most applicable to the enterprise type client. Service modeling within the service provider spaces (wireless, wireline, VPN, xSP, outsourcing) takes on many different looks as well. I will provide some specific insight into service provider TBSM Design Patterns in the future.

n-Tier Pattern

This service modeling design pattern resembles what clients learn about service modeling from the TBSM manuals or in the formal education. It builds upon the initial TBSM Design Patterns that I’ve talked about and is a simple migration from the initial infrastructure and application modeling patterns. We’re focused here on adding a little more to the representative model for a specific business service or application by organizing architectural components (infrastructure, applications) into contextual building blocks of a service. Think of it as the start of summing things up. This web farm plus that application server farm, plus this database farm work together to support service Online Banking. There’s little focus on specific detailed relationships or dependencies in this design pattern.

This design pattern is most common for clients who do not have an authoritative repository of service dependencies (CMDB), lack an automated discovery and mapping tool and resort to tribal knowledge and the super-secret Visio drawing to create their service models. Maturing from this design pattern into something more accurately depicting deployed services and applications is generally easy to do once the internal capabilities exist for a more automated service modeling approach.

Composite Pattern

This service modeling design pattern starts to merge the architectural type models with the n-Tier type models to create more accurate and representative service models. Here, the service models are made up of one or more functional areas or sub-services. Creating these composite based service models really gets into the semantics of how you define services within your organization. If you look at a complex end-to-end service such as ATM banking, from the point of entry at the ATM machine all the way to the back office mainframe and out to third party clearing houses, that end-to-end service delivery chain will be made up of potentially dozens of smaller functional areas or sub-services. The composite service model will resemble that service delivery chain most typically as a horizontal, fairly flat service model.

The ability to establish the most accurate end-to-end composite service model depends on the ability to instrument the inter-system, inter-application and inter-service dependencies, processes and transactions. I will introduce TBSM design patterns on processes and transactions soon. Another important concept that I will introduce later for composite service modeling is the concept of “hard coupling” and “loose coupling” within a composite service model. This is a key concept that must be understood for establishing realistic service models with accurate state and status propagation.

The dependencies and relationships driving this design pattern most likely will come from authoritative sources such as a CMDB or application discovery tool such as TADDM. In most client environments, custom composite applications and services are very complex and very large. Leveraging TBSM’s automated service modeling capabilities is a key trait within this design pattern.

Top Line Pattern

This service modeling design pattern closely resembles a “top down” or “business driven” approach. This is where focus is clearly centered on creating minimalist service models that focus on the key components of an end-to-end business service or application without getting overly concerned about the lower level details. This focus generally requires that the client has made investments into technology and products that provide instrumentation and visibility into these top level service and application areas. This may be end user experience and performance monitoring, website or application performance monitoring, synthetic or real user monitoring and transaction monitoring. Another good approach is to integrate in top line service metrics and measures from your help desk, ERP, sales management, inventory management or other sources that provide insight at the right level.

Using our end-to-end composite service example above, this service model approach would have very high level representation, usually consisting of only an instance for each of the key service delivery chain components. This can be a very useful approach to get something out there when you’re only visibility into service makeup may be that good old Visio diagram. In my opinion, the presentation details required for this design pattern almost requires the use of a custom canvas based dashboard approach rather than the traditional service model look and feel.

NOTE: I do intend to create visuals to explain these! I hope to use some of my time in Shanghai (or the airplane) to get some of this done. If you’d like more information sooner, just ping me.

• Splunk goes ‘platform’ to extend IT search benefits across more IT management functions
  Splunk has created the means to offer developers easy access to that data and the powerful inferences gleaned from comprehensive IT search. That means the data can go places no log file has gone before.

  ** This is powerful stuff folks **

  (tags: splunk bsm-ng google itsearch mashup situationalapplications itsm-ng)
• Kicking the tires of management software
  PacketTrap, which has pegged SolarWinds as its top competition, designed its products for network managers with between 100 and 5,000 nodes to manage.
  (tags: packettrap solarwinds)