Posts from — April 2008

• TIBCO proactive management approach enables SOA performance delivery as a managed service
  TIBCO is partnering with BMC Software, in that BMC will use TIBCO infrastructure as the SOA foundation for its Business Service Management Platform.
  (tags: Tibco SOA BSM BMC business-service-management)
• TIBCO SOA Management Platform Adopted By Business Service Management Market Leader
  BMC Software will embed TIBCO ActiveMatrix(TM) in its Business Service Management (BSM) platform. BMC selected TIBCO ActiveMatrix because of its ease of use and ability to provide service enablement and management on a single platform.
  (tags: BMC Tibco bsm business-service-management SOA)
• ITConcepts and Entuity to Deliver Comprehensive BSM Solution to Swiss Market
  ITConcepts’ goal is to provide the most compelling BSM solution for our customers
  (tags: ITConcepts Entuity bsm business-service-management)

• Symphoniq Announces TrueView 2.0 Real User Monitoring Solution for Rich Internet Applications: Latest Release Extends TrueView’s Web 2.0 Capabilities to Include Real-user Monitoring and Diagnostics for AJAX, Flash, and Silverlight
  TrueView 2.0 provides visibility into Web applications including Ajax, Flash/Flex and Silverlight to monitor how usage and performance are affecting the end user.

  ** ANYONE USING THIS? THOUGHTS? **

  (tags: symphoniq user-experience application_performance performancemgt)
• AWS Service Health Dashboard - Apr 28, 2008
  I’m sure Amazon could’ve done a better job creating a Service Health Dashboard!!! This is pretty minimalistic. What capabilities do they expose for people developing on the AWS platform? Can I instrument what I build?
  (tags: aws cloud dashboard health status bsm business-service-management monitoring)
• The misperceptions of the Network Operations Center - Network World
  However, in order for the NOC to get the kind of support that it needs to make further changes, senior NOC management needs to do a better job of marketing the role and the value provided by the NOC.
  (tags: noc network_operations organization IT network)
• Is User Monitoring The Next Wave In Enterprise App Management? — Application Performance Monitoring
  The real work comes in correlating and aggregating mountains of logs, as well as capturing and incorporating app-specific data that requires client- and server-side agents
  (tags: user-experience application_performance performancemgt monitoring)

• Integrien Announces Record Growth
  announced it is on target to deliver a record 233% revenue growth in 2008 via continued success with its flagship software solution, Alive, which enables organizations to eliminate much of the manual effort associated with maintaining mission critical app
  (tags: Integrien analytics bsm business-service-management events)

• Why is IT Still Not Communicating Well With Business?
  The biggest benefits to the entire business and to IT departments themselves will come … from establishing expressive two way communications between business and IT professionals. This needs cultural changes in both communities.
  (tags: bsm business-service-management alignment bsm_value it-value)

• 2008: The Year of CEP
  CEP is about making faster, smarter decisions and actions. CEP platforms will need to extend the reach of CEP to the business user, allowing them to be more self-sufficient in how they use and see real-time data
  (tags: CEP EDA BEM business-events BSM BAM BPM)
• Security, IT Operations, Compliance & Privacy Converge in Data Center
  “We see a natural integration point between what we’re doing with security information and event management (SIEM) and Tivoli [enterprise management products],”
  (tags: IBM Tivoli Netcool TSOM SIEM events)

Today, competitive Business Service Management solutions must provide quick time to value, be highly effective, easy to implement and manage and truly enable progress towards a business aligned organization and operations. In my efforts to assess and increase the Business Service Management readiness of our vast products within IBM Tivoli, I’ve just completed a quick first cut for our core monitoring product and associated monitoring modules. My results don’t shock me, and we have a long ways to go. I hope this can set a benchmark towards improvement in 2008, a year which brings significant change and potential for the BSM solution suite.

In my initial list of assessment areas below, I’ve tried to focus where I feel attention is needed “if I were king for a day”. Historically, we’ve focused on integrations at the back end and front end. We’re starting to focus more on some other useful areas via our navigation and reporting initiatives, but we’re still not focused on BSM solution oriented content (although we’re talking a lot about solutions for this and that).

Every release of the core products enabling the IBM Tivoli Business Service Management story (does everyone know what this is?) must include content into the core Business Service Management products including Netcool/OMNIbus and Tivoli Business Service Manager (TBSM). If we’re not doing this, we’re forcing our clients to take these tasks on themselves further increasing their workload, product management lifecycle, and drastically increasing their time to value from these investments. We absolutely must have value added content out of the box (or immediately available on OPAL) that coincides with every significant release of enabling technology (ITM, ITCAM, TWS, TPC, etc.) to be competitive within the BSM marketplace.

As I understand things within the ITM world, we include specific workspaces and reports with each release (core, IF, FP, etc.). Taking this work into consideration, exposing this with the appropriate Business Service Management context within our BSM products is a logical step. While every client environment will be unique and different, the trick here is to get to something that is 80% there that can be customized the rest of the way by our clients. Are there documents describing content associated with TEPS workspaces? Are TEPS workspaces just structured queries into TDW, TEMS and TEMAs? How would one find out about the queries used to drive a TEPS workspace? I’m sure someone could create a magic script to convert this stuff to relevant configuration components for a TBSM content pack.

The assessment lists things that I think are the relevant within the managed system, Netcool/OMNIbus and TBSM to further expand our end-to-end BSM solution and story using ITM based monitoring. I would like this to be a topic for discussion at DevCampTivoli. How can we do it? Should Tivoli do it? Should it be community driven? Would it provide value? Would it speed time to deployment? Would it enable more successful demonstrations, proof of concepts and sales? I certainly think so!

What are your thoughts?

Check out some of my other thoughts for improving the end-to-end BSM story here:

BSM Profile Concept for ITM 6.x
BSM Descriptor File Concept for ITM 6.x
Oranizational Structures for BSM Success
BSM Situation and BSM Event Concepts for ITM 6.x

A new IF for TBSM v4.1.1 is now available here. TBSM v4.1.1 IF001 and IF004 are dependencies.

This Interim Fix addresses problems reported in IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager 4.1.1.

* APARs that are included in this Interim Fix:

IZ17042 MOSWOS TBSM AGENT MONITORS INCORRECT OMNIBUS UNIX PROCESS

TBSM Process Control Agent does not accurately reflect status of the process control agent. Regardless of whether the process control daemon is up or down, it shows as Down in the Process
Control Agent view of the TBSM Agent workspace.

IZ17159 THE DIRECTSQL FUNCTION SI NOT AVAILABLE BY DEFAULT FOR POLICY WRITING.

The option to use this function by default is not provided for policy writing in the ESDA Edit Policy window.

IZ15468 SERVICE INSTANCE IN MAINTENANCE TURNS GREEN BEFORE MAINTENANCE

A service in maintenance state should remain blue color, until the maintenance schedule is complete, However, if an event comes in that clears the service, the service instance and status in the
Services tree turns green (not staying blue until maintenance is complete).

IZ15409 WHEN TBSM CHECKS THE STATUS OF THE DATABASE, IT CAN CAUSE THE DATABASE TO CRASH

After TBSM runs for a while, the status of the database is checked and TBSM crashes with the following error in the RAD_server.log file:

ENTRY RADService::executeNcs_dbCommand:command=/opt/netcool/bin/rad_db status
RADService::executeNcs_dbCommand: os.name=Linux
RADService::executeNcs_dbCommand: Exception: java.io.IOException:
Too many open files
Thread[CheckDBStatusThread,5,main]:
java.io.IOException: java.io.IOException: Too many open files
at java.lang.UNIXProcess.(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.ProcessImpl.start(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.ProcessBuilder.start(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.Runtime.exec(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.Runtime.exec(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.Runtime.exec(Unknown Source)
at com.micromuse.sla.impact.RADService.executeNcs_dbCommand(Unknown Source)
at com.micromuse.sla.impact.RADService$CheckDBStatusThread.run(Unknown Source)

• Netuitive Announces Advanced Integration With HP OpenView Operations
  With this solution, customers can automatically correlate HP-OVO data with monitoring data from third-party vendors to achieve an end-to-end view of service health.
  (tags: Netuitive bsm business-service-management analytics correlation HP HPOV)
• Disconnected no more: Wi-Fi when you fly | Mobile and Wireless | TechRepublic.com
  created by generationE Technologies, and combines IBM Tivoli management tools, Tivoli Netcool Omnibus and Impact with the familiar Google Maps visuals to provide a tracking system that manages Web access on a plane-by-plane basis
  (tags: generationE IBM Tivoli netcool/omnibus Netcool/Impact visualization dashboard Google Google-Earth)
• BMCDN : BMC Atrium Integration Engine 7.1.00 Administrator’s Guide
  Integration Engine is used to transfer data between external databases and BMC Remedy Action Request System (AR System) applications or between external databases and the BMC Atrium Configuration Management Database (CMDB) product.
  (tags: BMC Atrium Integration CMDB)
• A proud Archie Bunker! | NetworkWorld.com Community
  My suggestion to Dennis is that he learn from the archie bunkers, instead of trying to teach.
  (tags: CMDB DennisDrogseth EMA analyst)
• CMDB in the NOC: Is it time yet?
  most often with an eye to the network, but with the network group behaving, well, like the Archie Bunkers in the mix.

  *** Network, Mainframe, Application Group….Solve the organizational problem first and you can get to your “CMDB SYstem” Goals ***

  (tags: CMDB dennis-drogseth EMA analyst)
• Government IT Survey Shows IPv6 Confusion and Low Adoption for Virtualization Management Tools
  gap between intention and implementation is very telling making Green IT very low on the priority list.
  (tags: sciencelogic governmentIT)
• Gomez Announces Web Performance Testing Support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 8
  This increase means more content can be downloaded to the browser faster, good news for the web experience. However, for the unprepared, it can also mean strain on network and server infrastructure, causing performance bottlenecks impacting experience.
  (tags: Gomez InternetExplorer8 user-experience application_performance)
• CA Named a Leader in Data Center Automation by Independent Research Firm
  the next-generation DCA tools span technology domains and incorporate four key functional areas: comprehensive discovery, configuration and change management, IT process orchestration, and change control
  (tags: CA DCA datacenterautomation automation autonomic bsm)