Category — OPAL

Let’s finish the story. With the hype of IBM’s Impact 2008 conference on all things SOA this week, I noticed an interesting business partner offering from a company called Nastel.

Nastel offers

“application performance management solutions that enable businesses to ensure the required levels of performance, high availability and reliability of business-critical applications necessary for meeting SLA’s. Nastel’s AutoPilot Suite leverages its built-in Complex Event Processing (CEP) engine to deliver complete business situational awareness, speeding problem resolution and providing unique proactive, predictive problem prevention that enables governance in Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), facilitates SLA and regulatory compliance, and provides Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) support.”

These are all very important capabilities that an emerging IT organization must have, but how will they integrate with the broader IT management and monitoring portfolio? We must break down all of the silos of tools and data and ensure that we’re integrating and incorporating all of this valuable data and information into the broader end-to-end service management and monitoring efforts. The information that the Nastel AutoPilot M6 solution can provide is CRITICAL to any maturing business service management (BSM) solution.

There is a SIGNIFICANT opportunity for IBM business partners to take the extra effort to talk about the bigger picture and provide content and capabilities that can be leveraged by the broader family of IBM Tivoli products. Most OPAL contributions take the easy path and simply provide for event based integrations using ITM Universal Agents (UA) or simple SNMP Trap event integrations. How about providing custom Tivoli Business Service Manager (TBSM) dashboards, service models and rules that can provide immediate broad based value to the IT organization? How about operational rules, procedures and expert advice that could be used to help quickly isolate the problem? How about custom launch in context (LIC) integrations from the core presentation layer components (TBSM, TIP, TEPS, TCR, etc) into your domain specific product? How about custom reports based on the standard Tivoli Common Reporting (TCR) framework that make use of the data you’re solution collects? These are all very simple things that can help your solutions and products gain more adoption (or sales success).

I challenge all of our business partners (or start ups, OSS plays, etc…) to take the extra steps to contribute to the broader IT management and monitoring solutions that most clients already have made significant investments in. Your rewards may be more than you expected!

A new contribution to OPAL has been made for TBSM v4.x (any version of Netcool/RAD or TBSM v4.x) that discusses ways to customize the TBSM scorecard capability. Create custom linked actions, change icons, etc. within the RAD_GetTreeColumnValue.ipl policy for rendering within your scorecard.

Download available here.

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IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager (TBSM) allows users to view business service dependency models and monitor how events and other data affect those services in realtime.

The Service Tree view - sometimes referred to as the “Scorecard” - provides a powerful, consolidated view of service relationships, status, and key performance indicators (KPI), all displayed in a single “tree table” viewer. However, at times, it would also be useful to allow users the ability to “drill-down” into a specific status indicator or KPI, rather than the generic actions available only at the business service level. This would allow users to, for example:

* View the details of a specific KPI to see why it has degraded to the current level.
* Search a customer’s historical database for previous resolutions to a specific KPI scenario.
* Open a browser to customer-specific “RunBook” information on procedures to be carried out when a particular indicator is within a particular range, or has exceeded a particular value.
* Search the company’s Intranet or Internet for context-specific information related to the specific indicator or status for a given application.

This whitepaper describes customization that can be performed by customers to allow them to convert the static text or images into clickable hypertext links. The customer can specify the URL to launch to when the user clicks on a specific image or text in the Service Tree. Service-specific information can also be passed in to the URL as parameters.

One of the things that I like about working at IBM (specifically, ISST or Tivoli Lab Services) is their transparency. What I mean by that is much like the open source community that lives by their openness within code, development, documentation and support, IBM is very open in terms of its documentation and best practices.

When I’m surfing the net looking to learn about company X, Y or Z and their approaches towards technology, products and solutions such as Business Service Management, I always look for their user groups, documentation, best practices and other useful information that may show how they’re doing things. Do you know how successful I am? Not very! Why? I don’t know, but the general lack of transparency that other vendors has when compared to IBM does concern me.

Tivoli’s documentation, best practices and implementation guides (Redbooks), support, and user groups are pretty much wide open for the world to see. Also consider alphaWorks, developerWorks and OPAL!!

Transparent? Yes! Competitive differentiator? Yes! Like Open Source? Yes! Well, sort of.

The first DLA for the product formerly known as Netcool/Precision now known as Tivoli Network Manager IP v3.7. Note that they don’t mention this is also used to integrate with TBSM 4.1 if you don’t have the TADDM/CCMDB product (always the preferred integration path).

Available here.

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This Discovery Library Adapter (DLA) extracts network resource and relationship data from the IBM Tivoli Network Manager IP Edition (Network Manager IP) Network Connectivity and Inventory Model database and generates an output XML file that can be loaded into the IBM Configuration Management Database (CMDB) in the Tivoli Application Dependency Discovery Manager (TADDM) product.

Network Manager IP data in TADDM’s CMDB enables consuming applications, such as IBM Change and Configuration Manager to locate network resources discovered by Network Manager IP(such as network routers) in a TCP/IP network, understand their role in the network infrastructure and diagnose any problems on these network resources. This helps operators and network engineers to resolve network outages and provides service assurance for configuration and change management.

This integration also allows Nework Manager users to view a network resources configuration changes over time and isolate changes that may have created network outages.

A new OPAL submission for Tivoli Netcool/Impact today.

The Netcool/Impact policy included with this solution, IPLtoXML, can be used to convert data obtained from non-XML sources into XML. This XML can then be saved out to a file or pushed to the interface of an application that expects data in XML form.

Available here.

A couple of useful TADDM OPAL contributions for those interested in learning how to get more from your application discovery and mapping investment.

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Best Practices for using TADDM Sensors

Discovery is performed using sensors which are currently built and deployed as part of the TADDM product. The sensor asks, figuratively, the host and the applications how they are configured and who they are talking to.

This paper does not include detail on the complete list of sensors. Over time this list will be enhanced as we attempt to document all Tivoli Application Dependency Discovery Manager (TADDM) supported sensors, as well as the new ones that are added with every release. The following sensors are addressed:

Apache, DB2 database, IIS, Oracle database, Oracle Application Server, SAP - CCMS and SLD, SQL server database, Weblogic, pplication Server, Websphere Application Server, Windows OS

Tivoli Application Dependency Discovery Manger’s Flexible Approach to Discovery Whitepaper

Tivoli Application Dependency Discovery Manager’s (TADDM) flexible approach to discovery and automatic mapping of dependencies from layer 2 through 7 enables its users with the visibility and necessary agility requisite to improve service availability at their firms. TADDM’s unique approach of combining agent-less and credential-free discovery in configurable discovery profiles facilitates its user’s control over where they discover, what they discover and how deep they go. TADDM allows users continue to leverage their best practices for the business, but now armed with the powerful data analysis TADDM provides in order to make the best informed decisions for their firm.

A new Tivoli Netcool/Impact contribution on OPAL detailing internal performance testing results and a guide to testing the performance of your Tivoli Netcool/Impact v4.0 server.

Available here.

Probably one of the coolest features of our Netcool/Impact product is something called Operator Views. Think of them as a way to federate reports and dashboards from anything that Netcool/Impact has access to via its library of data source adapters. I’ve seen some really cool things created using them. Sky’s the limit here folks. If you have or are interested in Netcool/Impact, you’ll want to develop these. There are plenty of quick win scenarios for how they can be used to provide value to your internal clients.

Available here on OPAL.

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This document steps the reader through building an interactive dashboard using Tivoli Netcool/Impact Operator View smart tags within HTML. Dashboards built using these Operator View smart tags can display any data accessible by Tivoli Netcool/Impact, enabling the user to build dashboards that display data obtained in real time from applications, data buses, via web services, etc.