Category — Big4

The long awaited Tivoli Common Reporting (TCR) (based on BIRT) historical event reports are finally available. The documents and included files assumes that you’ll be archiving your events to the Tivoli Data Warehouse (TDW) using the new TDW Gateway and Reporter schema and these reports will pull from there.

It also looks like this is a MUCH smaller library of reports than the lists of reports I’d seen floating around. Not sure what the deal is there other than maybe it’s a way to justify keeping Netcool/Reporter around??

These should be easy to modify and point to your existing historical event database if you don’t plan to use TDW. Drop them in to TCR associated with TBSM v4.1.1 or upcoming 4.2 and incorporate some very basic event reports into your solution.

Download from OPAL here.

With Tivoli Business Service Manager (TBSM) v4.2 planned for general availability within the next few months, I feel that it’s very important that I provide some insight into things that all of our current (any version) and prospective TBSM clients begin to consider in advance of their migration/upgrade to or initial deployment of TBSM v4.2 in the near future.

The next generation of Tivoli Business Service Manager (TBSM) is different and offers opportunities for reevaluating the past to succeed in the future. The architectural options, operating scenarios, product features and capabilities are likely significantly different than those you may be currently using today. To fully exploit the new release, I will be sharing some thoughts and ideas for you to consider as you plan for your upgrade/migration or initial deployment.

First off, I strongly encourage you to not treat your migration and upgrade as just another routine step in the TBSM maintenance lifecycle. I strongly recommend that you reevaluate how you’ve used TBSM in the past. You may not need to do everything you’ve done previously – and probably shouldn’t anyway. There may be many more efficient alternative approaches you should consider.

I’d start be brainstorming some fairly simple and straightforward questions.

• Are you getting the expected value from your previous TBSM deployment?
• Does it provide measurable benefit to the business?
• Is it a critical application, used daily or something that’s occasionally referenced?
• Does it make peoples jobs easier?
• Do you know exactly why something is in there, what causes it to turn red, yellow or green?
• Is it kept up to date and accurate?
• Do you enjoy using TBSM within your operating environments?
• Does it make peoples jobs easier?
• Do your operations and support teams “trust” what you’re showing them?

If it’s hard for you to answer these questions or your answers are less than positive, it’s really important that you think deeply about how you’ll adopt TBSM v4.2 within your environment. I strongly believe that with the right strategy, roadmap, design and plans, you can significantly improve your implementation of TBSM and its acceptance within your organization.

Furthermore, I’ve seen far too many operating environments over the past few years that have yet to adopt a true consolidated operations environment. Are you operating in a silo with your current TBSM deployment? Is TBSM only used for the network, distributed or mainframe group within your organization? Why? Why not consider leveraging the industry leading capabilities of the Netcool/OMNIbus dependency and deploy a consolidated TBSM architecture? Work the organizational problems; establish the vision for consolidated operations and true end-to-end service management within TBSM. You have the technology and product capability, why not use it? Your chances of realizing true value oriented Business Service Management are very poor if you can’t work towards this consolidated model.

The more effort and time you place in architecture, design and planning, the more successful you will be. Your tactical efforts will ultimately fail without a strategic direction and purpose. TBSM v4.2 and the Tivoli Integrated Portal (TIP) platform offers many new architectural options to consider. Become familiar with these and the plans for broader based TIP adoption across the Tivoli portfolio. If you have a goal of a consolidated TIP architecture servicing the needs of numerous core products, the typical enterprise tools groups will need to ramp up skill sets in this new area quickly. Capacity planning, performance, large scale high availability and failover are all areas worthy of significant investigation and testing.

If you own other soon to be TIP enabled products such as Netcool/WebTop or Tivoli Network Manager (ITNM), how will you design and implement a consolidated platform for multiple TIP enabled products? Will you take advantage of the Tivoli Common Reporting (TCR) capability? How will you plan for broad based TCR usage? Will you use a batch oriented reporting mode to avoid potential performance impacts on the core products? What will your access, authentication and authorization schema be? How will you leverage the new Single Sign On (SSO) capability?

I’ll try and cover as many areas as I can without getting into any confidential areas while products are not in a GA state. I think there are a lot of things that should be done now and even more as the products are GA and available for you to explore within your lab or development environments.

Next up - the importance of events.

Shameless plug

IBM Tivoli Services and our TBSM AAA Accredited Business Partners are always available to help advise and consult with you in these areas. Please do not hesitate to contact me at anytime and I can help arrange further discussions.

Hopefully this OPAL whitepaper from one of our ATG folks makes our crazy TSRM - Netcool/OMNIbus integration a bit easier to understand and configure.

I still really have no idea why we’ve taken the concept of ticketing integration and made it so difficult. As an alternative to this approach, if you own Netcool/Impact you can look at this OPAL paper which uses WebServices. This approach needs to be validated against TSRM v7.x.

Mark this up as another Big4 vendor opening up “a bit” and making some really useful content available now via their BMC Developers Network (BMCDN).

While they haven’t opened up access to all of their product resources and documentation, there’s some really good stuff up there now, especially related to the ITSM platform and Atrium CMDB.

In addition to IBM’s complete transparency and openness, this makes the second vendor to show “a bit” of what’s under the covers to the broader community. What’s up with HP, CA, Compuware, Quest Software, Digital Fuel, Oblicore, Managed Objects, etc.?

A new IF is available for TBSM v4.1.1 addressing a few new areas (don’t see mine in there!). This depends on IF 001 and supersedes IF 004, 005 and 006. IF 007 can be downloaded here.

These are the new issues addressed:

IZ15914 INCONSISTENT SERVICE NAME TRUNCATIONS IN SERVICE TREE
Service name truncation is not consistent when using the static sizing tool. Many of the service names will truncate, but some do not.

IZ19833(NGF) NEED THE TBSM LOGON SCREEN TO BE ABLE TO ACCEPT MORE THAN 16 CHARACTERS
Integrated authentication works only if the password is short and when a longer password is used it causes the account in Active Directory to be locked.

This APAR increases the allowable length of the password to 127 characters - which is the Active Directory limit.

IZ20375 CREATING CUSTOM CANVASSES USING IE CAUSES HANG WHEN USING DE
When trying to either create a new custom canvas or edit an existing custom canvas, the canvas would fail during loading and the console would show the following error:

[Fatal Error] ServInst.xml:2:64: White spaces are required between
publicId and systemId. Exception in thread “Thread-12″
java.lang.NoSuchMethodError:

IZ24515 UNABLE TO SAVE SERVICE INSTANCES
The customer edits a service and clicks on the dependencies tab when the customer adds or removes dependent services, the change cannot be saved. The save screen will show up when the save button
is pressed, however, it will never go away and changes made are not saved.

IZ26602 PERSISTENT ESDA INSTANCE HAS A PARENT RULE FAILS TO SHOW UP IN
When there are persistent ESDA instances that belong to a template with a parent rule, they will not be displayed at the root of the tree even if they have no actual parents. Thus there will be no way
to see them.

This fix only applies to persistent ESDA instances that has no parents. If you want to enable the old behavior to not show the instances in the root of the tree set the following:

In RAD_sla.props
impact.sla.showesdainstanceswithparentrules=false

The default for this property is true, which will show these instances at the root of the tree.

Tivoli Netcool Service Quality Manager (TNSQM), Tivoli Business Service Manager (TBSM) and Tivoli Netcool Customer Experience Manager (TNCEM) have been packaged as the new Tivoli Netcool Service Quality Management Center (TNSQMC).

I’ll be talking at length about what Service Quality Management (SQM) really is later, but IMO the easiest way to think of it as Business Service Management (BSM) for the Engineering/Network focused groups of Communication Service Providers (CSPs) such as wireline/wireless telcos.

Traditional BSM still is very applicable to the enterprise side of CSPs and is a must have in supporting the business of being a telco by understanding the IT impacts on the many OSS/BSS systems that exist within these environments (billing, provisioning, fraud/revenue assurance, accounting, legal, HR, CRM/ERP, etc.).

Now what I’m trying to find out is what content is provided for creation of value oriented solutions within TBSM. I’d expect there to be templates, instances, rules, service models, scorecards, custom dashboards, layouts, launch in context actions, etc. available for various audiences (NOC, Eng, Mgmt, CustSvc, etc.).

Some backgrounders:

SQM Solution for Telcos
Tivoli Netcool SQM Service Solutions
Tivoli SQM Story
Tivoli Netcool Customer Experience Management
Service Assurance Demo Scenarios

IBM® Tivoli® Netcool® Service Quality Management Center V4.2 delivers:

• An integrated dashboard-based solution for service availability, service quality, service level agreement, and customer experience management.
• End-to-end Service Quality Management delivered via common visualization and reporting measures, and reports against key metrics to more effectively manage critical services.
• A rich set of extensible, off-the-shelf service-specific solutions for voice, video, and data services, which dramatically reduces total cost of ownership and accelerates time to benefit.

IBM Tivoli Netcool Service Quality Management Center is used to:

• View combined business and technology service indicators to quickly determine the impact of events on availability and performance.
• Discover root causes of quality issues throughout the service path, while helping your efforts to maintain aggregate service levels and SLAs.
• Get a detailed understanding of the individual subscriber experience combined with broader service quality trends.
• Share service quality and client information across multiple business units.
• Invest in modular architecture to help you address initial needs more cost effectively, and then expand as your requirements evolve.

While I’m sure that TBSM’s use of ILOG wasn’t in the business case for IBM’s announced purchase of ILOG today, I am getting my hopes up that this is the Christmas present that anyone using TBSM is looking for.

TBSM makes extensive use of ILOG under the covers for the core of the canvas and visualization. We barely scratch the surface in capabilities (see demos below) in how its used, but it is the foundation for all of the data driven widgets used in the canvas, custom dashboards, etc.

Let’s face it, we have a long way to improve in our dashboarding and visualization capabilities. The acquisition and product convergence focus has been a significant impact on new innovation in this area within TBSM. With the upcoming release of TBSM v4.2 soon to be behind us, I hope that we can finally make investments where they are desperately needed within the data visualization, user experience, widgets, real time charting/graphing and general sex appeal areas for creating the dashboards expected of products in this price point.

TBSM 4.2 will give us a new platform to build upon, but it WILL NOT MAKE SENSE to develop other components (widgets, charts/graphs, analytics, rules, visaulziation, workflow, etc.) in the buzz word of the day (AJAX, Dojo, Python, RoR, PHP, TCR/BIRT) when we may have this ILOG portfolio at our disposal. (my opinion only, I ack the biz side of these decisions)

I strongly encourage you to voice your thoughts and requirements for improvement of TBSM’s capabilities in these areas via appropriate channels.

ILOG has a log of powerful capabilities to offer should we choose to take advantage of them. Better yet, equipping you to take advantage of them with self service designers, SDKs, APIs, etc.

For example:

ILOG Visualization Portfolio
ILOG Diagrammer (TBSM uses this)
ILOG JViews Demos
ILOG Elixer
ILOG Elixer Demos AWESOME! Look at Gauges & Dials Demo!

I hope this is the Christmas present we’ve all been waiting on for TBSM this time next year!

The weekly source for hot IT management news and gossip is the IT Management Podcast hosted by Cote’ of Redmonk and John M Willis of Zabovo. This week’s episode featured OpenNMS’s Tarus Balog.

Tarus dropped a few interesting tidbits throughout the conversation around Network Management about a couple very large IBM Tivoli Netcool clients that were moving from or complementing their existing architecture with OpenNMS. One was a large telecommunications company in Italy (Telecom Italia?) and another a very large mobile telecommunications company in Switzerland named Swisscom.

This led to some discussions around product scalability, licensing models, etc. Tarus didn’t have any specifics to share other than one requirement for OpenNMS to handle event storms of 2K-3K per second. He said they’re working through architecture approaches to ensure that their backend databases can continue to scale in ways similar to Netcool/OMNIbus’s in-memory database.

Tarus also mentioned capabilities in OpenNMS on par with what Netcool/Impact offers. I believe he called them Automations. It’d be neat to hear more on this and if they’ll have a library of data source interfaces/integrations similar to Netcool/Impact.

Everything that Tarus and the OpenNMS team does is ultimately driven back into the main code tree for all to take advantage of. The OpenNMS DevCamp kicks off in a week or two where the foundations for OpenNMS 2.0 will be worked on. This is taking place in my backyard down at GA Tech if I recall correctly.

Congrats to the OpenNMS team for your entrance into the telco space with these clients. I also really want to learn more about your Papa John’s deployment and if I heard glimpses of Business Service Management (BSM) there or if you were just using that as an example!