Category — Big4

While there will probably be more marketing content than actionable TBSM content, there are a couple upcoming webinars on TBSM that I wanted to share.

generationE Technologies is THE WORLD’S ONLY AAA Accredited Business Partner for TBSM v4.1.x (heck, they’re the ONLY BUSINESS PARTNER ACCREDITED in TBSM at any level in the USA) will be presenting on TBSM in the enterprise and in the service quality management spaces on October 8th and 16th. Visit their website and the Events section for more information.

I’ve worked with these guys for many years now and have recently managed some of their consultants on a large financial client deployment of TBSM. They are very active in the community sharing their experiences with deploying TBSM and other enabling Tivoli software at Tivoli User Group meetings and Pulse user conferences. I’m also trying to get some of their practitioners to even participate here but they’re a bit on the “shy” side it appears.

If you’re ever in need of a business partner that knows TBSM and has a LONG history of success with the entire Netcool based portfolio, feel comfortable in reaching out to these guys.

TBSM v4.2 GA’d last Friday. Are you ready? Have you thought about what your plans are? Just another upgrade? Keeping things status quo? I advise you to not do that.

TBSM’s fundamental operating dependency is the Netcool/ObjectServer and its core operating principle is one being primarily event driven. A limited use license of THE leading event management platform is provided with TBSM v4.2 so in all realities, you will need to become proficient in two industry leading products and not just one.

Events can be ANYTHING. I view events merely as the vehicle for communicating something - data, information, metrics, KPIs, state, status, etc. ANYTHING. Netcool/OMNIbus offers very broad capability for collecting and consolidating events from hundreds and hundreds of sources. Using our “Swiss Army knife” probes, the sky is the limit in terms of what you can collect events from. Something blinking green in the datacenter, a valve, refrigerator, generator, business process/activity, whatever, we likely have a way to get event information. Netcool/OMNIbus SHOULD NOT BE considered just an IT monitoring tool, reserved only for network or systems monitoring event collection!

If you believe this, and your end state goal is to establish a consolidated operations environment where we abolish silos of information and consolidate the islands into an aggregate repository, your long term success with Business Service Management is heading in the right direction. In the case of traditional IT organizations, collecting events, alerts, messages, traps, notifications, etc. from any of the various silos in IT is crucial. Check the politics at the door and reach out to your colleagues and figure out how you can leverage this new TBSM platform to start on this integrated and consolidated journey.

Every client’s goal using TBSM should be to leverage the features that enable the automatic creation and maintenance of the complex service models within their environment. If you fail to find ways to use these features, your patience with TBSM will wane over time. You do not want to manually build and maintain service models! IT environments change too dynamically for you to ever have a chance to keep up. If you’re fortunate to have made investments and had successful deployments of application (or network) discovery and mapping tools or successfully deployed a CMDB, asset management, inventory or other repository/database that enables you to establish relationships and dependencies between things in your environment, you’re on your way to a pleasant TBSM experience over time (assuming you can negotiate permission to access those data repositories).

Chances are though, that you don’t have the fancy discovery tool or the CMDB project is in its third year of a five year project and you can’t get access. Your company probably frowns on the use of open source tools that may help get you started and the ‘hit by the bus’ scenario just happened to the one guy who knew everything about anything.

How can you get started? Let me chat about a few very important things you can think about doing.

Establish a uniform, standardized event format

Spend some time getting a basic understanding of how you will establish the various hierarchies within your environment (organizational, service, architectural, etc.). The goals here are to establish an event format that can help us build these hierarchies automatically.

Start looking into your existing monitoring and management solutions, their capabilities and the event information generated. How could you best configure these products or parse raw events to establish a normalized event format that will enable the use of TBSM’s autopopulation feature? As you learn about Netcool/OMNIbus, the alerts.status schema and probe rules files and lookup tables you will find numerous techniques for parsing and populating fields in your normalized event format.

Think about adding fields for each level of your hierarchy:

LineOfBusiness | BusinessService | BusinessApplication | Location | BusinessImpact | BusinessSLA | TransactionName | BatchJobName | CommonName | etc.

I’ve talked extensively on the importance of events numerous times in my past blog postings. Every ounce of effort and energy you put into this area will pay off enormously when it comes to service model creation and maintenance. I can almost guarantee it!

Establish an internal “CMDB” of sorts

The most successful implementations that I’ve seen of the TBSM product include integration with some sort of relationship repository. It doesn’t need to be any of the big CMDB solutions out there, and in all cases I’ve seen it’s not. These successful clients are building simple databases with simple table structures to capture the most important relationships in their organization. If you’ve made the effort to map some of this out within your organization, build your snazzy spreadsheet or Visio drawing, get that data into a repository where it’s usable to TBSM!!

There are two main classes here. The business perspective (top-down) and the IT perspective (bottom-up). These databases are establishing the key relationships and touch points between these two perspectives. Most clients are starting out with the containment model approach for technology and migrating into service and application oriented containment models. None of the most successful clients are implementing the end-to-end service or data flow model concepts where detailed relationships and dependencies are captured. This approach most definitely requires investment in application discovery and relationship mapping solutions, detailed instrumentation across the entire end-to-end service delivery architecture and a detailed data model for storing within the consolidated repository.

When we have something like this available, we can make use of standard event enrichment capabilities of the Netcool/Impact product to help build our normalized event format or utilize the powerful TBSM ESDA feature to build and maintain the service models automatically.

Investigate Tivoli Discovery Library Adapters (DLA) and other Vendor Product Data Export

From a Tivoli product perspective, the Discovery Library Adaptor is a powerful mechanism for extracting key information and relationship information that can be consumed by products like TBSM and TADDM. In TBSM’s case, if you’ve got significant coverage using the standard ITM 6 monitoring product across your open systems and mainframe environments, you could use the DLA to do much of the heavy lifting associated with service instance and basic containment model creation within TBSM.

In most cases, you’re probably going to have many other vendor tools and products across the environment. I’d recommend taking an approach of exporting core configuration data from these tools and consolidating it into the central repository mentioned above. The DLA’s from Tivoli products could also be merged into this repository rather than TBSM directly enabling creation of a consolidated “CMDB” for the monitoring tools organization and TBSM.

Closing Thought

Just let me say one more time how critically important events are for your TBSM implementation. If you have them, and they’re in a useless format or are not communicating a useful message, you’re in for headaches in numerous TBSM development areas. If you don’t have events for everything (monitoring gaps), you’re not going to be able to build the complete picture within TBSM. If your events aren’t trustworthy and reliable, I promise that the end users will not use your solution after the “crying wolf scenario” plays out a few times. If you show something to an executive and it’s not accurate, forget about getting any value from this investment or getting that maintenance renewal.

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.

Our *initial* launch of *basic* support for showing *some* stuff from TBSM has been detailed on the developerWorks TBSM Wiki site.

Check out the details here.

I *hope* that we put much more investment into this and get it to a point that it provides real value to those who may use it. I’d hate to give this to an executive and be on the other end of all the emails sent out from it asking “why is this red?” or “who is working on this?”.

I hope to see dashboards and scorecards. I’d love an interface similar to how viigo has with its hierarchy and navigation approach.

My timings are all off due to my trip to China over the past two weeks but with little external fanfare TBSM v4.2 was released this past Friday. I’m not going to share much in this note and save my reviews of documentation, product, issues, etc. in WYNTKs coming shortly.

For now, you can review the TBSM v4.2 Information Center here and release notes here.

I look forward to hearing your feedback, thoughts, first impressions, first painful experiences, whatever!

Looks like I’ll put off talking about a more pleasing subject of the importance of events for TBSM v4.2 to talk about something I’ve been thinking, playing, struggling with this past week. More details will have to wait until we’re GA here in a few weeks, sorry.

I can’t stress enough that you begin to create a thorough design and implementation plan for how you’ll establish access, authorization and authentication (AAA) within your TBSM v4.2 solution. Things have SIGNIFICANTLY changed in TBSM v4.2. There are many different options and settings throughout the product that must be set to implemented in a typical production environment. Many of them are easy to overlook, trust me!

I recommend starting with a systematic assessment of your existing environment (or strawman of what you think your requirements will be). If my end solution is a TBSM v4.2 layout with numerous views, pages and portlets, navigation and launch in context attributes, you must think through all of these components and document what users, roles or groups can access, see and do things. Are these users authenticated in an external source? What group are they assigned at login? Do they have the correct roles assigned to perform your expected tasks?

From an administrators perspective, you’ll need to think through things in the same manner, ensuring that you can perform the administrative tasks - and have the proper configurations to perform work as if you were a member of the end user group. This is a CRITICAL component, especially when implementing custom canvas dashboard solutions for users/groups.

I have this visual in my head of what this may look like to capture how things may be designed:

At each level, I envision documenting all of the critical configurations and settings with heavy focus on who can access, what can they do/see/click-on, etc. Trust me, there are configuration options at every level that you need to think through. This is especially true if you’re implementing solutions where one user/group can see some things and can’t see others.

Some random thoughts to consider as you work through this stuff:

• Are you using an external source such as LDAP, Active Directory or Netcool/OMNIbus for authentication and authorization? How will you integrate? What will the information exchange be? Do you know what your LDAP/AD group needs from you for configuration?
• Will you take advantage of the new Single Sign On (SSO) capability? How? What products will you want SSO access to from TBSMv4.2 / TIP?
• If you’re using legacy TBSM v3.1, Netcool/RAD or TBSM v4.1.x today, start to really look at what you’re doing and how your end user audiences access and work within this environment.
• What types of users do you have? Read only, have some privileges, superusers, etc.? What PSML, pages, tabs, view points can they see/access?
• What roles do they have today in each respective product? What can they do? What can they see? What menus, options, dialog boxes, check boxes, etc. can they interact with?
• Are you assigning roles to users or roles to groups or both? How should you be assigning roles for effective management? How would you audit this if asked?
• What groups do you have? What roles are assigned to groups?
• What NGF security models have you implemented? Are you controlling access to certain PSMLs, viewpoints, etc?
• Will you allow users to manage events from within TBSM? What permissions will you require from an event management perspective from Netcool/OMNIbus or Netcool/Webtop?
• What Tivoli Common Reporting (TCR) reports or charts will you incorporate into your solution? Will your users be able to design/upload their own?
• If launching out into other products, what AAA is required to allow that user to perform expected tasks, actions, etc. in the remote product (TEPS, ITM, TADDM, TSRM, etc.)
• Do you have additional security requirements such as SSL? Do you use CA Signed Certs or Self Signed Certs? Where do you require communications to be encrypted? (User to GUI, TBSM–>LDAP/AD, TBSM–>Other Product) There’s a GUI for this stuff now so hopefully no more command line and file hacking is required.
• You’ll want to learn as much as possible on this repository concept. (standalone, federated, etc.) More than likely you’ll be digging into WebSphere manuals if you have any significant security requirements. It appears as if you’ll always be in this federated repository mode using a local file and other source.

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.

Information available here.

Presenter(s): Joy Hawkins

Time: 12 Sep 2008, 11:00 EDT (Eastern Us), 17:00 UK (London), 19:00 CET (Rome)

This STE will cover TBSM BSM Agent (review both MOSWOS and Historical reporting pieces) overview and troubleshooting.

Two new IF’s have been released for TBSM v4.1.1.

IF008 requires IF001 includes IF004, IF005, IF006 and IF007 fixes in addition to the following new fixes.

*READ THE FINE PRINT IN THE READ ME!!!*

When published, it will be available in this directory structure.

IZ23415 DB CLICK ON EVENT IN SERVICE DETAIL NOTHING HAPPENS

When you double click on an event listed on the Event tab of the Service Details viewpoint, nothing happens. Doing the double click on the event, should launch a separate browser window containing
the details associated with the event.

IZ24957 UNABLE TO IMPORT RADSHELL EXPORT OF CONFIG

When the customer first exports their configuration from one system, and then tries to import into another system, they get this error for the import of a data fetcher:
“radshell> // Error: Error parsing input: bsh.TokenMgrError:
Lexical error at line 65, column 133. Encountered: “\r” (13), after :
“\”SELECT JOB_SCH_ST_ID, PCSG_DT, CAL_PCSG_WNDW_CD, BCH_NME, JOB_DESC,
BCH_ID, RUN_NO, JOB_SEQ_NO, AUTO_SYS_STRT_TM, AUTO_SYS_END_TM, ” ”

IZ25602 THINCLIENT IN IE, THE SERVICE DEPENDENCY PAGE HANGS

Thin Client doesn’t show up with IE.

IZ26785 VALUE AND AREA FOR PIE CHART IN TBSM 4.1 IS NOT REPRESENTED

When a user wants to show the annotations on a custom chart, the annotations line up with the incorrect plots on the chart. For example, if the user has a pie chart which displays Test 1 = 1000, Test2 = 2000, Test3 = 3000, and Test4 = 4000; The annotation on each slice showing the value would be like the following: Test1 - annotation is 2000, Test2 - annotation 3000, Test3 - annotation 1000,
Test4 - annotation 4000

IZ26795 POSSIBLE MISSING CLASSES FROM ALL3P.JAR

Unable to save Custom Canvas.

IZ29147 SERVICES VIEWABLE IN VIEWER, BUT NOT SERVICE TREE

When trying to expand a node in the tree to display the children, the plus sign stays a plus sign and no children are displayed. If the parent node is viewed in the service viewer, the children are displayed,
however, one of the children has a display name of “…” The issue only happens when retrieving nodes using an ESDA rule.

171333 CT-3174: 2nd launch of TEP opens separate IE7 browser

On Windows 2008, it was found that the launchtotep.vbs script is failing to work the same way it does in all of the other versions of Windows. Where the script is not able to re-use the same open browser
window already open to TEP.

IF009 is a TBSM-TADDM Discovery Library Toolkit integration IF. This supersedes IF003.

Available here.

INCORRECT REPRESENTATION OF TADDM FUNCTIONAL GROUPS (IZ12647)

After editing a TADDM business application, and removing members of a functional group, a delta import does not removed the objects from the TBSM service.

TADDM will send an update for a functional group the first time that a resource is added to the functional group. If the resource is removed from a functional group, and then later added again, an
update is not sent. This results in the functional group not being added back into the service in TBSM.

LOOPING CONDITION IN IMPORTED BUSINESS SERVICE TREE (IZ05790)

TBSM loses the knowledge that a resource was built from an ESDA; after which, when the service component repository informs the base TBSM server that a resource no longer exists, the base server
ignores the information and leaves the resource as is. This only applies to customers that have upgraded from TBSM 4.1.

LOOP IN THE SERVICE TREE WITH AN NFSSERVICE (IZ12344)

Business services containing an NFSService object contain a loop between the computer system and the NFSService.

MSVCR71.dll NOT FOUND ON WINDOWS SYSTEM (IZ26000)

The Discovery Library toolkit will not start on Windows. Running the command “xmltoolkitsvc.exe -d -t” reveals that the system cannot find msvcr71.dll.

DUPLICATE ROUTERS AND SWITCHES IN THE COMPONENT REGISTRY (IZ26267)

Business applications built in TADDM that include routers and switches show two instances of each device when the business application is imported into TBSM.

FILTER ON TADDM BUSINESS APPLICATION LIFECYCLESTATE (168719)

The ability to import a subset of the TADDM business applications.

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.