Category — dashboard

TBSM 4.1.1 quietly made its way out the door as an incremental release a couple weeks ago. This release mainly incorporates a few new features and capabilities, new bug fixes, interim fix roll ups and updating various internal (Webtop/NGF, ILOG) and external dependencies (NCSM). Most importantly IMO are the documentation updates and fixes. The new documents are all online here.

TBSM 4.1.1 is one of the first Tivoli products to adopt components of the Tivoli Common Reporting (TCR) capability. TCR is based upon the Eclipse BIRT project. TBSM 4.1.1 includes the TCR BIRT runtime component which is used to render the various out of the box reports included within this release. The intent of this initial release of reports is to enable legacy Tivoli Business Systems Manager clients to have a similar reporting capability to what they have in their current deployed versions of the legacy TBSM product. The reports are linked off of an NGF layout selectable from the main page selection box. There are various reports available each with a few choices for time boundaries.

The TBSM 4.1.1 TCR reporting feature is installed via the advanced install. You’ll need to install the included Business Service Manager Agent (ITM IRA agent) as well if you plan to use BIRT and the reports as intended in this release. Reporting support out of the box REQUIRES use of ITM and TDW. If you do not have this or do not intend to install it, you will be unable to use any of the out of the box reports for service health, outages, etc. included within TBSM 4.1.1 today.

The TBSM 4.1.1 TCR BIRT components are certainly available for use against other databases. If you already have a database with historical events, KPI/KPM or other supporting data for your TBSM solutions then investigate installing the additional JDBC drivers, downloading the Eclipse BIRT Report Designer application and creating your own custom reports. I’ll do a WYNTK on this later, it’s all very easy to implement and use, especially if you’ve ever worked with other reporting products like Business Objects, Crystal Reports, etc.

TBSM’s TCR, BIRT and overall strategy for reporting, charting and graphing visualizations needs significant improvement. A non-ITM/TDW solution for making use of the out of the box TCR BIRT reports within TBSM 4.1.1 is needed immediately. Full exploitation and exposure of ILOG charting and graphing should be the strategic direction for “near real-time” visualization needs. TCR and BIRT are perfect for the “near term historical” reporting. Areas for improvement in an upcoming IF or future release could be full report launch in context from any tree, service viewer or event to respective reports and an intuitive way to build these launch in context (LIC) integrations that requires no coding. Things may change significantly in this area now that IBM has announced its intentions to acquire Cognos.

A new feature called the Urgent Services Viewpoint has been introduced to the NGF Viewpoint library. This would be added to your custom NGF layouts and serve as a pre-filtered list of service instances whose status has exceeded a given threshold (Unknown, Maintenance, Marginal or Bad). By default, only those who are in a Bad state are shown. The Urgent Services Viewpoint is a good start and gives us some nice filtering and sorting, but ideally this needs to be much more flexible. Users should be able to add their own things to the hot list, the threshold for what appears on the hot list should be configurable by template type, content mapped into the columns should be configurable (for example, map in the trouble ticket number from an instance (from a service instance additional property or Netcool event)).

As many clients still use the default out of the box layouts today, there may not be enough real estate to add another viewpoint. Having something like an Urgent Services “Filter” that could be selected and applied OVER the normal Service Tree (not a View Definition for the canvas, but a similar capability for the Service Tree) so that only those Urgent Services are shown may be an interesting alternative. As I said, good start, but hopefully this will evolve over time.

We’re finally starting to uncover more of the magic under the covers within TBSM 4.1.1 now by exposing the Web Services and XML capabilities. While the capability has been there in the underlying embedded product, it’s just now that its use is starting to get legitimized. In this initial TBSM 4.1.1 release, these two powerful Data Source Adaptors (DSAs) will be made available to those willing to venture into internal Impact policy land. You’ll be able to write custom Impact policies to interact with those data sources to enable metrics collection, service modeling, custom dashboard and layout content, etc.

Use of TBSM 4.1.1’s Web Services and XML support requires work under the covers. There isn’t an exposed GUI to help with configuration and use and this is an area that must be improved in a future fix or release so we keep as much XML and policy hacking away from the new user. The use of these DSAs is discussed in the TBSM 4.1.1 Customization Guide but also look for Netcool/Impact documentation such as the Impact Policy Language manual, Impact by Example manuals and the individual Web Services and XML DSA manuals.

Should you upgrade? As I have yet to see any early release or formal performance and scalability testing results for TBSM 4.1.1 it is hard to say if there will be any significant improvements in those areas to justify an upgrade. Regardless of that, I’m always in favor of upgrading to ensure that I have all of the latest bug fixes applied. I have high hopes for the update done to ILOG under the covers, but I don’t think we’ll see much here in TBSM 4.1.1. Realistically, only you can judge the level of effort that it takes to make the upgrade within your environment from the product, politics/process and dev-test-qa-release to production process. The next major release of TBSM will require significant planning and preparation. You may not need any of these new features or capabilities in TBSM 4.1.1 today so it may be worth the wait.

TBSM 4.1.1 Tips

If you’re doing testing back and forth between TBSM 4.1 and TBSM 4.1.1, be sure to clear your Java cache each time. There are significant differences in the core Java files between these to versions and not using the right ones can cause problems. This is due to the ILOG updates.

The “Go” Button appears to be back on by default. This can be turned off. Visit here to fix this.

Investigate the Business Service Manager Agent documents for information on what the agent is collecting and writing back to TDW for the BIRT reports. Mimic this by creating your own policies to insert similar data into a database of your choosing. Load the appropriate JDBC drivers and modify or create your own reports similar to what’s out of the box today. If you want to review/hack the out of the box reports, they’re stored in $NCHOME/guifoundation/webapps/birt-viewer. I have no idea what an ITM IRA agent is or does so if someone can figure out what’s happening there I can help on the other parts.

The Dashboard Spy has a nice profile on the dashboard / portal / reporting capabilities in the FireScope appliances.

It may be just me, but I continue to struggle with what a dashboard should look like. I see lots of screenshots these days that look more like reporting and portal type solutions packed with way too much information for easy consumption. I like a lot of the capabilities I see in the FireScope product, but I’d like to see some screenshots of what they feel are true Business Service Management dashboards for both an IT and LoB/non-IT audiences. What I see here is more in line with specifics for the IT Operations audience.

The latest interim fix is available here for TBSM 4.1. This IF addresses the following:

* APARs that are included in this Interim Fix:

IY97570 - EXPORTING/IMPORTING RAD MODELS WITH A RECURSIVE SETUP IS NOT WORKING

Exporting/Importing RAD models with a recursive setup is not working.The developed template with recursive setup can not be exported to another server.

IY97932 - DATAFETCHER FAILS TO PARSE QUERY CORRECTLY

Datafetcher fails to return any values from the Objectserver (Omnibus) when one enters a query manually and clicks on the ‘View’ button on the Data Fetcher page. This seems to happen only when one uses the ‘+’ sign within the query.

IY98020 - CUSTOMER IS SEEING LIGHT WEIGHT EVENT LIST NOT UPDATING IN REAL TIME

Customer is seeing light weight event list not updating in real time. The events displayed are 10+ minutes behind. They get this whether they select the ‘Service Detail’ Window, or the ‘Service Affecting Events (AEL)’ tool.

IY99361 - JAVA.LANG.NUMBERFORMATEXCEPTION: FOR INPUT STRING:

When the name of a service is nothing but numbers, a very high number like 11192883746467293478926, the service viewer nor the service tree will show the service.

IY99701- SUPPORT FOR TBSM 3.1 ESDA FEATURE - OPAL SUBMISSION

This APAR is required by the OPAL submission “Integrating TBSM 3.1 and TBSM 4.1 — An ESDA Solution”

IY99887 - TBSM 4.1 CUSTOM CANVAS HANGS

When two or more custom canvases are loading on the same page, one will load and the other sticks in the loading state.

IZ00412 - SLA VIOLATIONS RESULTS DIFFERENT IN THIN AND FULL CLIENT

After setting SLA rules for templates, a test event is sent, the status of the service changes in the service viewer, however the SLA violations don’t update the service viewer.

IZ01782 -BIDIRECTIONAL SYNC BETWEEN TBSM 4.1 AND TEC FAILS WITH STATUS

TBSM 4.1 / tec integration bidirectional sync between TBSM 4.1 and Tec fails with status events

IZ04784 - TBSM 4.1 IMPORT ERRORS USING EXPORT.RADSH

When importing data into the radshell, multiple errors occur even though the database is clean.

IZ04795 - CUSTOM RIGHT CLICK MENU DOES NO DISPLAY

The customer has problems displaying the right click menu in the service viewer after creating a new view definition and adding a new right click action to the right click menu.

IZ05062 - ERROR RUNNING A QUERY TRYING TO RETRIEVE DATA FROM MSSQL 2005

When trying to view query results in the datafetcher or in the query builder using a MSSQL 2005 datasource, the user will get a similar error:
Exception while fetching from Ms-SQL2005 with query select * from node: Exception while executing database operation after trying twice. Exception: sp_cursoropen: Specified concurrency control option 4

IZ06110- BOUNCING TBSM IS CHANGING THE ORDER OF SOME TEMPLATES

When a Service entry has more than one Template, during the active session, the last Template added to the service becomes the Primary Template. The last added Template continues to be the Primary Template even after a logoff and logon. However, after a re-start of TBSM, the first saved Template now becomes the Primary Template.

IZ06438 - VIEWER HANGS AT LOADING

When selecting a view in service string, the service string in window sits in loading state and the view does not come up. On the java console, there are alot of null pointer exception errors.

and defect

165427 TBSM NOT REMOVING DELETED COMPONENTS FROM TADDM

Business Applications and Business Services deleted in TADDM are still present in TBSM after delta discovery

Via your normal channels (or soon to be).

The TBSM 4.1.1 manuals are available here:

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/tivihelp/v3r1/topic/com.ibm.tivoli.itbsm.doc/welcome.htm

I’ll do a WYNTK soon.

Continuing in my series (finally) on what the key elements of Business Service Management are (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, please enjoy and comment on Part 4 below.

In order for Business Service Management to stick for the long haul within a company it needs to be thought of as equally important within the company as other key business or IT initiatives do. Just as Sarbanes-Oxley and other compliance mandates changed the way most companies manage IT and their business processes or how the expected benefits of a SOA will change the way IT things about how to standardize complex enterprise architectures, Business Service Management must be elevated to these same levels within the company.

Strategy – strategic – what’s this mean?

Wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy] defines strategy as a long term plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal, most often “winning”. Strategy is differentiated from tactics or immediate actions with resources at hand by its nature of being extensively premeditated, and often practically rehearsed. The key words here we want to focus in on for our Business Service Management strategy are “long term plan of action”, “extensively premeditated” and “practically rehearsed”.

What’s a Business Service Management strategy and why should I have one?

First, it clearly defines what Business Service Management is for your company in your own words – it’s not IBM’s or an analyst’s definition of what Business Service Management is.

Second, your Business Service Management strategy is your vision and value statement, your governing principles – how your company will use Business Service Management to achieve value and competitive differentiation. It should include your own defined goals and objectives such as better cost controls, higher margins, improved service, improved user experience. At a high level your Business Service Management strategy should introduce how your company will operationalize the value statement and governing principles within specific lines of business, in IT, in Operations, in Application Support, etc.

Third, your Business Service Management strategy links Business Service Management’s expected value, returns, methodologies, integration and alignment with all of the other key business and IT strategies, architectures and initiatives. All key company initiatives such as Enterprise Architecture, Service Oriented Architecture, Business Transformation, Outsourcing/Insourcing should all have direct Business Service Management alignment and value statements.

Fourth, the Business Service Management strategy creates consensus and buy in within key audiences and sponsors. It neutralizes opinions and speaks in “good for business” terms. With the right level of agreement and support, the Business Service Management strategy establishes the value the initiative has for the company and that it’s not just another pet IT or Business project vying for scarce budget dollars or resources.

When starting work on your own Business Service Management strategy, it should focus at a higher level, not a low level. You should not talk about specific vendors, products or technologies within the strategy document. Technical standards, concepts, methods and practices can be mentioned if they are ones you wish to adopt as key guiding principles for enabling your Business Service Management strategy within your company

The Business Service Management strategy should be flexible and change based on the dynamics of the business yet fixed enough to allow planning and progress to be achieved. Your Business Service Management strategy helps you begin with the end in mind and will guide development of the Business Service Management roadmap. [see Post 3]

These tenets and guiding strategic principles are the underpinnings of successful Business Service Management initiatives. While most companies go for the “quick win” and strive to recognize “quick value” from their technology investments, these tactical efforts are mostly short lived and unsustainable. By focusing on Business Service Management as a strategic component and differentiator within the company, a foundation for long term success and value is established.

Follow on post will be discussions on the fringe benefits of establishing a Business Service Management strategy for the monitoring tools group, examples of Business Service Management strategies and linking the Business Service Management strategy to the Business Service Management roadmap (with examples).

The TBSM 4.1 Redpaper has been finalized and is available here.

–snip–

This IBM® Redpaper leads you through the new Tivoli Business Service Manager V4.1 that is based on Netcool/Realtime Active Dashboard (RAD), instead of the previous Tivoli Business Systems Manager V3.1.

This book will describe Tivoli Business Service Manager V4.1 components and architecture. We also discuss function comparison of functions for Tivoli Business Systems Manager V3.1 and Netcool/RAD to Tivoli Business Service Manager V4.1. We documents the installation and migration of Tivoli Business Service Manager V4.1 in our environment. Migration is currently only available for Netcool/RAD 3.0 users.

This book also contains integration with IBM Tivoli® Service Management framework that allows Tivoli Business Service Manager to integrates with Tivoli Change and Configuration Management database (CCMDB) using Discovery Library toolkit. This functions is also available for z/OS® configuration. Finally, Tivoli Business Service Manager operational consideration is discussed, includes backup and recovery process; maintenance schedule and some performance tips.

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.

-snip-

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.

Cote has some great thoughts today on his blog People Over Process in a post titled “What IT Should Enable: Making Money”. Cote talks about many of the key selling points into the concepts of Business Service Management (BSM) and how IT should really be thinking about its role in today’s companies. I also had a nifty similar thought from some time ago on how the average IT person should think of their role here.

I deal with the challenges of making BSM stick with clients every week. I see the same things over and over as the barriers to BSM success. The ones Cote mentioned are valid, but once the investment in a BSM capability has been made, the real challenges for BSM success become evident.

What can we as the “tools guys” do when we have to work with the clients and organizational groups/silos who just don’t get it, have their own fires to fight, project deadlines, silo oriented goals/objectives or can’t swim through the corporate politics and silos?

How do we “sell” and convince clients of the “culture change” needed for the concepts of BSM to really come to life? I know they’re very well aware of these “issues” but the state of denial, FUD and reluctance to leverage their latest technology purchase as the lightening bolt to get changes happening frustrates me to no end. I can spend all day painting the picture of capability, value, return on investment, “pain” avoidance and how the [insert IT group here] can be the hero that saves the day but the first thing out of their mouths is “we’ll never have access to that data, information, metric, etc.” Argghhh…..

The technology we sell isn’t the problem - it’s everything around it. (well, most of the time)