Category — Design Patterns

I’m making my IBM Tivoli Pulse 2008 session on TBSM available for those who were unable to attend the user conference this year or missed my session. The links below will allow you to download the session slides and an mp3 audio recording.

The session agenda was:

• Overall Migration and Upgrade Planning
• Architectural and Functional Planning
• TIP Planning
• Event Source Planning
• LoB, Service and Application Decomposition
• Service Model Design Planning
• TBSM v3 to TBSM v4 Planning
• TBSM v4.2 Migration, Upgrade and Architecture Options

Please feel free to contact me or your local IBM Tivoli teams if you’d like help in preparing for your next generation deployment of TBSM. I hope that through this session you understand how critically important planning, design and architecture is for your success with Business Service Management, the TBSM solution and enabling products.

Doug McClure’s IBM Tivoli Pulse 2008 Session Presentation : Preparing for the Next Generation of TBSM: Distributed, Mainframe and Beyond

Doug McClure’s IBM Tivoli Pulse 2008 Session Audio

All IBM Tivoli 2008 session presentations are available here. I will be adding the session audio for a few others related to BSM and TBSM soon.

Step 1: Go to your company portal and find the organization chart for the CIO, VP of IT, Director of MIS or whatever. Identify all of that persons direct reports

Step 2: Identify the person(s) that puts together each direct reports daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly status or metrics report. Establish a vision and “What’s In It For Me” (WIIFM) for joint success (make them feel like an owner) with each of these people around what you can do together with a custom dashboard and scorecard solution for their boss based on TBSM. Your goal is to obtain access to their reporting content, metrics, KPI, etc. Be sure to come away from your meetings with a good understanding of what is reported on, why and what’s good, marginal, bad, trends, etc.

Step 3: Build a simple top-line service model (maybe with an additional layer) resembling the organization chart and general categories of the content reported on in each direct reports organization.

Step 4: Build the necessary scorecards and custom canvas based dashboards and layouts for each direct report.

Step 5: Create a single consolidated custom canvas dashboard and layout for the person you identified in step one. Using your knowledge of what is being reported on and why, come up with the appropriate propagation rules and scenarios to flow information and state upwards. There may be a handful of very important things to pull up directly from a lower layer to the top layer. Highlight any of these on the top level dashboard so they stand out. Remember, have lots of white space and less is more!

Step 6: Go back and review each direct reports area with the person(s) you worked with in step two. Make sure EVERYTHING is accurate and that the person(s) you worked with will back you up.

Step 7: Set up meetings with each direct report and each of the reporting person(s) you worked with to show off your collaborative work. Work through one or all of the direct reports to establish the same meeting with their boss to review the work, assess value and see where this work takes you. Be sure to have your own proposals for expansion in each meeting (see BSM Strategy and Roadmapping). Also be sure to identify and potential roadblocks you may run into so this person can mitigate them. Always position this as win-win and WIIFM for each person.

Step 8: Okay, an extra one. Enjoy your new found success!

There’s lots of debate on what a service is. Let’s keep things simple for this discussion and call a service an aggregate of services, sub-services, processes, transactions and IT technology that provide some value or purpose for the business. A service can be decomposed into some more specific functional areas, sub-services, processes or transactions, groupings of technology, capability, or activity. Modeling these is fairly straight forward and is similar to the approaches outlined so far in this series.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately on how clients try to model their services, how IBM Tivoli thinks about services and how the industry as a whole has been thinking about services. There are probably a dozen efforts underway to come up with some standards based modeling approach for this. New buzzwords arrive in my feed reader every week such as the Common Model Library (CML), Shared Information/Data (SID), Common Information Model (CIM) and vendor specific ones such as Tivoli’s Common Data Model (CDM), Microsoft’s System Definition Model (SDM) and Service Modeling Language (SML). There are a few very interesting approaches that you may want to reference as well in your modeling of services. One is IBM’s Component Business Model (CBM), Service Oriented Modeling and Architecture (SOMA) and the other is the TMF’s Telecom Applications Map (TAM) (aka Applications Framework).

I believe in all of these efforts and I think they can provide value and help meet the needs of practitioners trying to implement management, monitoring and BSM. Every company is different, every service is different, and every organizational silo in your company will describe business services and applications differently. Your approach for modeling services within your organization should be unique and fit the needs you have. The value that these efforts all bring to you right now is a starting point and potential source for establishing a common service model approach and language within your company. Your goal should be to review these and see if you can use portions to create your own unique service modeling approach.

I see a few different design patterns from clients modeling services within TBSM. These are the n-tier pattern, the composite pattern, and the top line pattern. These design patterns tend to be most applicable to the enterprise type client. Service modeling within the service provider spaces (wireless, wireline, VPN, xSP, outsourcing) takes on many different looks as well. I will provide some specific insight into service provider TBSM Design Patterns in the future.

n-Tier Pattern

This service modeling design pattern resembles what clients learn about service modeling from the TBSM manuals or in the formal education. It builds upon the initial TBSM Design Patterns that I’ve talked about and is a simple migration from the initial infrastructure and application modeling patterns. We’re focused here on adding a little more to the representative model for a specific business service or application by organizing architectural components (infrastructure, applications) into contextual building blocks of a service. Think of it as the start of summing things up. This web farm plus that application server farm, plus this database farm work together to support service Online Banking. There’s little focus on specific detailed relationships or dependencies in this design pattern.

This design pattern is most common for clients who do not have an authoritative repository of service dependencies (CMDB), lack an automated discovery and mapping tool and resort to tribal knowledge and the super-secret Visio drawing to create their service models. Maturing from this design pattern into something more accurately depicting deployed services and applications is generally easy to do once the internal capabilities exist for a more automated service modeling approach.

Composite Pattern

This service modeling design pattern starts to merge the architectural type models with the n-Tier type models to create more accurate and representative service models. Here, the service models are made up of one or more functional areas or sub-services. Creating these composite based service models really gets into the semantics of how you define services within your organization. If you look at a complex end-to-end service such as ATM banking, from the point of entry at the ATM machine all the way to the back office mainframe and out to third party clearing houses, that end-to-end service delivery chain will be made up of potentially dozens of smaller functional areas or sub-services. The composite service model will resemble that service delivery chain most typically as a horizontal, fairly flat service model.

The ability to establish the most accurate end-to-end composite service model depends on the ability to instrument the inter-system, inter-application and inter-service dependencies, processes and transactions. I will introduce TBSM design patterns on processes and transactions soon. Another important concept that I will introduce later for composite service modeling is the concept of “hard coupling” and “loose coupling” within a composite service model. This is a key concept that must be understood for establishing realistic service models with accurate state and status propagation.

The dependencies and relationships driving this design pattern most likely will come from authoritative sources such as a CMDB or application discovery tool such as TADDM. In most client environments, custom composite applications and services are very complex and very large. Leveraging TBSM’s automated service modeling capabilities is a key trait within this design pattern.

Top Line Pattern

This service modeling design pattern closely resembles a “top down” or “business driven” approach. This is where focus is clearly centered on creating minimalist service models that focus on the key components of an end-to-end business service or application without getting overly concerned about the lower level details. This focus generally requires that the client has made investments into technology and products that provide instrumentation and visibility into these top level service and application areas. This may be end user experience and performance monitoring, website or application performance monitoring, synthetic or real user monitoring and transaction monitoring. Another good approach is to integrate in top line service metrics and measures from your help desk, ERP, sales management, inventory management or other sources that provide insight at the right level.

Using our end-to-end composite service example above, this service model approach would have very high level representation, usually consisting of only an instance for each of the key service delivery chain components. This can be a very useful approach to get something out there when you’re only visibility into service makeup may be that good old Visio diagram. In my opinion, the presentation details required for this design pattern almost requires the use of a custom canvas based dashboard approach rather than the traditional service model look and feel.

NOTE: I do intend to create visuals to explain these! I hope to use some of my time in Shanghai (or the airplane) to get some of this done. If you’d like more information sooner, just ping me.

We have the start of a pretty good integration between TBSM v4 and TADDM, Tivoli’s Application Discovery and Dependency Mapping product. I say it’s a start because it has a looong way to go to get to where it needs to be for the typical client’s use. There are plenty of challenges with this integration, from performance, scalability and customization.

Within TADDM, you’re pretty much confined to three main containment model constructs. The computer system, the business application and the business service. Within TBSM v4, you can create containment models for anything your heart desires. Getting TADDM’s very configuration item (CI) view of the world to align to reality as built within TBSM v4 is, to say the least, challenging.

Our development organization made a lot of assumptions in their initial release of this integration. Some may be right, but in most cases, clients will want to customize how things are mapped across from TADDM into TBSM v4. The concepts I’m writing about on TBSM Design Patterns will be something you’ll want to map into these eventually. Aligning your own custom templates, integrating your own events and metrics, etc. all requires the careful hacking of XML files and potentially customizing the ESDA policies that drive the SCR. Customizing the Tivoli CDM, custom DLA’s and a GUI based integration that covers mapping TADDM resources to TBSM templates and models is ultimately needed as well.

Here are some resources to help get you started. I strongly encourage you to consider ISST Services to help you along in this journey. It’s not for the faint of heart.

• Installing the Discovery Library Toolkit
• Discovery Library Toolkit
• Discovery Library Toolkit and TADDM Configuration
• Tuning for the Discovery Library Toolkit
• TADDM - TBSM Integration White Paper
• Assigning Different Templates to Services Imported from the SCR
• Discovery Process in TBSM v4 - Mechanism and Customization
• Troubleshooting the Discovery Library Toolkit

Very TADDM specific resources that may be of help. Consider these as you try to speak the same language as your TADDM administrators do.

• Using the Data Model to display data in TADDM
• IBM Tivoli Common Data Model: Guide to Best Practices
• Discovery Library Integration Framework
• IBM Tivoli Common Data Model: Guide to Best Practices

I think Ryan’s monthly wrap up posts are really nice and I’m going to start these as well.

Hot Posts for January

In Where is Quest Software’s BSM Play? I ask what’s taking Quest Software so long to roll out a new BSM story based on their Magnum Technologies acquisition. Lots of good comments here from Quest Software clients who have had both success and challenges with Foglight. Quest Software’s Foglight Product Manager chimes in for some commentary! Don’t be a stranger Brad!

In Will Compuware 2.0 Include a Clear BSM Story and Viable Solution? I question if Compuware can really reinvent itself and compete in the BSM space. Still no response here from Compuware. Where’s the 2.0?

In So You Want to do BSM? and several articles that EMA has put out in the trade rags this month highlighting the results of their BSM/SLM Market Forecast for 2008-2012 they have painted a bright future for Business Service Management. They also are emphasizing the challenges with the traditional ways of implementing it, something that I’m in complete agreement with and have been dealing with for years. Still looking for a final version of this market forcast report. More here and here.

DevCampTivoli Thought Provoking Series

In Is Your Tivoli Monitoring, Netcool/OMNIbus or TBSM Organization Structure a Barrier to BSM Success? to propose new approaches for IT organization structure to focus on end-to-end service management ownership.

In My ITM 6.x BSM Profile should include a BSM Descriptor File I propose an approach for every managed system to provide key information needed for BSM.

In All I want for the New Year is a BSM Profile for ITM 6.x I propose a concept for specific and purpose built instrumentation of managed systems using a BSM Profile.

WYNTK on TBSM Series

In WYNTK on TBSM Design Patterns: Architectural Model for COTS and Composite Applications I introduce TBSM design patterns for modeling COTS and Composite Applications.

Industry Highlights

BarCampESM was a success. Check out the OMC site for all the follow on activity and blip.tv for all the sessions. My presentation and video are available here. Take 30 minutes and watch the video. Let me know what you think? Am I way out in left field here? Too passionate?

Digital Fuel issued a couple PR’s announcing some impressive wins within very large telecommunications companies. Me thinks they’re ripe for an acquisition.

I’ve started to watch a bunch of new vendors this month. These all fit into various niche areas of the management and monitoring space and are very critical to a maturing Business Service Management deployment. True value oriented and powerful BSM can’t be done without capabilities offered by vendors such as these.

Integrien looks like the newest player in this “monitoring analytics” area. Netuitive and the former ProactiveNet (BMC) also play in this area. Integrien released version 6.0 of their product and apparently has addressed some of their scalability challenges. I was very impressed with what I saw in terms of their presentation layer, but haven’t seen much other than that. Steve Henning (VP Products, Integrien and ex-IBM Tivoli Security guy) joins the conversation and shares some insight as do many others who are very familiar with all three vendors in this space. I’ve invited Steve to guest author on the blog so maybe we can get some more insight into this much needed space!

I’ve always been pretty close to the user experience, user performance, synthetic/real-user monitoring segment. Three new vendors crossed my wires this month to join the others I’m pretty keen on (Keynote, Gomez, Tealeaf, Coradiant, IBM, HP, Quest, Compuware). Mature BSM deployments absolutely depend on the perspectives that vendors like this provide. It’s absolutely required for successful BSM and is the “glue” that joins the end-to-end service delivery chain together as the end user sees it.

Check out Knoa Software, Symphoniq and Aternity. If you have any information or experience with these vendors, I’d love to hear about it!

Almost as important to knowing how critical business services and applications are performing from the end user perspective, trying to really understand in instrument the ultra-critical transactions flowing across end-to-end services and applications is a sign of a very mature BSM deployment. In Two to Watch in Transaction Management and Monitoring Space” I call out Correlix and Correlsense as two that should be considered. I’m also looking for anyone with personal experience or information on these vendors and their technology. Correlsense’s CTO/Founder is an ex-IBMer and has a great start to a blog with teeth!

On the To-Do List for February

• The Next Generation of Business Service Management
• Hey! You got your monitoring in my RIA!
• New IBM Tivoli developerWorks collaboration sites
• More WYNTK on TBSM Design Patterns
• More in the DevCampTivoli Thought Provoking Series

What do you want to hear about?

Many of the clients I work with have dedicated groups within the IT organization, operations or monitoring group based on common monitoring or product areas. For example, many larger Tivoli clients have a dedicated distributed systems monitoring group that is responsible for all ITM based monitoring, another group responsible for event collection and management with Tivoli TEC or Netcool/OMNIbus and yet another group tasked with deploying application discovery and mapping (TADDM) and business service management solutions (TBSM). Sometimes these groups fall under the same first line manager, but more often than not they do not.

I get the need for silo based organizational structures such as functional area and product specific groupings. This is the old school way of organizing the SMEs and getting work done. It’s the assembly line, work comes in and work goes out, add a monitor here, threshold there and move on to the next request or problem. It develops and reinforces the SME concept within these areas. Great, we have “lifers” who do one thing or another for a long time.

Business Service Management (BSM) is all about the instrumentation and visibility into the end-to-end service. BSM solutions depend on the ability for highly accurate information flowing from all of the core business service monitoring domains. BSM absolutely requires being able to work within an organizational structure that promotes collaboration and communication between the functional organizations within IT, operations or monitoring groups AND external to these comfort zones out into the business service SME groups (dev, support, etc.) AND most importantly with the LoB. BSM requires a common vocabulary, workflow and “style” that old school monitoring organizations are just not very “hip” to. I find many areas of the traditional IT organizational structure flawed and many are plagued by folks with “blinders” on (not my job, not invented here, etc.) and nobody with a sense of end-to-end ownership for business service management and monitoring. These cancerous attitudes and organizational structures are significant barriers to Business Service Management success.

In an effort to find the ideal collaborative and organizational approaches for creating powerful, value added BSM solutions, DevCampTivoli has been created. The theme for this event is “Collaborative Development of End-to-End BSM Solutions”. The desired outcome is to identify optimal approaches for how to best organize and collaborate within the typical IT, operations or monitoring organization so that the ITM, Netcool/OMNIbus and TBSM groups can work better, smarter and faster with an explicit focus on implementing BSM solutions within those products. We will experiment with various approaches and techniques and share our findings and success (of failure) stories. Whatever the DevCampTivoli produces will be freely available to anyone to take, modify and use to improve their BSM deployments.

Take a few minutes to visit DevCampTivoli. This event will be the May 17-18, 2008 which is the weekend before the annual IBM Tivoli User Conference Pulse 2008 in Orlando, FL. The thought and hope is that SME’s and practitioners in ITM, Netcool/OMNIbus and TBSM will already be coming to Pulse 2008 and will be able to come in a couple days earlier to participate.

More to follow…

Our TADDM product has a pretty nifty capability to help it along in its discovery process. You have an option to create files called Application Descriptors that are simple XML files that describe what business applications are deployed onto the server, what components make up the application and how these various components are organized, grouped or have relationship to the business application. Examples of TADDM Application Descriptors are available here.

What if we took this extremely simple concept and turned it into something for the ITM 6.x BSM Profile? What if we had a BSM Descriptor File? It may contain many different sub-components that help me to express the unique characteristics of what this server and installed software do to support business services and applications.

The BSM Descriptor File may contain:

• Business Service Descriptors: Information on the business service(s) this component supports/enables
• Business Application Descriptors: Information on the business application(s) this component supports/enables
• Transaction, Process or Activity Descriptors: Information on key transactions, processes, daemons, batch jobs, etc. that this component supports/enables
• Impact Descriptors: Information on how this component may impact the business goals and objectives, revenue, customer experience, metrics, KPIs, etc.
• Compliance Descriptors: Information on compliance controls that this component must adhere to.
• Risk Descriptors: Information on business risks that may be associated with this component
• Security Descriptors: Information on security policies applied to this component
• Business Schedule or Calendar Descriptors: Information on when there may be important times during the day, week, month that this component may need to be managed differently (end of month batch jobs, financial runs, maintenance windows)
• Operations Support Descriptors: Information about the on call group, escalation paths, etc.

Part of the XML tagging within the BSM Descriptor File should include annotation on how these unique components are mapped into events generated from individual ITM 6.x monitoring agents and their BSM Profile. With this information flowing freely into the event stream, making use of the powerful capabilities within Netcool/OMNIbus and TBSM 4.x become very easy. These BSM Descriptor concept maps very nicely to the TBSM Design Patterns that I’m also currently blogging about.

In an effort to collaborate on how to create such a BSM Descriptor and the ITM 6.x BSM Profile, DevCampTivoli has been created. The theme for this event is “Collaborative Development of End-to-End BSM Solutions”. The desired outcome is to come up various approaches for developing a BSM Descriptor File and BSM Profile for ITM 6.x, necessary configurations within the Tivoli EIF probe, Netcool/OMNIbus and TBSM 4.x that can be easily customized and implemented at any client. Whatever the DevCampTivoli produces will be freely available to anyone to take, modify and use to improve their BSM deployments.

Take a few minutes to visit DevCampTivoli. This event will be the May 17-18, 2008 which is the weekend before the annual IBM Tivoli User Conference Pulse 2008 in Orlando, FL. The thought and hope is that SME’s and practitioners in ITM, Netcool/OMNIbus and TBSM will already be coming to Pulse 2008 and will be able to come in a couple days earlier to participate.

More to follow…

As I was catching up on feed reading today, I came across an article I originally read back in August that can be useful in decomposing custom composite applications and developing representative TBSM service models.(WYNTK on TBSM Design Patterns for COTS and Custom Composite Applications) Brandon Satrom is an Enterprise Architect who is involved with developing enterprise architectures and custom composite applications. He proposes a Composite Application Framework (CAF) which you can review on his blog postings here and here.

Why is this important? You can review his work and references to gain insight into why custom composite applications are built and why they provide value to the business. With this, decomposing them into respective components, layers and tiers may become easier within your environment. From there, you can then see what kinds of visibility you have into those areas in terms of performance, availability, user experience, capacity, reliability and most importantly how all of these things may impact the business in meeting their goals and objectives.