Category — devCampTivoli

Today, competitive Business Service Management solutions must provide quick time to value, be highly effective, easy to implement and manage and truly enable progress towards a business aligned organization and operations. In my efforts to assess and increase the Business Service Management readiness of our vast products within IBM Tivoli, I’ve just completed a quick first cut for our core monitoring product and associated monitoring modules. My results don’t shock me, and we have a long ways to go. I hope this can set a benchmark towards improvement in 2008, a year which brings significant change and potential for the BSM solution suite.

In my initial list of assessment areas below, I’ve tried to focus where I feel attention is needed “if I were king for a day”. Historically, we’ve focused on integrations at the back end and front end. We’re starting to focus more on some other useful areas via our navigation and reporting initiatives, but we’re still not focused on BSM solution oriented content (although we’re talking a lot about solutions for this and that).

Every release of the core products enabling the IBM Tivoli Business Service Management story (does everyone know what this is?) must include content into the core Business Service Management products including Netcool/OMNIbus and Tivoli Business Service Manager (TBSM). If we’re not doing this, we’re forcing our clients to take these tasks on themselves further increasing their workload, product management lifecycle, and drastically increasing their time to value from these investments. We absolutely must have value added content out of the box (or immediately available on OPAL) that coincides with every significant release of enabling technology (ITM, ITCAM, TWS, TPC, etc.) to be competitive within the BSM marketplace.

As I understand things within the ITM world, we include specific workspaces and reports with each release (core, IF, FP, etc.). Taking this work into consideration, exposing this with the appropriate Business Service Management context within our BSM products is a logical step. While every client environment will be unique and different, the trick here is to get to something that is 80% there that can be customized the rest of the way by our clients. Are there documents describing content associated with TEPS workspaces? Are TEPS workspaces just structured queries into TDW, TEMS and TEMAs? How would one find out about the queries used to drive a TEPS workspace? I’m sure someone could create a magic script to convert this stuff to relevant configuration components for a TBSM content pack.

The assessment lists things that I think are the relevant within the managed system, Netcool/OMNIbus and TBSM to further expand our end-to-end BSM solution and story using ITM based monitoring. I would like this to be a topic for discussion at DevCampTivoli. How can we do it? Should Tivoli do it? Should it be community driven? Would it provide value? Would it speed time to deployment? Would it enable more successful demonstrations, proof of concepts and sales? I certainly think so!

What are your thoughts?

Check out some of my other thoughts for improving the end-to-end BSM story here:

BSM Profile Concept for ITM 6.x
BSM Descriptor File Concept for ITM 6.x
Oranizational Structures for BSM Success
BSM Situation and BSM Event Concepts for ITM 6.x

Aternity and StackSafe were very highly ranked by Joshua Jaffe over at TechConfidential.

Aternity looks very interesting and would be a key component in a maturing Business Service Management (BSM) solution. They have a webinar upcoming that I plan to attend to see what else I can learn. I know they follow the blogosphere, so maybe they can chime in with some technical, non-marketing information on their solution, capabilities and how they see their solution enabling BSM.

StackSafe has some interesting stuff from what I can tell from reviewing their website. Their technology seems to be firmly rooted in the dev, test, QA world and all things before something is put into production. Change management, what if testing, etc. I could easily see this stuff as another approach for a dev-test lab for the monitoring tools group to leverage. I’d position this as a way for the typical EMS/NMS team have their own virtual labs and business service or application copies that they can instrument using their normal tools, test scenarios, events, metrics collection, etc. StackSafe, if you’re out there, would be interested in talking about how we could do something like this at DevCampTivoli.

In this series of thought provoking posts I’ve asked for the ability to instrument for Business Service Management (BSM) at the managed system source and introduced a concept for an ITM 6.x BSM Profile and BSM Descriptor File. I’ve also proposed new organizational concepts that would establish end-to-end ownership for BSM within the typical monitoring tools group. As I peel the layers of this ITM 6.x product back, I’m now in search of the capability to create purpose built BSM Situations and BSM Events directly from ITM 6.x.

The first level of maturity in Business Service Management (BSM) is achievable by ensuring that a solid foundation in the fundamentals of network, system, application and service management and monitoring is in place. Where we’re failing our clients is not providing the necessary BSM best practices to help them use ITM 6.x with BSM as the end state. If clients have a well instrumented IT environment and if ITM 6.x has this capability, all events generated from ITM 6.x monitoring should include core BSM contextual information that establishes the most basic level of IT – Business alignment.

There’s no reason this needs to happen using more complex technology or products such as Netcool/Impact, TADDM or a CMDB. Sure, it may help make things easier, but the fact of the matter is that not all clients will have the ideal Tivoli environment with all of our enabling technology and products. Every client I’ve been to in the last two years has a heterogeneous environment with core products from all key vendors. If we don’t think about enabling fundamental BSM capabilities in ALL of our core products, we’re letting our clients down.

This BSM Situation and BSM Event concept would enable ITM 6.x clients to build BSM Situations that generate purpose built BSM Events. The key here is that every situation within ITM 6.x needs to allow for a purpose built BSM Situation with its own BSM contextual information, policies, thresholds, business calendars, etc. to be associated with it. This would then enable key BSM Event field information to be mapped into the core event emitted. BSM Situations and BSM Events may stand on their own and never be seen by the traditional NOC/EOC or support operator. Think of certain information such as common system information, metrics, KPIs, performance or capacity data that simply flows northbound to build or drive the BSM models and scorecards within TBSM.

Some of my initial questions:

• What capabilities do we have to do something like this?
• Could a BSM Situation be triggered by another situation and map in key BSM information into the generated event?
• What attributes can be mapped in?
• Is there a limit?
• Can attributes read from a file (the BSM Descriptor file) on the managed system?
• Can there be custom attributes defined in the BSM Situation?
• How many?
• How and where does information get mapped into the event format?
• How can every field of a generated event be controlled, overwritten or customized? (message summary, custom fields, etc.)
• Can I create custom slots/fields in the outgoing event?
• How many?

My initial queries to the experts and skimming of our manuals and other internal training materials leads me to the conclusion that these fundamental systems management capabilities do not exist in ITM 6.x. I hope I am wrong. I hope there is some way to do this. My end state objective here is that I get events flowing northbound from ITM 6.x monitoring that convey the critical BSM information within the event such as business services, applications, transactions, LoB, Clients, server OS, location, support group, compliance/risk classification, business impact, etc. I do not want to have to add this upstream unless it’s absolutely necessary.

In an effort to collaborate on how to generate powerful events that convey the most fundamental IT - Business alignment and help clients reach the first phase of Business Service Management, 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 Situations and BSM Events from ITM 6.x and the 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 outcome is it 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…

What’s the future hold for Business Service Management (BSM)? Well, if John and many analysts are right it’s really going to be “in the sky” with the emergence of cloud computing. Read some of John’s thoughts on the topic in “Demystifying Clouds”.

The motivation for cloud computing is usually to control costs, standardize, eliminate headcount, reduce impact of change, etc. All of these link back to the goals and objectives of the business - control costs and make money. John and I talk about this stuff a lot. Everything has an angle back to BSM in one way or another. If you’re like most of the clients I see these days who struggle with the basics of IT management and monitoring, your future isn’t going to get much easier. Just look at where we are in terms of Virtual Machine management and monitoring today, we’re still stuck in the old way of doing things.

I expect John to dive into more of the gory details as he posts more, but the tenants of BSM must be thought of even more within a utility compute or cloud computing environment. If you’re not thinking about the end game, you’re just jumping on the bandwagon. BSM and the ability to instrument to have the necessary visibility into what’s happening at all levels in the cloud is critical. All of this must be tied back into a central repository for managing business services, applications and transactions in the cloud environment. This isn’t just CI or CMDB stuff here, this is end-to-end services with the necessary alignment with the business.

If you’re a cloud computing, utility, grid or other virtual player, John and I would like to talk to you about supporting DevCampTivoli. The theme is “Collaborative Development of End-to-End Business Service Management Solutions” and you may be able to help by providing a virtual environment, business service or application that would be at the core of this initiative in May. I see huge opportunities for someone to offer a “development environment in a box” where IT management and monitoring practitioners around the world (read IBM, HP, CA, BMC, Hyperic, Zenoss, etc. clients) can “turn up” business services and applications and develop appropriate IT management and monitoring solutions within their own cloud environments. This becomes a very affordable dev-test-release to production enabler!

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?

I’ve been speaking this stuff for five years now and the analysts are now singing the same song. Refer to my link post from yesterday which includes some recent commentary from the EMA folks on Business Service Management (BSM). What we need to do is learn from the Europeans who figured this stuff all out years ago (another article discusses this). Guess I should’ve been an analyst and got paid the big bucks for this stuff…

From this article.

For IT to be focused along these lines, and hence for BSM to succeed, the collaborative, cross-domain processes recommended by best practices such as the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) need to be implemented, or BSM will remain a pie-in-the-sky dream. As a model, BSM is first and foremost not about technology, but about a cultural shift in how IT professionals collectively (and individually) think and work, both among themselves, and in support of their customers’ businesses.

This pretty much reinforces the realities that I deal with every day. Fortunately, I have the vision, determination and capability to help clients get through the muck and reach their desired end state.

I think there is an opportunity to do things a different way, a BSM 2.0 way. There is an opportunity for someone, some company to take advantage of the predicted market surge for Business Service Management over the next five years. Will it be the incumbents, the OSS community, Google or an emerging company such as FireScope?

I encourage everyone to talk about these challenges, seek a new way to think about these problems, break the traditional IT organizational models apart, include Business Service Management and the monitoring tools group in the “secret club” (Enterprise Architecture Council, etc.) and finally recognize that this stuff is critical to the success (revenue, cost control, compliance, etc) of your company!

Now let’s all roll up our sleeves and figure out HOW to do it. Check out DevCampTivoli. This could easily be the foundation for BarCampBSM or DevCampBSM events in the future. What are YOU going to do to help?

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…