Category — devCampTivoli

One of the foundations of Business Service Management (BSM) is to see things from the business perspective. To get there, one of the best ways to do that is to instrument for BSM at the source. The majority of all server agent deployments for HW/OS monitoring and COTS application agents (DB, AppServer, etc.) are deployed in a pure out of the box (OOB) manner. Most clients will take what their vendor offers up within these OOB configurations as their own “best practices” and leave it at that. Some may take the time to modify thresholds in an effort to control the signal to noise ratio in the event console. This practice generally leads to a “needle in a haystack” approach for event management and a bad reputation for the tool in use for monitoring.

There will always be a need for the “best practice” OOB monitoring offered by vendors in their solutions. The primary audience is the NOC, EOC and support organizations. They speak this language and have been programmed to know what to do when the “95% CPU Utilization” event comes in. The BSM Profile concept is to help organizations move beyond this to focus how these lower level things may impact the business services, applications and activities that help the business meet its goals and objectives.

I want to see things change. I want to see the ability to configure monitoring with a purpose that’s above and beyond the OOB configurations. The establishment of a BSM Profile for managing the server HW/OS and deployed applications enables visibility into what that server or application really exists for - supporting the business.

The ideal BSM Profile for ITM 6.x would include the following:

1. Custom instrumentation into very specific business service, application and transactions ALIGNED to the LoB, services, applications and key business activities that they enable (and impact).
2. Custom free form text fields that enable creation of a specific and unique message relative to the above.
3. Mapping into custom event fields/slots of the ideal BSM Event Format.
4. Generate purpose built events, KPI/KPM or other data for the purposes of driving a service model or dashboard

In an effort to collaborate on how to create such a 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 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…

Business Service Management (BSM) requires some level of visibility and insight into the core networks, systems, applications, transactions and processes happening across the IT environment. This visibility and insight requires some contextual understanding of how those things support and enable the key business services, applications, transactions, processes and activities that are critical to the business meeting their goals and objectives. The more emphasis on this contextual understanding we can establish directly from the source systems and applications, the easier and more efficient that operations, event and business service management can be in upstream solutions.

My findings and overall assumption is that most fundamental Tivoli monitoring is implemented in such a way that it’s only enabling the SME groups (SysAdmins, EOC/NOC, etc.) to identify, triage and resolve low level problems. I posed a series of questions to the only two Tivoli Monitoring gurus that I know about to try and gauge what could be done to better equip Tivoli Monitoring clients to implement fundamental system HW/OS and application/database monitoring so that it enables a client to implement true BSM solutions upstream. My intent from this dialog was to start a new series of blog postings called “The Top 10 Things and ITM Client Can/Should Do to Enable BSM and How to Implement Them”.

John “The Uber ITM Guru” Willis bit and we had breakfast to discuss. John’s got a lot of great ideas from what can and should be done from the ITM perspective. He mentioned a few of his clients that really get it and what they’ve done in the past to get there. We talked about the realities of client deployments today, politics, keeping up with constant changes and releases in the products and IT environment. Apparently the game really changed from ITM 5.x to ITM 6.x and things really need to be thought of in a different way making use of the Universal Agent. John’s answers continued to amaze me because of the level of effort it sounded like to do something as simple as this.

I kept coming back to a couple simple scenarios:

• How can I get something as simple as the the operating system name/version, server location, datacenter rack/row embedded in every event coming from an ITM agent?
• How can I get the business service/application that this server/application/database supports embedded in every event coming from an ITM agent?

We’d been discussing collaboration in the community via wiki’s, blogs, mailing lists, etc. for some time now. We landed on the idea of a scenarios based collaboration event focused on how one could solve real world problems using Tivoli products within the Business Service Management space. Something straight from the experts and practitioners out there. Something that shows what can/should be done from end-to-end using ITM 6.2 (and its dependencies) and TBSM 4.1.1 (and its dependencies) to create real world BSM solutions that any Tivoli client could implement.

Introducing DevCamp Tivoli. Our thoughts are that we’d meet before the annual Tivoli Technical User Conference (TTUC) called IBM Pulse next year. The conference next year is planned for May 18-22 so we’re targeting having this DevCampTivoli on Saturday May 17th. We’re betting on SME’s and Practitioners being able to fly in early for the conference they may already be attending and being able to participate in this event. Whatever the outcome of the DevCampTivoli is, we’d like to present that during a BoF session during the conference and on the OPAL site for everyone’s benefit. Listen to my first podcast ever on this topic with John here. Read over John’s blog posting announcing the event here. Visit the DevCampTivoli website and sign up!

More to come on this as we noodle through the concepts. Visit the site and sign up if you’d like to help out. We’re certainly interested in your input towards scenarios and development approaches within ITM 6.2, Tivoli EIF Probe, Netcool/OMNIbus and TBSM 4.1.1.