Category — E2E Service Management

FireScope’s countdown excitement was revealed today (a little bit late ) and their next steps in Business Service Management innovation are now visible. It appears that there will be a 28 day launch cycle of numerous new products and tools.

FireScope’s Business Edition (BE) concept consists of a couple key components aimed as initial entry points for smaller enterprises. The fuller featured Enterprise Editions (EE) are the natural migration paths or starting point for larger enterprises. Pricing modelers are available right on their website.

Some of the “coming soon” tools looks like it puts them in company with PacketTrap and SolarWinds. FireScope BSM:BE and CMDB:BE puts them in company with Nimsoft and Managed Objects.

BSM BE

Optimized for the unique needs of small to medium sized businesses and starting at only $2,450, FireScope BSM:BE features an engaging and user-friendly interface and flexible auto discovery provides rapid time to competency, with multiple setup wizards and inline help designed to make implementation accessible for any level of user.

CMDB BE

FireScope CMDB:Business-Edition delivers the same enterprise-grade functionality as traditional CMDB’s, minus the exhorbitant price tag and pain inducing deployment. For less than $10,000, IT Organizations gain real-time visualization and documentation of their infrastructure along with a complete view of the interrelationships of the software and systems impacting those operations, without the need to hire an army of consultants and mind-numbing planning sessions.

Hmm, the free trial download isn’t available to me yet. Anyone else?

Michael Biddick has put together a gloomy article on the realities of implementing Business Service Management over here. While I do not agree with much of what he says, he’s certainly correct that it’s a challenge for most organizations to successfully implement Business Service Management.

–snip–

However, this promised future of BSM as a product is far from assured. We’re seeing early BSM adopters feeling downright gloomy, mainly as a result of unmet expectations. Many deployments simply don’t provide clear links between IT events and business services. In others, things start out well enough, but maintaining systems lacking in automation is not realistic given limited IT staff. The truth is, you can’t buy your way to BSM, and companies that persist in thinking a single product, no matter how big, complex, and expensive, will deliver are doomed to disappointment.

–snip–

Why are clients expectations being unmet? Is it because they’ve put their faith in a suite of tools and technologies over the changes required to implement Business Service Management successfully? IMO, yes. There are significant organizational barriers to success with Business Service Management that most IT organizations just don’t put the effort into addressing.

My challenge for Michael and his Information Week series would be to stop talking about the product and vendor capabilities and really start a series that shows companies how they can get started.

Don’t tell us we need a service catalog, CMDB, or application discovery tool, tell us how we can use the investments we’ve already made in millions of dollars worth of software to achieve service management excellence.

Tell us how to define a Business Service Management strategy that’s right for our own company, how to create a roadmap, architecture and design that guides every initiative and project at our company along the lines of service centric, top down, business aligned, operationally superior Business Service Management.

I know Michael’s company has the capability and background and hopefully they are helping establish these things when deploying software from these vendors. I challenge Michael to share these experiences. Talk about how we as vendors and you as consulting and systems integrators can improve a clients environment and chances of success with Business Service Management after the sale has been done.

The time is now to start talking about what needs to be done for clients to succeed with Business Service Management!

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

These topics are all the rage now and have taken center stage in the virtualization, utility, cloud and next generation datacenter discussions. Great stuff, good things to shoot for, but on an even more fundamental level, anyone who’s attempting automation, autonomics, run book automation, etc. without having a solid implementation of the fundamentals of network, systems, application and service management and monitoring in place is, frankly, F-O-O-L-I-S-H.

You’ve absolutely got to have the right level of visibility into the environment first. When some automated activity takes place, you’ve got to know if it was successful, and the impact it may have had on the bigger end-to-end service or application, system or network environment. The only way for this to happen is to ensure instrumentation and eventing is in place, have a consolidated (network, server, application, service, mainframe, distributed, middleware, transactions, virtual, vmware, cloud, etc.) event view with analytics in place to ensure that operations focus is on the right events and a presentation layer that ties everything together into a business service context.

That’s hard to do. It’s no wonder that the things that are first to go are patch management, operating system or core system (CPU, Memory, Disk/Storage) automation activities. They’re low(er) risk, repetitive and time consuming tasks. What group owns these tools? The systems administration groups for the most part. Do they have an end-to-end business service focus? Do they understand (or care) about the impact on the bigger picture? Do the tools used provide eventing, status and insight into what they’re doing? Are they integrated into the broader IT management and monitoring architecture? Would the operations group know how to respond to a “CPU Provisioning Event” if they even got one? Would they know what system, application or business service it’s impacting? Would they know how to prioritize this event against the hundreds of others they are faced with?

What are your thoughts or experiences here? How are you operationalizing investments into automation, autonomics or run book automation beyond the systems administration groups? Can you get useful eventing from these tools? What’s the level of effort required to instrument an “autonomic lifecycle”? What’s being done to align these “sexy” buzz words into the Business Service Management (BSM) story?

A new OPAL contribution to integrate TNSQM and TBSM is available here.

-snip-

An integration of the Tivoli Netcool Service Quality Manager (TNSQM) and Tivoli Business Service Manager (TBSM) products is possible by using the Service Level Agreement (SLA) violation events generated by TNSQM.

TBSM can be configured to automatically create services based on event data from the Netcool/OMNIbus ObjectServer; in this case SLA violation alarms being generated by TNSQM. The integration described in this package utilizes the Auto-Population capabilities of TBSM to accomplish the integration task. Auto-population rules are appropriate for simple models and they work best when all the data (ObjectServer or SQL data source) for the model can be obtained from a single event or row in one table. In this case all of the necessary model data is extracted from the SLA violation alarms generated by TNSQM.

TNSQM alarms drive the auto-population rules in TBSM and this results in the creation of a service model viewable in TBSM scorecards and dashboards.

That one day, a typical American tourist from Atlanta, GA would be walking along the Great Wall of China and be able to send Tweets along the way? I’m not impressed by the technology, but just the fact that I was updating Twitter from the GREAT WALL OF CHINA! My perceptions of China have changed forever and I believe the future of the WORLD will change significantly based on what China does.

The leading mobile provider China Mobile has more customers than the entire population of the USA, well north of 375M. The last I heard, the largest mobile provider in the USA had less than 50M. Everyone is using a mobile phone here in China. I rode on a boat through the city of Zhouzhuang and the “granny” who was the [insert the word for boat operators like in Venice] on her mobile heading back up stream for more tourists. There is a mass collision of hyper growth and significant poverty in the areas that I have seen over the past two weeks. That hyper growth bleeds into poverty stricken areas throughout Shanghai and Beijing. Cellular phones are everywhere. Handset technology that is very “cool and hip” with the younger generations today blows ours away.

I challenged my IBM host yesterday to think about what China would be like when his two year old son turns 15 or 20. The largest bank in China (ICBC - 1984) and the largest mobile provider in China (China Mobile - 2000) were founded in radically brief timeframes compared to similar US companies. The Chinese government is considering establishing a market for start up companies to get funding, build their businesses, IPO, etc. What will China look like in 15 years? What will China have to do to operate successful companies at this hyper scale that is very unfamiliar to most US companies? How will technology have to adapt? What technology needs to be created? What software will need to be developed to manage 500M - 1B mobile users, mobile content, mobile applications (banking, etc)?

I don’t think that the acceptable answer will be segmentation, regionalization, geo-localization of technology. This is the answer for technology that can’t scale. If you’re following John Willis as he dives into cloud computing, might this be a possible answer? Maybe we need to think in terms of how we all learned about the solar system here and orbiting planets around the sun. If the utility compute cloud is the core of the hyper scale architecture of the future, each orbiting “planet” around the compute core is more compute clouds for hyper scale applications, and then more for hyper scale transactions, and hyper scale services. Additional compute cloud “moons” would be hyper scale resources for managing at mass scale. Sometimes there are multiple “moons” required to provide more fine grained mass scale management, additional services, functions, etc. Wow, I’m rambling here but my mind is in some sort of hyper mode thinking about all of this stuff. Can you name a US company that could on-board (acct mgmt, provisioning, billing, etc.) over 7M new customers in a single month as China Mobile did in January 2008?

China is big. China will be bigger than we can ever imagine. I think we need to be seriously reconsidering how we do things today to prepare for what China will require in 3, 5, 10 + years. China needs progressive, abstract thought leaders who can challenge the status quo to help them continue to meet hyper growth requirements. China needs highly skilled practitioners and business partners who can help show them the way. From there, they’ll dedicate their own resources to carry things forward. (what’s possible when you have THOUSANDS of skilled resources in development centers…ANYTHING).

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…