Category — Events

I found this sales and marketing deck over at OSS Professionals that gives a good glimpse into what RiverMuse is up to. I love the logo!

(Mike, if you have a more recent one please send and I’ll update).

This open source start up is unveiling their exciting message and pre-release web site for what could be an industry changing tipping point that firmly places open source as a viable alternative to the “Big4″ and the “Other 6″ within any sized company in any industry.

RiverMuse has launched their website and has plans for initial software availability in early November. RiverMuse (Riversoft and Micromuse) is the brainchild of the founders of the Micromuse and the industry recognized Netcool/OMNIbus solution.

• Chief Science Officer: Philip Tee – Co-Founder of Micromuse/CTO, Founder of RiverSoft/CTO & Chairman, Early software designer Avantgarde (Boole & Babbage/BMC Event Manager)
• Chief Technology Officer: Predrag [Fred] Mutavdzic – Architect Netcool Mediation Technologies, Micromuse
• Executive Director: Mike Silvey – Co-Founder of Micromuse/SVP Marketing and Business Development, VP Business Development and Marketing at RiverSoft.

Here’s a snip from their website - clearly positioning their product at those who’ve made significant investments in or are considering Netcool/OMNIbus technology with promises of a brighter future, improved architecture and a roadmap that if delivered would easily place this open source alternative in the leader’s quadrant of any analyst’s market assessment.

Their plans for putting the administrators first is AWESOME. They get the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) issue with the Big4 and Other6. They’re putting that first OVER any current buzzword bingo (ITIL, ISM, SOA, Green, and yes even BSM - Mike and I need to have more heart to heart talks on that!). Run the numbers in any decent sized monitoring shop and look at the staff and maintenance costs (HW and SW) and you’ll see that something has to be done in the next decade of IT management and monitoring. Do more with less, smarter, cheaper (free) tools, products and solutions as a competitive differentiator (and job security).

That is, if they can deliver. Some that I’ve talked to advised me that “they’d believe it when they see it”. I spoke with Mike a couple months back and took away the sense of a solid vision and plan to execute against. I’d love to hear about some big wins, replacements or other success (benchmarks against Netcool/OMNIbus, OpenNMS, HPOV, EMC/SMARTS, BMC, etc.). I’ve signed up for the software and look forward to kicking the tires!

RiverMuse for IBM Tivoli Netcool Owners

(IBM Tivoli Netcool Omnibus / Micromuse Netcool Omnibus, Cisco InfoCenter)

What a great product – we think so, we originally conceived, designed and built Netcool as an antidote to the offerings of the day. However, we never finished it and, neither did the people who inherited Micromuse after we left, nor have [or will] IBM. The issue is Netcool’s discombobulated configuration methods that lead to an ownership Tax on you, the customer.

Although Netcool is undoubtedly the best-of-the-best Legacy Event Management system, having invented:

* the Exclusive event paradigm
* automatic repeat filtering ‘de-duplication’
* drag and drop correlation, and
* simplified event enrichment

Netcool hobbles around on a major Achilles Heel. Namely, the more filtering and correlation, the more embedded complexity in the platform since Netcool has three different configuration programming languages that have no configuration integrity. Consequently, the more you use Netcool the higher the Total Cost of Ownership gets.

RiverMuse offers the same out of the box functionality as Netcool, however with a thoroughly modern architecture, configuration is easier to perform and maintain offering a significantly lower total cost of ownership. Oh, and did we tell you the core RiverMuse FreeCool is free?

RiverMuse will gradually introduce migration tools for Netcool customers, initially we’ll enable our customers to consuming Netcool Probe events, and in the future, RiverMuse will launch a ‘Netcool Configuration Conversion’ tool to simplify migrations of Probe Rules and ObjectServer Triggers and Actions.

I was listening to a recent IT Management Guys podcast and Tarus Balog mentioned that the upcoming OpenNMS 1.6 would include TL-1 (Transaction Language 1) support. My jaw hit the ground (floor of the airplane).

An open source, free software solution for TL-1! I seem to recall the MUSE acquisition of Lumos Technologies was pretty significant as a key vehicle for integrating eventing/messaging from telco environments. In turn, these “probes” were sold for $$$$$$$ within large telco environments to bring in information from Class 4/5 Switches, DACS, SONET ADMs, etc. Not sure if this is a big seller for us or not still, but it was at one time.

I pinged Jeff Gehlbach and he confirmed this news and pointed out their focus on support for autonomous messages, turning them into openNMS events. He mentioned these would also be easy to relay as traps. They’re looking for test gear to continue to develop and improve their TL-1 support (obviously a challenge to find or get access to). Ping Jeff here if you’ve got any leads.

If OpenNMS is able to execute here and provide this capability, their position is likely to grow as a solid open source/free software alternative in service provider environments. They’re already winning and displacing incumbent Netcool installations in Italian service providers.

TBSM v4.2 GA’d last Friday. Are you ready? Have you thought about what your plans are? Just another upgrade? Keeping things status quo? I advise you to not do that.

TBSM’s fundamental operating dependency is the Netcool/ObjectServer and its core operating principle is one being primarily event driven. A limited use license of THE leading event management platform is provided with TBSM v4.2 so in all realities, you will need to become proficient in two industry leading products and not just one.

Events can be ANYTHING. I view events merely as the vehicle for communicating something - data, information, metrics, KPIs, state, status, etc. ANYTHING. Netcool/OMNIbus offers very broad capability for collecting and consolidating events from hundreds and hundreds of sources. Using our “Swiss Army knife” probes, the sky is the limit in terms of what you can collect events from. Something blinking green in the datacenter, a valve, refrigerator, generator, business process/activity, whatever, we likely have a way to get event information. Netcool/OMNIbus SHOULD NOT BE considered just an IT monitoring tool, reserved only for network or systems monitoring event collection!

If you believe this, and your end state goal is to establish a consolidated operations environment where we abolish silos of information and consolidate the islands into an aggregate repository, your long term success with Business Service Management is heading in the right direction. In the case of traditional IT organizations, collecting events, alerts, messages, traps, notifications, etc. from any of the various silos in IT is crucial. Check the politics at the door and reach out to your colleagues and figure out how you can leverage this new TBSM platform to start on this integrated and consolidated journey.

Every client’s goal using TBSM should be to leverage the features that enable the automatic creation and maintenance of the complex service models within their environment. If you fail to find ways to use these features, your patience with TBSM will wane over time. You do not want to manually build and maintain service models! IT environments change too dynamically for you to ever have a chance to keep up. If you’re fortunate to have made investments and had successful deployments of application (or network) discovery and mapping tools or successfully deployed a CMDB, asset management, inventory or other repository/database that enables you to establish relationships and dependencies between things in your environment, you’re on your way to a pleasant TBSM experience over time (assuming you can negotiate permission to access those data repositories).

Chances are though, that you don’t have the fancy discovery tool or the CMDB project is in its third year of a five year project and you can’t get access. Your company probably frowns on the use of open source tools that may help get you started and the ‘hit by the bus’ scenario just happened to the one guy who knew everything about anything.

How can you get started? Let me chat about a few very important things you can think about doing.

Establish a uniform, standardized event format

Spend some time getting a basic understanding of how you will establish the various hierarchies within your environment (organizational, service, architectural, etc.). The goals here are to establish an event format that can help us build these hierarchies automatically.

Start looking into your existing monitoring and management solutions, their capabilities and the event information generated. How could you best configure these products or parse raw events to establish a normalized event format that will enable the use of TBSM’s autopopulation feature? As you learn about Netcool/OMNIbus, the alerts.status schema and probe rules files and lookup tables you will find numerous techniques for parsing and populating fields in your normalized event format.

Think about adding fields for each level of your hierarchy:

LineOfBusiness | BusinessService | BusinessApplication | Location | BusinessImpact | BusinessSLA | TransactionName | BatchJobName | CommonName | etc.

I’ve talked extensively on the importance of events numerous times in my past blog postings. Every ounce of effort and energy you put into this area will pay off enormously when it comes to service model creation and maintenance. I can almost guarantee it!

Establish an internal “CMDB” of sorts

The most successful implementations that I’ve seen of the TBSM product include integration with some sort of relationship repository. It doesn’t need to be any of the big CMDB solutions out there, and in all cases I’ve seen it’s not. These successful clients are building simple databases with simple table structures to capture the most important relationships in their organization. If you’ve made the effort to map some of this out within your organization, build your snazzy spreadsheet or Visio drawing, get that data into a repository where it’s usable to TBSM!!

There are two main classes here. The business perspective (top-down) and the IT perspective (bottom-up). These databases are establishing the key relationships and touch points between these two perspectives. Most clients are starting out with the containment model approach for technology and migrating into service and application oriented containment models. None of the most successful clients are implementing the end-to-end service or data flow model concepts where detailed relationships and dependencies are captured. This approach most definitely requires investment in application discovery and relationship mapping solutions, detailed instrumentation across the entire end-to-end service delivery architecture and a detailed data model for storing within the consolidated repository.

When we have something like this available, we can make use of standard event enrichment capabilities of the Netcool/Impact product to help build our normalized event format or utilize the powerful TBSM ESDA feature to build and maintain the service models automatically.

Investigate Tivoli Discovery Library Adapters (DLA) and other Vendor Product Data Export

From a Tivoli product perspective, the Discovery Library Adaptor is a powerful mechanism for extracting key information and relationship information that can be consumed by products like TBSM and TADDM. In TBSM’s case, if you’ve got significant coverage using the standard ITM 6 monitoring product across your open systems and mainframe environments, you could use the DLA to do much of the heavy lifting associated with service instance and basic containment model creation within TBSM.

In most cases, you’re probably going to have many other vendor tools and products across the environment. I’d recommend taking an approach of exporting core configuration data from these tools and consolidating it into the central repository mentioned above. The DLA’s from Tivoli products could also be merged into this repository rather than TBSM directly enabling creation of a consolidated “CMDB” for the monitoring tools organization and TBSM.

Closing Thought

Just let me say one more time how critically important events are for your TBSM implementation. If you have them, and they’re in a useless format or are not communicating a useful message, you’re in for headaches in numerous TBSM development areas. If you don’t have events for everything (monitoring gaps), you’re not going to be able to build the complete picture within TBSM. If your events aren’t trustworthy and reliable, I promise that the end users will not use your solution after the “crying wolf scenario” plays out a few times. If you show something to an executive and it’s not accurate, forget about getting any value from this investment or getting that maintenance renewal.

Shameless plug

IBM Tivoli Services and our TBSM AAA Accredited Business Partners are always available to help advise and consult with you in these areas. Please do not hesitate to contact me at anytime and I can help arrange further discussions.

The long awaited Tivoli Common Reporting (TCR) (based on BIRT) historical event reports are finally available. The documents and included files assumes that you’ll be archiving your events to the Tivoli Data Warehouse (TDW) using the new TDW Gateway and Reporter schema and these reports will pull from there.

It also looks like this is a MUCH smaller library of reports than the lists of reports I’d seen floating around. Not sure what the deal is there other than maybe it’s a way to justify keeping Netcool/Reporter around??

These should be easy to modify and point to your existing historical event database if you don’t plan to use TDW. Drop them in to TCR associated with TBSM v4.1.1 or upcoming 4.2 and incorporate some very basic event reports into your solution.

Download from OPAL here.

The weekly source for hot IT management news and gossip is the IT Management Podcast hosted by Cote’ of Redmonk and John M Willis of Zabovo. This week’s episode featured OpenNMS’s Tarus Balog.

Tarus dropped a few interesting tidbits throughout the conversation around Network Management about a couple very large IBM Tivoli Netcool clients that were moving from or complementing their existing architecture with OpenNMS. One was a large telecommunications company in Italy (Telecom Italia?) and another a very large mobile telecommunications company in Switzerland named Swisscom.

This led to some discussions around product scalability, licensing models, etc. Tarus didn’t have any specifics to share other than one requirement for OpenNMS to handle event storms of 2K-3K per second. He said they’re working through architecture approaches to ensure that their backend databases can continue to scale in ways similar to Netcool/OMNIbus’s in-memory database.

Tarus also mentioned capabilities in OpenNMS on par with what Netcool/Impact offers. I believe he called them Automations. It’d be neat to hear more on this and if they’ll have a library of data source interfaces/integrations similar to Netcool/Impact.

Everything that Tarus and the OpenNMS team does is ultimately driven back into the main code tree for all to take advantage of. The OpenNMS DevCamp kicks off in a week or two where the foundations for OpenNMS 2.0 will be worked on. This is taking place in my backyard down at GA Tech if I recall correctly.

Congrats to the OpenNMS team for your entrance into the telco space with these clients. I also really want to learn more about your Papa John’s deployment and if I heard glimpses of Business Service Management (BSM) there or if you were just using that as an example!

Let us see if we can find the five leading reasons (maybe more, maybe less) for why we need a proactive or predictive solution these days.

#1: I don’t have effective change control in place that spans into and incorporates the monitoring that I do on end point systems, applications and services.

#2: My boss wants me to “do more with less” so I need to figure out a way to clean up the mess I have today in my resource monitoring and event management solution.

#3: I know that when this thingy begins to slow down and that thingy drops packets that my transactions begin to fail. Now how do I write that policy to correlate all my thingys?

#4: My tool is better than your tool. I need to figure out a way to make you believe that your tool is always wrong so you’ll work my trouble ticket.

#5: My manager told us that we need to become more proactive. I sent the dba an email to tell him that we were going to have an outage to this database in three hours. He’d already gone home for the day.

These are tongue in cheek, but the underlying themes of each one are very valid in nearly all operations and application support groups. Why are we interested in predictive and proactive tools when we probably don’t have our own house in order in the first place?

How would you write the business justification and capital purchase plan to explain why you need them? How will you quantify your reasoning? Are you willing to give up one or more FTEs to purchase this solution? Have you had an honest look into the far reaching corners of your organization to see where the real root causes may be that spark your interest in these solutions? Are you ‘really’ ready to try and be proactive or predictive? Are you ‘really’ doing reactive well? What does predictive and proactive really mean to you? How would you describe the core capabilities such a solution should have? How would you associate expected value and ROI from having those capabilities? Where should we be looking elsewhere for help in these areas (BI, operational BI, BPM, BAM, analytic databases, statistical modeling and forecasting, etc.)

Please share your thoughts and ideas on why proactive and predictive solutions are of interest these days.

Just some rambling thoughts here…feel free to join in.

Is another tool what’s really required here? What should/could be done in domain specific resource monitoring solutions that addresses the problems at the edge? Should I really be monitoring everything that comes out of the box in a default configuration? Why do I have all of these profiles, situations, thresholds, events, etc. in the first place? Do I even now what I’m monitoring and why?

What if I have a multi-vendor, multi-sourced environment where I may or may not have visibility? What if I don’t have a CMDB or other source of topology, relationships and dependencies? What if I don’t even know the state and status of the applications, databases or services to begin with? What will I be able to do with investments into these technologies?

What if I have adopted a “manager of managers” concept where I have a consolidated operations eventing environment with feeds from across the entire business environment (facilities, plant, IT, datacenter, logistics, telephony, manufacturing, contact centers, etc.)? Shouldn’t this dynamic “learning” and “thresholding” concept be really applied at this level for some sort of “intelligent event management” free from manual intervention, policies, codebooks, etc? How about the context of the business calendar and schedule merged with the IT operations calendar and schedule? I doubt that this can all be “learned” magically.

If I invest in a BMC ProactiveNet, Netuitive or Integrien (or other fundamental dynamic “learning” or “trending” tool - my favorite was a company called Premonitia - now defunct, based on research from accoustic modelling of whales and shrimp IIRC), how will I recognize and measure the value from that investment? How should the operations environment change to adopt the promises of the “secret sauce” within these emerging technology areas? Will IT operations and second/third tier support teams need to change the ways they work today? If so, how? Does IT operations know how to respond to a future state that hasn’t occurred or someone stating that a service is “slow”? I think most operations and support teams are still in their infancy here.

I’m all for emerging technologies that speak towards making the lives of the folks on the front line better and for sensing, isolating and resolving issues within complex IT environments before they impact the business services, but will investing in these tools really improve the status quo within the typical operations environment? The Next Generation Operations Center, Command Center, Service Management Center or whatever we want to call it must be enabled with these types of technology, but also must prepared to think, operate and respond differently than they do today.

How are you changing? Will you change? Where’s your value proposition? Is it at the front line, second/third line of the support process, at the LoB? Is it about efficiencies in workflow? Do more, with less? Automation? Availability? Becoming proactive? Do you know the real root causes prompting your interests in this technology? What are your vendors doing about it? What is your monitoring tools group doing about it? Should they be doing something different?

Please share your thoughts on how best to operationalize and really recognize value from your investments into these technologies or what you’re doing to address the real root causes of the symptoms this technology addresses.