Category — Implementation

Hopefully this OPAL whitepaper from one of our ATG folks makes our crazy TSRM - Netcool/OMNIbus integration a bit easier to understand and configure.

I still really have no idea why we’ve taken the concept of ticketing integration and made it so difficult. As an alternative to this approach, if you own Netcool/Impact you can look at this OPAL paper which uses WebServices. This approach needs to be validated against TSRM v7.x.

A new IF is available for TBSM v4.1.1 addressing a few new areas (don’t see mine in there!). This depends on IF 001 and supersedes IF 004, 005 and 006. IF 007 can be downloaded here.

These are the new issues addressed:

IZ15914 INCONSISTENT SERVICE NAME TRUNCATIONS IN SERVICE TREE
Service name truncation is not consistent when using the static sizing tool. Many of the service names will truncate, but some do not.

IZ19833(NGF) NEED THE TBSM LOGON SCREEN TO BE ABLE TO ACCEPT MORE THAN 16 CHARACTERS
Integrated authentication works only if the password is short and when a longer password is used it causes the account in Active Directory to be locked.

This APAR increases the allowable length of the password to 127 characters - which is the Active Directory limit.

IZ20375 CREATING CUSTOM CANVASSES USING IE CAUSES HANG WHEN USING DE
When trying to either create a new custom canvas or edit an existing custom canvas, the canvas would fail during loading and the console would show the following error:

[Fatal Error] ServInst.xml:2:64: White spaces are required between
publicId and systemId. Exception in thread “Thread-12″
java.lang.NoSuchMethodError:

IZ24515 UNABLE TO SAVE SERVICE INSTANCES
The customer edits a service and clicks on the dependencies tab when the customer adds or removes dependent services, the change cannot be saved. The save screen will show up when the save button
is pressed, however, it will never go away and changes made are not saved.

IZ26602 PERSISTENT ESDA INSTANCE HAS A PARENT RULE FAILS TO SHOW UP IN
When there are persistent ESDA instances that belong to a template with a parent rule, they will not be displayed at the root of the tree even if they have no actual parents. Thus there will be no way
to see them.

This fix only applies to persistent ESDA instances that has no parents. If you want to enable the old behavior to not show the instances in the root of the tree set the following:

In RAD_sla.props
impact.sla.showesdainstanceswithparentrules=false

The default for this property is true, which will show these instances at the root of the tree.

In an repost of an article from a couple years back, Robin Bloor provides some updated color on the state of BPM and SoA. It’s apparent that some of the other “B” buzz words have the same challenges that exist on the BSM front.

Things to ponder…

• How can these projects with such touted value to the business or IT be successfully implemented?
• Where are vendors falling short in helping “solve the organizational problems” that often cause these “B” projects to fail?
• Is throwing technology/product at the problem the best place to start?
• What should a next generation organizational structure look like? Can IT and Business organize around end-to-end business service/process delivery and support?
• How can organizations be incented, encouraged, mandated to have an end-to-end business service/process focus?
• Where success stories for BPM, SOA, BSM, BAM, etc. exist, how have these technologies been operationalized, organizations changed, workflow/process/procedure modified to reap the benefits?
• Is it foolish to think that any of these organizational challenges can ever be solved or at least minimized?
• Do we have generational issues here that will change as Baby Boomers retire and Gen X/Y/Z move up the ranks in IT and Business?

Give the post a read, I found these two very applicable to all of the things I’m seeing with BPM, BSM, BAM, etc.

Question 5: What are the most difficult steps within a BPM project – and what makes a SOA project tedious?

For an Oracle or DB2 database? Thoughts? Reasons why?

What about the manager of a DBA group or other higher level manager? What DBA specific information should be aggregated to present at this higher level?

Lots of fixes in this. Everyone should review. Depends on IF001 and supersedes IF004 and IF005. Available here.

This Interim Fix addresses problems reported in IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager 4.1.1.

* APARs that are included in this Interim Fix:

IZ13211 RADSHELL CAN’T USE HTTPS

When TBSM is configured to connect to Security manager via ssl, the rad_radshell script doesn’t work.

IZ14054 REAL-TIME INDICATORS IN CUSTOM CANVAS HARD-CODED

When custom canvas exists, if a users adds anything else to the canvas and saves the changes the old canvas icons never update. User will have to add all icons at one time and save if they want to
continuously see changes to the custom canvas. This fix will only work for brand new canvas creation. Current canvases with numerical data in the value fields in the layoutxml files, will have to be recreated in order for this fix to work since the rule has been wiped out of the file.

IZ15514 HITTING THE TAB WHERE THERE IS NO INSTANCE DEFINED

When viewing the custom canvas, the edit tab displays NoInstanceDefined if no instance was tied to the custom canvas. However, users can still click the tab and see previously displayed data.

IZ15295 CUSTOMER IS NOT ABLE TO VIEW SLA CHARTS PAGE

When displaying the SLA Charts page from the drop down tool, an error occurs and no chart information is displayed.

IZ17751 CONFIGURING MULTIPLE TBSM SERVERS CONCURRENTLY FROM A SINGLE

Customer is unable to create ESDA rules on 2 seperate TBSM servers simultaneously from the same client machine, the 2nd ESDA popup corrupts the 1st one that ESDA rules were being created for.

IZ17754 DATA FETCHER TO ORACLE DB RETURNS ERRONEOUS TIME VALUE,

After IF1, the customer’s data fetchers that go to an Oracle database and retrieve a timestamp column, incorrectly show oracle.sql.TIMESTAMP instead of the actual timestamp values.

IZ19449 TEMPLATE RULE THRESHOLDS ARE INCORRECTLY DISPLAYED

Template rule thresholds are incorrectly displayed after the first rule is viewed. Customer views a template rule with marginal and bad thresholds set, and any other template rule that is viewed after this that has marginal and bad thresholds, displays the values that were seen with the first rule. The marginal and bad threshold values are not updated based on the new rules that are viewed.

IZ19688 MOUSE CLICKS NOT RECOGNIZED IN SERVICE ADMIN IN CERTAIN

If the customer switches pages or logs out and back in again, the interactions stops working. When using Firebug to debug this issue you will find that the ActionRegistry.jsp file gives a 404 error saying that the /desktop/ActionRegistry.jsp cannot be found. This issue seems to happen when the customer has custom pages with actions.

IZ20394 NUMERIC FORMULA DATA INCORRECT AFTER RADSHELL EXPORT/IMPORT.

When importing a service model via the radshell script, the Use Policy box is checked for the Internal attributes even though no policy was being before exporting the file.

* APARs that are included in this Interim Fix from IF0005:

IZ17042 MOSWOS TBSM AGENT MONITORS INCORRECT OMNIBUS UNIX PROCESS

TBSM Process Control Agent does not accurately reflect status of the process control agent. Regardless of whether the process control daemon is up or down, it shows as Down in the Process
Control Agent view of the TBSM Agent workspace.

IZ17159 THE DIRECTSQL FUNCTION SI NOT AVAILABLE BY DEFAULT FOR POLICY WRITING.

The option to use this function by default is not provided for policy writing in the ESDA Edit Policy window.

IZ15468 SERVICE INSTANCE IN MAINTENANCE TURNS GREEN BEFORE MAINTENANCE

A service in maintenance state should remain blue color, until the maintenance schedule is complete, However, if an event comes in that clears the service, the service instance and status in the Services tree turns green (not stay blue until maintenance is complete).

IZ15409 WHEN TBSM CHECKS THE STATUS OF THE DATABASE, IT CAN CAUSE THE DATABASE TO CRASH

After TBSM runs for a while, the status of the database is checked and TBSM crashes with the following error in the RAD_server.log file:

* APARs that are included in this Interim Fix from IF0004:

IY99094 ISM REPORTS FAIL TO LAUNCH FROM RAD UI

ISM Report Launched from RAD has no info in it. The new window pops up to display the graph and info? but there is no info on the graph.

IZ09057 DATA FETCHER STOPS WORKING DUE TO LOST DATABASE CONNECTIONS.

Data fetchers fail to access their specified data source. Message ‘Exception Executing Query’ may be received. Logs report ‘Exception while executing database operation after trying twice. Exception: Io exception: Broken pipe’.

IZ09754 “INSERT ACTION FUNCTION” FOR RADSHELL FUNCTION IS NOT WORKING.

When trying to insert the RadShell function into a custom policy via the Impact policy editor the following message is returned:HTTP Status 500 -

IZ10261 CUSTOM CANVAS EDIT FAILS AFTER REFRESH

Various java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError messages are being generated when viewing custom canvasses.

IZ12362 CUSTOM CANVAS THE TAB TITLES ARE NOT ALWAYS CORRECT

When clicking on a custom canvas that is not tied to a service instance,the context of the Edit Service tab shows either ‘false’ or the named value of the previously clicked service instance, template, or tied custom canvas.

IZ12777 SERVICES IN SERVICE VIEWER NOT AUTOMATICALLY SIZED TO THE WINDOW

When viewing or creating a custom canvas, the size of the object added to the custom canvas is not automatically fit to the size of the canvas.

IZ13840 LOCALESET ISSUE WITH TBSM4.1.1 (I18N) UNABLE TO WORK WITH LANG=ZH_CN

Solaris only

IZ13303 SETUP.SH’S ON DVD 2 FOR SOLARIS FAIL

When running the setup.sh script for the TBSM language pack as described for Solaris, the following error message is received:
./setup.sh: test: unknown operator == Installation cannot be performed.

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.

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.

BMC’s CTO Tom Bishop responds to Michael Biddick’s Information Week Article and adds to the conversation.

The article also makes an incorrect generalization by suggesting that smaller vendors do a better job of “playing well with others.” BMC – a charter member of the ‘Big Four’ management vendors – provides solutions that operate well in heterogeneous environments and integrate with the broadest range of technologies possible. This allows organizations to utilize current IT investments instead of replacing and beginning anew. As we tell our customers every day, a correct implementation of BMC’s BSM strategy makes our competitor products better. This is a fundamental difference between BMC and our competitors.

One of the biggest challenges I see personally, am asked by clients and integrators constantly, and see a very large amount of traffic headed to my blog from Google searches is around integration difficulties with the BMC Atrium CMDB. I’d like to invite Tom or some of his team to respond and share more about how client’s investments in other vendor technology and products can be improved, simplified or even realized when they desire to leverage the powerful information in the Atrium CMDB, especially complex service relationships and CI information.

I’m aware of the new(ish) Atrium Integration Engine, but I’m pretty sure we (IBM Tivloli) are not exploiting it in any way formally. Can we get a discussion going or information out there in the BMCDN or other place on integrating BMC Atrium with core IBM Tivoli products. Put the bad blood aside, let’s do it for the customers!