Category — CMDB

I will try and get some time on the calendar with some of the internal IBMers working on this effort and put another interview out there. I found out about this via a BMC Blog posting by Van Wiles here.

Interesting commentary will likely appear in the trade rags and skeptic blogs alike very soon.

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CMDB Federation Consortium completes white paper describing the CMDB Federation specification.

Well, we did it!

The CMDBF Consortium has completed its first objective, which is a white paper describing the proposed approach to federating multiple “Management Data Repositories” into a “Federated CMDB.”

Just released here.

All tied up into the BSM, CMDB and IT process messaging.

Question - Does BMC have a pure-play BSM solution or are they about the sum of all the parts?

A new draft release of the IBM Redbook is available here.

Description:

The IBM Change Configuration Management Database Configuration Discovery and Tracking Server v1.1 (CCMDB-CTDS) is an agentless deep discovery tool which automatically can discover configuration information of application systems, their components and relationships, as well as installed hardware and software components in a complex computer server environment - and track changes to them over time.

IBM CCMDB-CDTS v1.1 is the core component of IBM’s IT Service Management strategy, and fills the role of Change Management Database, for your implementation of ITIL aligned IT processes.

This book provides help and recommendations on how to get started deploying IBM Change Configuration Management Database Configuration Discovery and Tracking Server v1.1 and provides step-by-step instuctions for setting up scanning in your own environment. In addition, the various interfaces that can be used to integrate CCMDB-CDTS with your existing IT Service Management processes are described.

The information in this book is aimed for IT Specialists who will be responsible for implementing IT Service Management solutions based on IBM Change Configuration Management Database Configuration Discovery and Tracking Server v1.1

I started optimizing my installations of these products today to “take back control” of all the browsers I have open on my desktop.

Netcool/RAD 3.0 was the first product to ship with our Netcool GUI Foundation (NGF) solution for establishing a common GUI framework/portal for all of our products. One of the features of this is the ability to create portlets of other content, applications, web pages, etc. to create all-in-one pages for the various audiences within any given environment. Since I’ve been working with Netcool/RAD 3.0 and the new ITCCMDB CDTS/CMDB (fka ITADDM) solution, I thought this would be a good starting point.

This picture is showing the embedding of the main CDTS/CMDB GUI into a new “page” I’ve called ITSM. Within the ITSM “page” I’ve created multiple “tabs” to represent the various GUIs I want to embed. Each tab has a “viewpoint” which is the actual content being embedded.

This tab is showing the CDTS/CMDB Domain Manager GUI after logging in.

This tab is showing the CDTS/CMDB Domain Manager Application Summary display. These are many of the discovered and modeled applications running on my laptop that I created after installing the ITCCMDB CDTS/CMDB product a few weeks back.

The “tab” approach for every piece of content or GUI probably won’t scale due to the horizontal real estate available. NGF offers the ability to embed “menu panes” within a “tab” so that may be best for consolidating similar solution GUIs. Each of these would be a “tab” across the top with a focused “menu pane” on each “tab”. I’ll probably end up with something like this.

CDTS/CMDB
- CDTS Main GUI (Web)
- CDTS Domain Manager GUI (Web)
- CDTS Product Console (Java Client)

PMIP
- PMIP Main GUI
- ITPM - Change Management
- ITPM - Release Management
- ITPM - Availability Management
- ITPM - Storage Management

CDTS/CMDB - Netcool/RAD 3.0 Integration
- Integration Status
- Integration Schedule
- Integration Artifacts

There’s nothing too difficult about this if you’re working with Netcool/RAD 3.0 and the NGF framework. I’ll talk more about the details of how to do it later after I figure out some of the quirkiness that I experienced as I worked on this today.

Dennis and the guys at EMA put this on yesterday. It was rather good and provides some different perspectives into the CMDB concept, how people are trying to approach implementing it and the not so uncommon challenges trying to get it done.

Check out the replay here:

http://www.emausa.com/ema_lead.php?ls=cmdbaws0706&bs=recording2

My first in a series of postings over at the IT Service Management - Practical Insights blog focused on what’s really happening with the CMDB Federation Consortium. My goal is to share with practitioners worldwide what the plans are, how things are progressing and just how real this multi-vendor (and soon non-vendor practitioner and end-user) collaborative effort is.

Join in the conversation on my blog or over at the IT Service Management - Practical Insights. I’ll certainly do what I can to get any questions answered! I expect to post every month or so or as significant events or highlights are announced.

The first article is available here. Join in the conversation!

I was able to work through the last few issues I was having thanks to the tips and tricks section of the ITCCMDB redbook.

Discovery started after defining a simple scope range for the RHEL system I run in a VMware image on my laptop. There is lots of flexibility here to control what’s discovered and what’s excluded. The initial discovery consisted of basic port scans, ping, ICMP and ssh probes of my host to see what was happening. Various sensors are triggered based on what it finds and a very basic set of information is collected.

Conducting a more detailed discovery was as simple as configuring proper credentials for my RHEL image and applications so the discovery process can log in and collect much richer information. Full information about my RHEL image, DB2 database, etc. was collected after adding this information and rediscovering.

I’ve now got a lot of discovered information about what’s installed in my RHEL environment (Netcool/OMNIbus, Netcool/RAD 3.0, Netcool/NGF, Netcool/License Manager, Netcool/Security Manager, ITCCMDB (CDTS/CMDB)). Most of this makes sense to me as I’m familiar with all of those application characteristics. However, there’s not enough context to really know what 192.168.228.2 port 4100 is. Creating custom servers profiles allows you to add the right context to the discovered information for grouping everything into applications and services. There are quite a few out-of-the-box custom servers that you’d expect to find in a large IT environment so you’re likely to have a lot of information after your first discovery. Building custom servers is where you’ll spend a lot of time in custom service and application environments.

There’s a lot of flexibility in how to build custom server profiles. The simplest way was to match a port that was discovered, such as port 4100. I know this port is for the Netcool/ObjectServer. I can add more parameters that must match such as the program name “nco_objsvr” to be sure that I get an accurate match for future discoveries. Any future discovery information matching port 4100 and “nco_objsvr” will now show up as Netcool/ObjectServer applications.

It’s in the custom server profile that I also can define what configuration files, software modules or application descriptors that I want to discover and track. What I like about this is you can actually download and track the contents of configuration files, directories or if something changes with a module or binary.

I’ve got a lot to play with now. Next steps are building business services and applications. Stay tuned.

I’ve almost got this installed now so I can start to kick the tires of at least the Configuration Discovery Tracking Server (CDTS) and CMDB portion of this powerful CCMDB solution. I don’t have enough horsepower in my laptop to be able to run the Process Management Integration Platform (PMIP) or any of the IT Process Managers (ITPM), so I’ll be sticking with the discovery, mapping and CMDB portions (former TADDM technology). Most of my work will be here, especially working on the integration of this with Netcool/RAD 3.0.

Some initial notes:

- Installer: Was pleasantly easy. After downloading software over my DSL connection for what seemed like an eternity, the installer seamlessly guided me through getting the CDTS installed. I selected all of the defaults, added a few passwords, and had the installer go ahead and install DB2 for me.

** Note: One problem I ran into was associated with a component in my RHEL 4 installation called “autodir”. This program takes over some of the systems administration tasks related to creating home directories. It takes over the /home directory and the installer program failed to create any of the user accounts and home directories needed by the CMDB and DB2 until I turned off “autodir”.

- Documentation: I seemed to be jumping between manuals to find what I needed for getting the CDTS/CMDB portion installed. Many of the manuals have information for installing the entire ITCCMDB solution which got confusing at times. The best manual for the CDTS/CMDB portion was probably what was in the /opt/IBM/cmdb/doc/cmdb_install.pdf because it was only on the CDTS/CMDB portion. The draft redbook was also useful.

- Web GUI: Still as nice as ever. Collation did a great job on this and it’s continues to shine in this release.

I’m still working through some issues before I can get up and operational with discovery and populating the CMDB. More notes to follow.