Category — ITIL

In addition to our ongoing empahasis on IBM Service Management you’ll soon start to hear more and more messaging and positioning around IBM’s Governance and Risk Management focus areas.

IBM Governance and Risk Management
Techweb Portal on IT Governance and Risk Management

Dig in and get up to speed. I sense more cool commercials and ads in the future!

Just found the CMDB Federation white paper today. This is the much anticipated first deliverable from the joint working group made up of IBM, BMC, HP, Microsoft, Fujitsu and CA. You can download it here or here.

Update - Looks like they have the beginnings of a website now here.

Update - IT Skeptic’s Post here.

Hank Marquis has some good commentary here.

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.

Wow! This looks really interesting and brings a wealth of potential for our ITSM portfolio. I see all kinds of gaps being addressed in our portfolio with this - Service Desk, Service Catalog, enhanced Discovery, enahnced Asset Management, enhanced SLA & SLA monitoring, etc.

Yes, re-read that - Service Desk & Service Catalogs! I look forward to seeing what develops here!

Some links to info - more to come I’m sure.

Acquisition PR

ITSM Solutions

Maximo Discovery

Maximo IT Asset Management (ITAM)

Maximo Service Desk

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!