Category — Netcool/Impact

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.

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.

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!

This is Dan Tabor’s Business Service Management (BSM) presentation and audio from the IBM Tivoli Pulse user conference held last month in Orlando. Dan is the Senior Product Manager for BSM and a few of the enabling BSM products and acronyms (TBSM, Impact, TADDM, TIP, TCR) at IBM Tivoli. Listening to this presentation, you’ll hear Dan share what BSM is and how he’s driving IBM Tivoli’s BSM direction in current and future releases of the BSM portfolio from IBM Tivoli.

While Dan and I agree on many things related to BSM and the direction IBM Tivoli should be taking or where investments should be made, we agree to disagree in many areas. Dan has the very difficult job of balancing customer wants and needs with the difficult IBM politics, process and bigger picture.

If you’d like to hear more about IBM Tivoli’s Business Service Management story and solutions, feel free to contact myself or your local IBM Tivoli (or Business Partner) representatives.

See the screencast presentation here.

A new OPAL submission for Tivoli Netcool/Impact today.

The Netcool/Impact policy included with this solution, IPLtoXML, can be used to convert data obtained from non-XML sources into XML. This XML can then be saved out to a file or pushed to the interface of an application that expects data in XML form.

Available here.

A new Tivoli Netcool/Impact contribution on OPAL detailing internal performance testing results and a guide to testing the performance of your Tivoli Netcool/Impact v4.0 server.

Available here.

Probably one of the coolest features of our Netcool/Impact product is something called Operator Views. Think of them as a way to federate reports and dashboards from anything that Netcool/Impact has access to via its library of data source adapters. I’ve seen some really cool things created using them. Sky’s the limit here folks. If you have or are interested in Netcool/Impact, you’ll want to develop these. There are plenty of quick win scenarios for how they can be used to provide value to your internal clients.

Available here on OPAL.

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This document steps the reader through building an interactive dashboard using Tivoli Netcool/Impact Operator View smart tags within HTML. Dashboards built using these Operator View smart tags can display any data accessible by Tivoli Netcool/Impact, enabling the user to build dashboards that display data obtained in real time from applications, data buses, via web services, etc.

Our fifth Netcool/Impact OPAL contribution!

Available here.

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Netcool/Impact can send notifications via email, instant messages, and paging (email based or CLI based). Netcool/Impact provides an effective way of notifying people about events occurring in your environment. The event can exist in Netcool/OMNIbus, other SQL based data sources, on a JMS bus, or it can sent via Web Services message. Impact can trigger a notification policy to run on receipt of an event in any of these sources. The notification policy can send a notification to a recipient identified in the event or it can find the recipient in an external data source.

Impact can also receive emails and instant messages. When a message is received, Impact can run a policy which parses the message and takes some action. A good example of using this functionality would be to have someone acknowledge receipt of a notification by forwarding the email to Impact, with the word acknowledged in the message body. Impact could parse that from the message and flag the event. In the same scenario, if the recipient has not acknowledged the notification within a specified time period, the event could be escalated by sending a notification to a backup contact, or the original contact supervisor.

Impact allows for a great deal of logic to be applied to notification scenarios. You can control who gets a notification, when they get it, how the message appears, what information is in the message, how to escalate, etc. Information related to the event that resides in other sources can be included in the message, saving the recipient a great deal of time. For example, providing a support phone number in a notification of a software issue could be of great benefit to someone in their car, on a train, or at lunch, without access to this information.