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.
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Hi,
I have put following query in TME10 forum and Doug McClure replied that it is possible. Can you provide me detail how we can acheive this using TADDM.
We have around 90 Servers (AIX, Sun Solaris, Windows 2000/2003). We want to
use TADDM to discover these Servers and applications in phases as follows:
Phase 1. On Weekend morning we want the TADDM to discover all the Servers
(90 servers) using Generic or SNMP Sensors without providing any Access to
TADDM on these Servers.
Phase 2. After discovering all these servers we will identify 5-10 Servers
for more detailed discovery of Applications for Dependency and
configurations detail to build Application Topology. At this time we can
provide Read Only Access required to discover the Servers/Applications on
these 5-10 Servers.
We need to know can we do this phase wise discovery using TADDM or do we
need to provide Read Only access even in Phase 1.
Rizawn,
I strongly recommend reviewing the IBM Redbook for ITCCMDB (including CMDB/CDTS/TADDM) sections 2, 3 and 4.
First, define your networks/sub-nets or specific hosts that you want to perform discovery on. You can set up multiple profiles for these scopes. You may wish to create a specific scope for each server operating system, function, etc.
Next, you’ll need to define what you want to have happen in this initial phase 1 limited discovery. You’ll need to decide whether you’ll want to login to systems via SSH or other protocolst or only leverage SNMP/WMI. You need to define what generic means to you and set up CDTS/TADDM that way. If you don’t want to login to a server or application, don’t provide the access credentials.
Review the documents and the Custom Servers and check/uncheck those items you want in the phase 1 discovery. You probably don’t need to worry about applications or services at this point.
Run the discovery and review what you’ve got. Start to ratchet up the depth and breadth of discovery by adding more access credentials and turning on more custom servers (or creat more custom server profiles). This would be your phase 2 discovery.
The next steps would be to start to organize the discovered configuration items into applications and services. This is where the real value comes together! You’ll likely need to work with other groups than the server and network folks to tie all of this together. Bring in the application and security folks as well – early in the process. Make sure they’re all aware of what’s happening and contribute. Show them examples of reports or how they can access the CMDB and leverage the configuration data in their own ways. Get them hooked on that and they’ll be sure to cooperate and contribute!
HTH,
Doug