Business Service Management (BSM) requires some level of visibility and insight into the core networks, systems, applications, transactions and processes happening across the IT environment. This visibility and insight requires some contextual understanding of how those things support and enable the key business services, applications, transactions, processes and activities that are critical to the business meeting their goals and objectives. The more emphasis on this contextual understanding we can establish directly from the source systems and applications, the easier and more efficient that operations, event and business service management can be in upstream solutions.
My findings and overall assumption is that most fundamental Tivoli monitoring is implemented in such a way that it’s only enabling the SME groups (SysAdmins, EOC/NOC, etc.) to identify, triage and resolve low level problems. I posed a series of questions to the only two Tivoli Monitoring gurus that I know about to try and gauge what could be done to better equip Tivoli Monitoring clients to implement fundamental system HW/OS and application/database monitoring so that it enables a client to implement true BSM solutions upstream. My intent from this dialog was to start a new series of blog postings called “The Top 10 Things and ITM Client Can/Should Do to Enable BSM and How to Implement Them”.
John “The Uber ITM Guru” Willis bit and we had breakfast to discuss. John’s got a lot of great ideas from what can and should be done from the ITM perspective. He mentioned a few of his clients that really get it and what they’ve done in the past to get there. We talked about the realities of client deployments today, politics, keeping up with constant changes and releases in the products and IT environment. Apparently the game really changed from ITM 5.x to ITM 6.x and things really need to be thought of in a different way making use of the Universal Agent. John’s answers continued to amaze me because of the level of effort it sounded like to do something as simple as this.
I kept coming back to a couple simple scenarios:
- How can I get something as simple as the the operating system name/version, server location, datacenter rack/row embedded in every event coming from an ITM agent?
- How can I get the business service/application that this server/application/database supports embedded in every event coming from an ITM agent?
We’d been discussing collaboration in the community via wiki’s, blogs, mailing lists, etc. for some time now. We landed on the idea of a scenarios based collaboration event focused on how one could solve real world problems using Tivoli products within the Business Service Management space. Something straight from the experts and practitioners out there. Something that shows what can/should be done from end-to-end using ITM 6.2 (and its dependencies) and TBSM 4.1.1 (and its dependencies) to create real world BSM solutions that any Tivoli client could implement.
Introducing DevCamp Tivoli. Our thoughts are that we’d meet before the annual Tivoli Technical User Conference (TTUC) called IBM Pulse next year. The conference next year is planned for May 18-22 so we’re targeting having this DevCampTivoli on Saturday May 17th. We’re betting on SME’s and Practitioners being able to fly in early for the conference they may already be attending and being able to participate in this event. Whatever the outcome of the DevCampTivoli is, we’d like to present that during a BoF session during the conference and on the OPAL site for everyone’s benefit. Listen to my first podcast ever on this topic with John here. Read over John’s blog posting announcing the event here. Visit the DevCampTivoli website and sign up!
More to come on this as we noodle through the concepts. Visit the site and sign up if you’d like to help out. We’re certainly interested in your input towards scenarios and development approaches within ITM 6.2, Tivoli EIF Probe, Netcool/OMNIbus and TBSM 4.1.1.
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I think its a great area to look into and the timing is absolutely correct now, as this BSM idea has been around for sometime.
Being new to this, the biggest challenge I see from reading various articles and by doing the actual implementation of these products (ITM, TADDM, Omnibus, EIF, TBSM) is how to make get business sense out of all the data provided by these tools in a nice executive dashboard or in a very simpler, meaningful manner to end user.
As from my last 2 experience driving major part of ITM Best Practices, via Whitepapers, UA solutions and visits to many customers all around the globe, I think the need for “Best Practices” for BSM space is vital. A forum/team which can show users, using step by step scenarios and uses cases, how TBSM can fit in there environments.
The simpler we can present this idea, the more impact it will have.
Starting with a nice simpler scenarios of ITM with TBSM, involving TBSM.
Then we can go into Capacity Planning tools (Performance Analyzer), SLA, TADDM & CMDB in the picture, as we move forward.
So if I am a customer and wants to get this Solution (ITM/TBSM/Omnibus), I need a simple paper, explaining how the Events from ITM going to TBSM via Omnibus, can show my business picture. So this will require creating some meaningful “Services” (which is also a big area to look into, how to create an efficient service/rule).
So anyways, just my few cents as I am new to this and will be deep diving into BSM and driving Best Practices for BSM.
Thanks Naeem! Between your background and John’s I think we can really bring this concept to life and meet all of our goals! I look forward to speaking with you in more detail soon!
Doug