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Customizing Tivoli Business Service Manager v4 and TADDM Integration

in Application Discovery, Best Practices, Business Service Management, Design Patterns, IBM, Implementation, TADDM, TBSM, Tivoli, Usability, Value, Visualization

We have the start of a pretty good integration between TBSM v4 and TADDM, Tivoli’s Application Discovery and Dependency Mapping product. I say it’s a start because it has a looong way to go to get to where it needs to be for the typical client’s use. There are plenty of challenges with this integration, from performance, scalability and customization.

Within TADDM, you’re pretty much confined to three main containment model constructs. The computer system, the business application and the business service. Within TBSM v4, you can create containment models for anything your heart desires. Getting TADDM’s very configuration item (CI) view of the world to align to reality as built within TBSM v4 is, to say the least, challenging.

Our development organization made a lot of assumptions in their initial release of this integration. Some may be right, but in most cases, clients will want to customize how things are mapped across from TADDM into TBSM v4. The concepts I’m writing about on TBSM Design Patterns will be something you’ll want to map into these eventually. Aligning your own custom templates, integrating your own events and metrics, etc. all requires the careful hacking of XML files and potentially customizing the ESDA policies that drive the SCR. Customizing the Tivoli CDM, custom DLA’s and a GUI based integration that covers mapping TADDM resources to TBSM templates and models is ultimately needed as well.

Here are some resources to help get you started. I strongly encourage you to consider ISST Services to help you along in this journey. It’s not for the faint of heart.

Very TADDM specific resources that may be of help. Consider these as you try to speak the same language as your TADDM administrators do.