In this series of thought provoking posts I’ve asked for the ability to instrument for Business Service Management (BSM) at the managed system source and introduced a concept for an ITM 6.x BSM Profile and BSM Descriptor File. I’ve also proposed new organizational concepts that would establish end-to-end ownership for BSM within the typical monitoring tools group. As I peel the layers of this ITM 6.x product back, I’m now in search of the capability to create purpose built BSM Situations and BSM Events directly from ITM 6.x.
The first level of maturity in Business Service Management (BSM) is achievable by ensuring that a solid foundation in the fundamentals of network, system, application and service management and monitoring is in place. Where we’re failing our clients is not providing the necessary BSM best practices to help them use ITM 6.x with BSM as the end state. If clients have a well instrumented IT environment and if ITM 6.x has this capability, all events generated from ITM 6.x monitoring should include core BSM contextual information that establishes the most basic level of IT – Business alignment.
There’s no reason this needs to happen using more complex technology or products such as Netcool/Impact, TADDM or a CMDB. Sure, it may help make things easier, but the fact of the matter is that not all clients will have the ideal Tivoli environment with all of our enabling technology and products. Every client I’ve been to in the last two years has a heterogeneous environment with core products from all key vendors. If we don’t think about enabling fundamental BSM capabilities in ALL of our core products, we’re letting our clients down.
This BSM Situation and BSM Event concept would enable ITM 6.x clients to build BSM Situations that generate purpose built BSM Events. The key here is that every situation within ITM 6.x needs to allow for a purpose built BSM Situation with its own BSM contextual information, policies, thresholds, business calendars, etc. to be associated with it. This would then enable key BSM Event field information to be mapped into the core event emitted. BSM Situations and BSM Events may stand on their own and never be seen by the traditional NOC/EOC or support operator. Think of certain information such as common system information, metrics, KPIs, performance or capacity data that simply flows northbound to build or drive the BSM models and scorecards within TBSM.
Some of my initial questions:
- What capabilities do we have to do something like this?
- Could a BSM Situation be triggered by another situation and map in key BSM information into the generated event?
- What attributes can be mapped in?
- Is there a limit?
- Can attributes read from a file (the BSM Descriptor file) on the managed system?
- Can there be custom attributes defined in the BSM Situation?
- How many?
- How and where does information get mapped into the event format?
- How can every field of a generated event be controlled, overwritten or customized? (message summary, custom fields, etc.)
- Can I create custom slots/fields in the outgoing event?
- How many?
My initial queries to the experts and skimming of our manuals and other internal training materials leads me to the conclusion that these fundamental systems management capabilities do not exist in ITM 6.x. I hope I am wrong. I hope there is some way to do this. My end state objective here is that I get events flowing northbound from ITM 6.x monitoring that convey the critical BSM information within the event such as business services, applications, transactions, LoB, Clients, server OS, location, support group, compliance/risk classification, business impact, etc. I do not want to have to add this upstream unless it’s absolutely necessary.
In an effort to collaborate on how to generate powerful events that convey the most fundamental IT – Business alignment and help clients reach the first phase of Business Service Management, DevCampTivoli has been created. The theme for this event is “Collaborative Development of End-to-End BSM Solutions”. The desired outcome is to come up various approaches for developing a BSM Situations and BSM Events from ITM 6.x and the necessary configurations within the Tivoli EIF probe, Netcool/OMNIbus and TBSM 4.x that can be easily customized and implemented at any client. Whatever the DevCampTivoli outcome is it will be freely available to anyone to take, modify and use to improve their BSM deployments.
Take a few minutes to visit DevCampTivoli. This event will be the May 17-18, 2008 which is the weekend before the annual IBM Tivoli User Conference Pulse 2008 in Orlando, FL. The thought and hope is that SME’s and practitioners in ITM, Netcool/OMNIbus and TBSM will already be coming to Pulse 2008 and will be able to come in a couple days earlier to participate.
More to follow…
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