WYNTK on TBSM v4.2 Preparation: The Importance of Events

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.