Tivoli Business Service Manager v4.2.1 Generally Available

Today marks the start of our journey to improve, innovate and define the next generation of Business Service Management (BSM) within the Tivoli BSM portfolio. What was initially started with TBSM v4.2 and the consolidation of two legacy BSM platforms and adoption of a new consolidated portal environment, TBSM v4.2.1 continues by advancing our capabilities and consumability while focusing on improving the end user’s experience and capabilities to develop BSM use cases, scenarios and solutions.

TBSM v4.2.1 introduces an entirely new service tree portlet. Much snappier and greatly restyled, the ability to map in real time metrics and eventing to create rich “at a glance” views into the health, performance and availability of business services is improved with dynamic sorting, resizing and user persistence.

Addressing one of my biggest pet peeves for the past four years, we now have the ability to add multiple widgets from the same service instance on the same canvas. Now, creating “dummy instances” can be minimized and more efficient modeling can be implemented to map metrics, state and status from an instance into gauges, shapes and prototypes for visualizing the use case, scenario or solution.

With our initial entry into “BSM Analytics”, the Time Window Analyzer (TWA) offers a powerful complement to any BSM use case or scenario. The ability to map in metrics, KPIs, events, or any other data with a time context into “Google Finance” type visualizations offers the ability to analyze cause and effect relationships quickly in a real time or historical context. Overlaying “markers” with eventing, maintenance windows, outages, change activities, etc. can help pinpoint “root cause” events that may be the reason for adverse impact on the trended metrics and KPIs.

With an updated version of the underpinning TIP component, we pick up the ability to export/import typical TIP based components and develop proper navigation scenarios. Performance is greatly improved and I’m seeing great user experience with FF 3.0.13 and Sun JRE 1.6.0.14.

There are a few service viewer portlet updates that you should focus on. You can AND SHOULD use the service viewer portlet for all of your custom canvas based dashboards. DO NOT use the Inline Frame portlet anymore. The new service viewer portlet allows you to set the options needed, hide menus, etc. AND maintains the knowledge of how to respond to mouse clicks where the Inline Frame portlet does not.

And finally, of significance to me as one who installs TBSM dozens of times a year, we now have an upgrade install option to go from v4.2 to v4.2.1! It works as expected! You still have to do an export/import type install to go from any other version to v4.2.1, but this looks like a very good thing going forward.

Check out TBSM v4.2.1 via your Passport Advantage account now! Give me some feedback! Let us know how it goes!