It was good to get back to the Atlanta Network and Systems Management Technical User Group (ANSMTUG) meetings again last night. I was reminded by Scott Parker that it will be coming up on five years since I founded this user group. I’m glad that Scott’s been able to pour some time and energy into it and keep it moving this year.

I missed Erik Martin’s initial presentation on Netuitive at the ATL ITSMF LIG meeting a few months back so it was good to hear him speak last night at the ANSMTUG meeting. Erik is a Director in the IT Operations Technology Transformation group within AT&T (Cingular).

Erik spoke about how they’ve branded their deployment of Netuitive SI and SA as their statistical-based predictive alerting or “SPA” service and how it is changing the way back office (enterprise) IT Operations is thinking about infrastructure, application and service management. I’m pretty familiar with the implementation there and have spoken at length with the folks who implemented it. Erik brought a higher level perspective which was good to hear.

AT&T is feeding Netuitive SI and SA with data from their traditional systems management tools such as BMC Patrol and HP/Mercury BAC/Topaz. They have plans to add in additional HP OVO and CA/Wily data as well. They mentioned integration with one or more of the “CMDBs” to provide some level of service model/topology information to avoid doing this manually.

Some of the things that I’ve been talking about in my blog about Netuitive and the players in this predictive/proactive space were validated last night by Netuitive’s biggest customer and actually by their VP of Sales Tony Gilbert.

My take aways:

– You need to be a good social engineer to gain support, implementation and operations success with predictive/proactive solutions. Too many folks are skeptical and need to be convinced one way or another that it can and does work. This is very much similar to the challenges of deploying ITIL processes and/or BSM solutions.

– You can’t change the IT Operations and Application Support group’s perspectives or reactive nature overnight, you’ve got to invest time, energy, money and training into changing the culture. This must be through top down leadership by example, and in my opinion, through organizational change, compensation and incentives.

– Operationalizing the solution will be one of your biggest challenges. At some point, you may need to just blindly cut over and not advertise that there’s some “magical tool” behind the scenes. Tony validated that they’re still learning as a vendor how to help clients in this area, with much of that learning from AT&T’s deployment.

– You can’t expect value over night. Expect at least six months or more to allow these solutions to build up enough data to provide high quality results.

– At some point you have to let the results stand on their own. AT&T has been posting screenshots and information to the Intranet to show how Netuitive alerted or would have warned in advance of other monitoring tools or IT Operations response. Their is nothing more pleasing than showing that your “controversial” tool indicated a problem before the incumbent or home grown tool or script did and that gets the needed attention of management.

– Applying this type of predictive/proactive solution to the tried and true, stable and standard infrastructure, applications and services is the no-brainer application of Netuitive. Using standard tools in addition to Netuitive for emerging technology adds to the comfort level until their stability has been reached and Netuitive’s has accumulated enough data.

Some may get the perception that I do not like Netuitive from reading my blog. That’s never been the case. I certainly didn’t agree with their original marketing campaign and claims of “BSM by Lunch”, which no longer appears to be in use. My main area of strong interest for discussion is breaking down the “secret sauce” (the patented statistical models) in such a way that you, the readers and practitioners who’ve been doing this stuff a long time could understand it, compare it to what you do now, and learn that yes, this is important and viable technology.

The private and public comments and feedback you’ve shared validate that these types of discussions are wanted. You’ve said you want the openness, transparency and “to the point” discussions so you can see the potential that a predictive/proactive solution can provide within the day-to-day chaos you’re dealing with.

Netuitive has an open invitation to guest author on my blog or conduct podcasts with me and talk about these things. Integrien has participated to some degree here as well. (Steve???)

Links that I have found interesting for December 9th:

• Dissecting the Bull: Novell and Microsoft: Risk Assessment – On the optimistic side, the variety of products is a safety feature, and only the Workgroup and Service segments had declining revenues. The acquisitions of Platespin and Managed Objects should help Novell keep close to the cutting edge in 2009.
• HP Software Universe and the big announcements – Network Management Center – NNMi v8.10 adds a number of features:

  * Advanced map support – hierarchical container views built from node groups
  * Thresholding on device metrics such as CPU and memory. Also checking status on items such as fans and power supplies
  * iSPI Performance also adds reporting on device metrics
  * Path View is enhanced to support integration (NNMi Advanced only) with HP Route Analytics software (RAMS). This shows directional equal cost multi-paths
  * Support for application level failover. This adds to the high availability support using cluster technology.
  * A new version of AlarmPoint, 4.0, is shipping in the box with NNMi 8.10
  * And an advanced version of NNMi with the creative name NNMi Advanced – which adds HP RAMS integration and support for virtualized networks: HSRP, VRRP and aggregated ports

• EMA Impact Brief Applauds Zyrion's Innovative BSM Offering and Unique Service Container Technology – Zyrion Inc., a provider of BSM and IT infrastructure monitoring software for mid-market enterprises, today announced that the Zyrion Traverse™ business service management (BSM) solution was praised by leading analyst firm, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) in its latest Impact Brief paper, "Zyrion Releases Traverse – Business Service Management for the Mid-Market." EMA cites Zyrion Traverse for its unique Business Service Container technology which links infrastructure components to services, enabling the much sought after end-to-end dashboard capability that the mid-market requires.