dougmcclure.net — thoughts on business, service and technology operations and management in the digital transformation era

Tivoli Business Service Manager (TBSM) v4.1.1 IF 12 Available

by doug on March 30, 2009

in IBM, Implementation, TBSM, Tivoli, Usability

They have made IF 12 available for TBSM v4.1.1. Be sure to read the README and do a backup!

Available here.

About this Interim Fix:
————————————

This Interim Fix addresses problems reported in IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager 4.1.1.

* APARs that are included in this Interim Fix:

IZ36557 INCORRECT STATUS BEING REPORTED BY THE TBSM COMMON AGENT

Movement of Services to and from State Maintenance is not reported by TBSM Agent.

IZ38632 RADSHELL IMPORT ERRORS

Customer reported getting Exception messages while trying to import their radshell into TBSM 4.1.1

IZ39269 USER CAN STILL SEE SERVICES IN THE SERVICE VIEWER WITHOUT THE RIGHTS TO DO SO.

A read only user has permission to view certain instances in the tree. Some of these instances have dependents that the user cannot see in the tree. If the user clicks on the instance in the tree to display in the service viewer, the user can see the dependents it doesn’t have permission to view.

IZ42625 BE ABLE TO ALTER THE ALERT STATE OF A RESOURCE WITHIN CUSTOM

There is no way presently to have code that is specific to tree template. A new variable will be passed into the policy, in order to trap code depending on the name of the tree template being used.

IZ42747 TBSM 4.1.1: PROBLEM WITH RESTORING POSTGRES DB

The customer is trying to execute the backup/restore feature of TBSM using the rad_db script. When they execute $NCHOME/bin/rad_db backup -backupfile something.sql They are missing some insert statements for two instances.

IZ43473 UNABLE TO VIEW TOPOLOGY VIEWS ON THIN CLIENTS

Topology views paint and do not show the actual view but the loading icon instead. A refresh of the Iframe does not help.
A refresh of the client browser does not help. When this starts happening all thin client users are impacted.

IZ44517 INCOMING STATUS RULES THRESHOLDS LOST

Import of numerical rules are lost after a restart of the server.

IZ44533 IMPROVE MEMORY USAGE BY TBSM

When allowing the canvas to sit unmanned for long periods of time, parts of the screen will white out and the canvas will
be unviewable. The canvas exhibits a freezing state and cannot correct itself unless the browser is restarted.

* APARs that are included in Interim Fix 11:

IZ33476 INITIAL DISPLAY OF SERVICE IN SERVICE VIEWER FROM DOUBLE CLICK

After clicking on a service in the tree to display in the viewer, the instances that loaded in the viewer would not be fit to view
and would be small and located to the upper left corner of the viewer.

IZ37056 CANNOT LAUNCH AEL/LEL FROM TBSM WHEN LOGGING IN TO TBSM THROUGH LOADBALANCER

When the customer logs into TBSM using the BIGIP loadbalancer, the user cannot see the Webtop AEL or LWEL applets

IZ38526 RAD FAILOVER & FAIL-BACK IS UNEXPECTEDLY UPDATING REMOTE OMNIBUS

If an event storm comes into omnibus during the TBSM failover process, the prior status will be shown instead of the new status and the tally field of the event increases by one.

IZ38629 THERE ARE EVENTS IN OBJECT SERVER MATCHING THIS INSTANCE

In an event storm, some events are not processed by TBSM at times. The user wants a simple way to reprocess the events on demand

IZ39009 CUSTOM CANVAS FREEZES AFTER 4 HOURS.

Service Viewer screen goes white intermittantly. The only way to fix it is to restart Internet Explorer.

IZ39100 CSS FUNCTION TO ALLOW FORMATTING OF NUMERIC RULE OUTPUTS IN THE

Provide a CSS function that will allow the “reformatting” of these KPI values as integers.
Read IZ39100.doc for more information.

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Business Service Management Strategy Tip of the Week #7

by doug on March 24, 2009

in Best Practices, BSM, BSM Strategy, Business Service Management, Implementation, Strategy, Value

Creating the BSM Strategy Draft

In my last post [sorry for delay, traveling too much!], the overall theme for starting to put together a plan of attack for drafting a BSM Strategy was to take the K.I.S.S. approach. Your goal for developing the BSM Strategy is to keep it at as high level as possible with a focused effort at keeping out low level details.

Building upon this K.I.S.S. thought, you should not talk about specific vendors, products or technologies within the strategy document. The objective here is not to bet the chances of a successful outcome, return on investment or effort and competitive differentiation from Business Service Management on any one vendor, tool or technology. The focus instead must be on the outcomes expected from investments and adoption of BSM within your company’s IT and Business units, not on how vendor X or Y spreads their gospel of value and ROI.

Think about this. Are you willing to bet your success (career, promotion, bonus, reputation) on anything other than the sound business decisions based on what you’ve found out to be important to your business units, IT organization and your boss? Keeping focused on these things in the BSM Strategy is critical. You’ll have plenty of time to evaluate vendors, technology and tools AFTER you’ve established an agreed upon BSM Strategy and BSM Requirements and Capabilities document. You’re setting yourself up for failure if you veer off course here.

Technical standards, concepts, methods and practices can be mentioned if they’re ones you wish to adopt as key guiding principles for enabling your Business Service Management Strategy within your company. Avoid the urge to dive into the technical details and only incorporate if you’re reasonably sure that what you’re talking about is understood by those who will read the BSM Strategy document. It may be reasonably safe to talk about ITIL v3, CobIT or ISO 20000 (or others important to your business, industry) if the audience is fairly technical and best practice oriented. If they’re not, don’t! And NEVER copy and paste anything from these best practices or any vendor’s literature. Be original and focused on your company and business objectives.

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Interesting Links for March 20th

by delicious on March 21, 2009

in General

Links that I have found interesting for March 20th:

The 4 Steps of BSM Success – How to Succeed at BSM
There are four fundamental components of successful BSM initiatives:

1.

Defining services
2.

Assessing the business value of those services
3.

Measuring service quality and performance
4.

Selecting and justifying services or service improvement programs

Let's look at each one in turn.

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