thoughts on business, service and technology operations and management

Links that I have found interesting for August 28th:

• Osmius: The Opensource Monitoring Tool - Osmius allow us to monitor and supervise anything connected to our network. These elements could be attached to:

  * Server Network : Linux, Windows, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, VxWorks, OpenVMS, …
  * Services : Databases, Web Services, App. Services, SAP, …
  * Sensors : Pressure, Temperature, Industrial,SCADA,Solar Pannels, …
  * Domotic Networks : Fire detectors, surveillance elements and access control, …
  * Other types : To develop a new Osmius agent is extremely easy, fast and robust.

Links that I have found interesting for August 27th:

• Netuitive Now Predicts Performance Issues for Oracle Databases - Netuitive, Inc., the leader in real-time analysis software for business service management (BSM), today announced that its real-time analysis software has been successfully integrated with Oracle Enterprise Manager. With this integration, Oracle Enterprise Manager customers are able to predict, diagnose and resolve Oracle database performance issues in real-time, dramatically improving the performance management of their database environments.

Links that I have found interesting for August 25th:

• The Data Center Journal - Where IT, Facilities and Design Meet - Think like a Pilot to Build an Effective IT Dashboard - Having implemented hundreds of IT dashboard projects for customers around the world, we’ve learned that there’s an equivalent “six pack” of information that lets an IT executive know at any given time whether he’s “open for business”. For each mission-critical service or application, these include:

  - Application availability
  - IT component availability
  - Application response time
  - Application transaction volume
  - IT alarm summary
  - Trouble ticket summary

  ** I'd say that there'd better be more important things for an IT EXECUTIVE to want to see/worry about than lower level IT Component Availability and IT Alarm information. **

Links that I have found interesting for August 22nd:

• Chronicles of a Wandering Mind » Announcing RapidInsight as an open source project and getting slammed for it - Next think I know, I was kicked out of the mailing list by the administrator (Jim Popovitch) for “unsolicited commercial solicitation”. You can take a look at the email and judge yourself. I certainly don’t see it as such. There is well established precedence where open source projects are mentioned freely including ones by the mailing list admins. I replied to Jim’s email explaining my point of view and left it at that. As much as Netcoolusers is a “community”, it is controlled by two people afaik, and there is no mechanism for due process. They make the rules and they are the judge and the jury.

  Just sigh and move on… But it didn’t end there.

  ** This is just crazy. Anyone with a project that betters someones use of this very expensive software should be allowed to participate in this mailing list. This has been taken out of context and he should be allowed to participate in the list and strongly encouraged to do so. **

The long awaited Tivoli Common Reporting (TCR) (based on BIRT) historical event reports are finally available. The documents and included files assumes that you’ll be archiving your events to the Tivoli Data Warehouse (TDW) using the new TDW Gateway and Reporter schema and these reports will pull from there.

It also looks like this is a MUCH smaller library of reports than the lists of reports I’d seen floating around. Not sure what the deal is there other than maybe it’s a way to justify keeping Netcool/Reporter around??

These should be easy to modify and point to your existing historical event database if you don’t plan to use TDW. Drop them in to TCR associated with TBSM v4.1.1 or upcoming 4.2 and incorporate some very basic event reports into your solution.

Download from OPAL here.

With Tivoli Business Service Manager (TBSM) v4.2 planned for general availability within the next few months, I feel that it’s very important that I provide some insight into things that all of our current (any version) and prospective TBSM clients begin to consider in advance of their migration/upgrade to or initial deployment of TBSM v4.2 in the near future.

The next generation of Tivoli Business Service Manager (TBSM) is different and offers opportunities for reevaluating the past to succeed in the future. The architectural options, operating scenarios, product features and capabilities are likely significantly different than those you may be currently using today. To fully exploit the new release, I will be sharing some thoughts and ideas for you to consider as you plan for your upgrade/migration or initial deployment.

First off, I strongly encourage you to not treat your migration and upgrade as just another routine step in the TBSM maintenance lifecycle. I strongly recommend that you reevaluate how you’ve used TBSM in the past. You may not need to do everything you’ve done previously – and probably shouldn’t anyway. There may be many more efficient alternative approaches you should consider.

I’d start be brainstorming some fairly simple and straightforward questions.

• Are you getting the expected value from your previous TBSM deployment?
• Does it provide measurable benefit to the business?
• Is it a critical application, used daily or something that’s occasionally referenced?
• Does it make peoples jobs easier?
• Do you know exactly why something is in there, what causes it to turn red, yellow or green?
• Is it kept up to date and accurate?
• Do you enjoy using TBSM within your operating environments?
• Does it make peoples jobs easier?
• Do your operations and support teams “trust” what you’re showing them?

If it’s hard for you to answer these questions or your answers are less than positive, it’s really important that you think deeply about how you’ll adopt TBSM v4.2 within your environment. I strongly believe that with the right strategy, roadmap, design and plans, you can significantly improve your implementation of TBSM and its acceptance within your organization.

Furthermore, I’ve seen far too many operating environments over the past few years that have yet to adopt a true consolidated operations environment. Are you operating in a silo with your current TBSM deployment? Is TBSM only used for the network, distributed or mainframe group within your organization? Why? Why not consider leveraging the industry leading capabilities of the Netcool/OMNIbus dependency and deploy a consolidated TBSM architecture? Work the organizational problems; establish the vision for consolidated operations and true end-to-end service management within TBSM. You have the technology and product capability, why not use it? Your chances of realizing true value oriented Business Service Management are very poor if you can’t work towards this consolidated model.

The more effort and time you place in architecture, design and planning, the more successful you will be. Your tactical efforts will ultimately fail without a strategic direction and purpose. TBSM v4.2 and the Tivoli Integrated Portal (TIP) platform offers many new architectural options to consider. Become familiar with these and the plans for broader based TIP adoption across the Tivoli portfolio. If you have a goal of a consolidated TIP architecture servicing the needs of numerous core products, the typical enterprise tools groups will need to ramp up skill sets in this new area quickly. Capacity planning, performance, large scale high availability and failover are all areas worthy of significant investigation and testing.

If you own other soon to be TIP enabled products such as Netcool/WebTop or Tivoli Network Manager (ITNM), how will you design and implement a consolidated platform for multiple TIP enabled products? Will you take advantage of the Tivoli Common Reporting (TCR) capability? How will you plan for broad based TCR usage? Will you use a batch oriented reporting mode to avoid potential performance impacts on the core products? What will your access, authentication and authorization schema be? How will you leverage the new Single Sign On (SSO) capability?

I’ll try and cover as many areas as I can without getting into any confidential areas while products are not in a GA state. I think there are a lot of things that should be done now and even more as the products are GA and available for you to explore within your lab or development environments.

Next up - the importance of events.

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.

Links that I have found interesting for August 21st:

• SPSS, Data Mining, Statistical Analysis Software, Predictive Analysis, Predictive Analytics, Decision Support Systems - SPSS has become a leader in predictive analytics technologies through a combination of commitment to innovation and dedication to customers. You will find SPSS customers in virtually every industry, including telecommunications, banking, finance, insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, consumer packaged goods, higher education, government, and market research.

  Customers use SPSS predictive analytics software to anticipate change, manage both daily operations and special initiatives more effectively, and realize positive, measurable benefits. By incorporating predictive analytics into their daily operations, they become Predictive Enterprises—able to direct and automate decisions to meet business goals and achieve measurable competitive advantage.

• Nimsoft Ranks as the Fastest Growing Systems Management Software Company - "Our ranking recognizes our high customer adoption and satisfaction," said Gary Read, president and CEO of Nimsoft. "I see none of our competitors growing their customer base as rapidly or replacing as many Big 4 solutions as Nimsoft. The company's momentum can only be attributed to our dedication to our customers' needs as well as delivering a highly effective solution that drastically reduces costs and increases efficiencies."

Well, this should be an interesting meeting providing they don’t use it as a sales and marketing demo. I hope Eric and the team talk down in the weeds on how the technology works, doesn’t work, benefits AT&T and most importantly how they’ve operationalized the concept of being proactive and predictive in what’s normally a very reactive environment.

The meeting information is available here.