Why is the purpose of "integration"? Improving operational efficiencies is one reason. It does not make sense for operations folks to hunt down information about a problem in different systems. They need to be able to access the data seamlessly as they go through their processes instead of thinking about where they find which data, deal with the hassle of working with different products. Information needs to be at their finger tips so to speak...
I had written a post about a typical support process to aid in future discussions on integration, it may help setting the stage here as well. “Event views” are very common front ends for operations folks. Consolidating events into a single locations and providing view to the users have been the most commonly seen approach to provide the information necessary for operations in the operations centers.
There are handful of widely used patterns we see in the user interfaces when implementing the approach stated above:
Summary to detail drill down
In this pattern, events are grouped using filters and represented in concise manner, using graphs, charts, etc. One of the major challenges of the event consolidation approach is that there are too many events, hence it's not feasible for an operator to look at the events together. To overcome this issue, events are typically segmented into logical groups (by geography, organization, service, technology, interest, etc.) so that user can see the state of each of the segments and drill down to the details to see all the events for that segment as needed, (hence go from summary to detail).
The status of the segments may be represented bar/pie charts, tables, hierarchical trees, etc. and the drilled down events use the standard table format where events are typically shown. Almost all of the products in the marketplace provide this pattern as it is easily understood by everyone.
Event Enrichment
By default the events in management tools would have basic technical information available from the event source (log entries, traps, management systems, etc.). The event data by itself is often not enough for the operations folks to make any sense of it. Additional information from other data sources is often needed. Event enrichment approach attempts to solve this problem by adding information to the event that may be useful for the users. This pattern is an example of what I called “Integration in the data layer” in the post about different integration layers.
Typically, the data from the event is used to perform a “lookup”, (query other data sources), retrieve additional data and populate the event fields. This approach makes the additional data gathering process seamless to the users. From the users' perspective, there is no difference between the enriched data and native data.
The data for event enrichment may be in a text file, in a database, in another management system, etc. The event management system typically provides a mechanism to execute code to retrieve the data from the data source for each event and populate the relevant fields.
Ad-hoc user actions
In many cases, event enrichment is not always feasible or desirable approach. The data necessary may be to rich to represent in the fields of an event, data may be too dynamic, there may be performance issue in retrieving the data, external system may not have a standard mechanism to provide the data, user may need to modify the data in the external system etc.
In these type of situations, it is preferred for the user to execute an action, typically from an in-context menu. The action typically launches another application for the user to have access to the additional functionality. Ideally, the new application would launch in-context of the event, without requiring a separate login, taking the user directly to the relevant user interface.
This pattern is an example of “integration in the presentation layer ” as described.
Each of these patterns have their use in different situations. iFountain suite of products provide functionality to address each of these patterns.
RapidInsight provides a simple mechanism to implement integration in the presentation layer. It is very easy to implement ad-hoc actions via right click menus or clickable hyperlinks to retrieve data by either launching native UI of other tools or allowing use of predefined configurable components to represent the relevant information from other systems in a consistent user interface. I'll go through an example of how to do this and why it is sometimes preferable to using native user interfaces in a separate post.
