In a previous post, I've outlined a scenario and how different management tools may need to be integrated to support the IT processes.
Before getting into the particular integrations between tools for different management disciplines, I'd like to describe a framework to define different integration types with the hope that the classification will help when discussing different integration options in the posts that will follow.
Integration in the Data Layer
This type of integration suggests exchange of data between the management systems in the back end. Typical examples may be exchanging data between inventory, provisioning and monitoring systems. Monitoring system may discover the IT resources and populate the inventory database, or other way around the monitoring system can get the list of resources that should be monitored from the inventory system, etc.
The challenges we face when implementing this type of integration solutions may include:
- lack of standard, flexible, open, reliable APIs
- difficulties in consolidating different data models from different management systems
- difficulties in identifying the same resource in different systems due to different naming
- vendors changing internal data store, API, or the schema between releases and breaking the integration
- keeping the two systems synchronized
- preventing bad data in one system to pollute the data in the other system
Functional Integration
Functional integration goes deeper where management systems not only exchange data but also use functionalities of each other as part of their own capabilities. This type of integration typically require API level integration between the tools.
An event management system may use the inventory system to correlate events, and customer management system to prioritize events based on customer service level agreements, etc.
Event Integration
This is more likely to be the most common integration type where management systems generate and send events when specific conditions occur. Monitoring systems may send events when a threshold is reached, when an application is not available, ticketing systems send events when a ticket is opened/updated/closed etc.
By far the most common event mechanism between management systems is SNMP traps. Almost all management tools are capable of sending and receiving SNMP traps, although the amount of work one has to do at each tool to process the traps may vary significantly. Setting up event integration using SNMP traps is relatively easy, low tech solution and many of the management tools in the market claim to have “integration” by just relying on the fact that they can send/receive SNMP traps. The suitability of SNMP traps as an event integration mechanism is debatable however. SNMP is an unreliable protocol, traps can be dropped when there are issues with the network, etc. The content that can be transferred in an SNMP trap is also limited.
Flat files are also another event integration method used extensively. The flexible format of the flat files often makes files (log files etc.) often the defacto integration medium.
When the receiver is a human and not another management system, email is the most common event integration method.
The shortcomings of the event integration is the fact that events do not typically contain any context. It often requires significant level of custom work to make sense of an event sent by one system on the other, therefore event integration is easy to begin with but often involve high level of maintenance.
Presentation Layer Integration
In this type of integration, management systems are not integrated in the back end; data or event exchange does not occur between the systems. Instead the information from different management systems is integrated in the UI, when presented to the user. HP OpenView NNM is probably the most commonly known example of this type of integration. HPOV NNM is used by many management tools as the UI platform, where management tools can be launched in context of the object in HPOV NNM.
Frameworks like CA Unicenter and Tivoli can also be considered presentation layer integration solutions (they also provide other integration points) since they can be used as the main UI for the users where all other management tools are launched.
A more sophisticated recent presentation layer integration approach is using a single UI to interact with different management systems where a back end server integrates with management system and presents information using the same UI framework. This approach is considered to opportunistic as it can be implemented quickly, and typically suitable when access to all the functionality of each management tool is not required and a subset is sufficient.
Now that we have established our scenario and laid out a framework to talk about different integration types, we are ready to move on to analyzing integration requirements between different management disciplines. First stop, integrating and event management tool and a trouble ticketing solution. What are the common patterns? How can/should we integrate them to support the IT processes?
