Blogs

We've used number of different technologies to provide persistence service in our products. Our main concerns/requirements can be listed as:

1. performance. The persistence mechanism should perform well since we manage real time monitoring data. Number of write/read operations per second as well as performance of the queries are key performance aspects for us.
2. A fixed/static schema is not suitable for our products since they support dynamic modeling. Mapping from Object to its storage should be flexible.
3. Querying the object storage should be easy and should not require developer skills.

In the first iteration of our products, we had used a database. However, relational databases have a rigid schema structure, hence modification of the schema by the users was problematic. The performance of the solution was also not ideal. Both read/write and search performance were not adequate for many use cases that we have.  read more »

Can we have a single unified model to describe all IT "assets", everything IT cares about? The idea is certainly appealing, and excites any IT management geek, this one included. Cote has a post where he articulates the advantages of having one standard model to model everything in IT and argues one of the big 4 open sourcing their CMDB solution may be the fastest way to get there. Can this happen? Stranger things did happen but I'd put likelyhood of this one as very low. It would certainly shake things up if a major CMDB became open source and if (this is a big if as well) the model used by it gained traction. One can only hope, not much more we can do.  read more »

The problem is well known and stated over and over again throughout the last decade. Most IT organizations are structured around functional silos of expertise and too focused on technology, hence there is a gap between IT organizations and the business. It is mostly agreed that IT organizations need to move toward service management, but there are different schools of thought on how to get there.

My personal journey in this realm started over a decade ago when I worked for a very large system integrator/outsourcing company that was organized in very distinct, geographically dispersed silos.  read more »

It's been almost three weeks since we've announced our intention to start releasing our products as open source. I had finished my previous post by hinting that RapidCMDB, a federated CMDB solution was going to be the first open source project to be released. So what happened in the last three weeks? What's the hold up?
The delay is primarily due to a major architectural decision we have taken. All our previous products share a common server platform called RapidServer. RapidServer is all java application server that includes all the needed components to run our applications, and not having external dependencies mean quick and easy deployment.  read more »

I'm excited to announce that iFountain has decided to go down the road not so less traveled and embrace the open source model. Being open has always been in our DNA, and we've agreed that embracing the open source model is the best manifestation of this objective.

As part of being open and transparent, I'll try to journal the road to open source for us. We'll try to get this done right. No doubt that it would not be difficult to post all the source code somewhere, stick on the GPL license, make a press release and declare the mission accomplished. But outcome of that alone would be no good for anyone. It takes more than declaring a license to turn closed source products into useful open source projects. Based on lessons learned from other projects, here is what we intend to do:

Open development infrastructure  read more »

OK I admit that only a few people would use the words "IT management" and "cool" at the same sentence, but here I go! You can now work with your managements systems from your IM client. The latest release of RapidInformer now supports AOL IM, Google Talk, Jabber and IBM Sametime. You no longer have to be glued to the glass to stay informed or have a console running to interact with your management systems. Via the bidirectional IM interface, notification come to where you are and you can execute commands directly from your IM client or email. "ESM via IM" so to speak.

Let's review what this thing can do:

Notifications: Notifications can be send via email, SMS, instant messaging, or any system that has an API or command line interface. Not much new here other than Sametime support, moving right along.  read more »

Well it looks like there is more to beacon than meets the eye (or admitted by facebook). Some good old fashion detective work by Stefan tells us that facebook collects information about what you buy in beacon participating sites even if you're not logged in or choose to opt out. They seem to be attempt to restrict the discussion to the news feeds and hope people won't notice the data collection part. Most people of course, will not notice as they have hoped for, but so far the backlash seems to be continue. Will people stop using facebook?  read more »

Scenario: Customer uses Netcool Object Server for event management and requires the events to be enriched with data from a CMDB using RapidConnector. The device or link name will be used as the key to query the CMDB to get the information such as maintenance status, SLA level, location, etc. and populate event fields.
 read more »

Systems integration projects in IT management field typically do not follow software engineering methodologies and tools commonly used by software developers. There are number of reasons for this. Integration work is often after thought, integrators (like myself) may write code (mostly scripts) but often not software developers by training. The tools are also lacking since the integration often involves proprietary components and programming languages provided by the vendors. Forget about IDEs, refactoring, unit testing frameworks, etc. Still there are tremendous benefits in using whatever tools available.
We've been working on gathering sort of "best practices" with the objective to make them standard operating practices for ourselves. Looking into some of the techniques/tools/methodologies and learning from our software developers, some of our customers, and web 2.0 world (collaboration), we've identified a core set of practices that we think is not too ambitious: collaboration, version control tools, and automated acceptance tests

Collaboration:  read more »

John Willis asks whether ITIL still matter in the world of Amazon and Google (what I had referred as "best in class infrastructure providers"). ITIL skepticism is not new; there has been skeptics since the beginning for variety of reasons; some more valid than others. John is raising the issue from a different perspective. He stipulates that ITIL may not be required if majority of the services are provided by external giant service providers.  read more »