EMC Smarts

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 »

RapidInsight is designed to integrate disparate management systems, databases etc. with its flexible scripting support in the server side, and AJAX UI in the client side. We have demonstrated with Google Maps integration, how it supports mashups in a previous post. Recently, we have added a timeline component, a DHTML-AJAX based widget for visualizing time based events, which makes use of SIMILE Timeline widget. Now we will go through a scenario how you can use this new UI component in the RapidInsight context.  read more »

RapidInsight is typically used to integrate data from different systems in the presentation level, hence data exchange between UI components in the browser is core functionality. In the live RapidInsight demo implementation available on this site, devices are organized in a tree. When the user clicks an object on the tree, the object data is passed to chart and the events grid components. Events grid show the events related to the object selected by user, and the pie chart updates based on the severities of the events for that objects. Which data should be exhanged between which components is specified in a configuration file. This functionality enables mashup of data from different data sources. Data from inventory, event, change management, ticketing, etc. can be presented to the users in context, in an integrated manner. RapidInsight data stores just enough data to facilitate the integration of the data and the communications with multiple backend systems.  read more »

Netcool is one of the most popular (if not the most) manager of managers in the market, and it has been for quite some time. I still remember the first time I started using it 8 years ago. I was hooked at once. I could not believe how much better than Unicenter and TEC it was.

Through the years, number of different products were released to provide web based access to Netcool as it was a common requirement in the marketplace, but they did not live up to the quality of the core Netcool (Omnibus) product. Some customers (and consultants) became Webtop gurus, making the best of it, others rolled out their own solutions, almost everyone hoping a better version would come along “soon”.  read more »

Supporting many different platforms (windows, flavors of unix, etc.) is a major challenge for software vendors. One one hand vendors would like to support as many platforms as possible simply because customers demand it, on the other hand every supported platform brings extra support overhead and spreads the resources which is not good for anyone.  read more »

The value of working with the best people cannot be overstated, nor needs any explanation. As such, I'm thrilled to announce that Shai Benjamin will be working with us.

I had the privilege to work with Shai previously at Smarts prior to the EMC acquisition. Shai has a rare blend of qualities, combining supreme understanding of the theory, extensive field experience, and great social skills that make it pleasure to work with him. As good as it gets quite frankly.  read more »

In a series of posts on dynamic model, I've gone through extending the Smarts model using the dynamic model capabilities. As discussed, extending the model is not all that hard. Some things are very straight forward, others require looking at some examples etc. Unfortunately, using SNMP instrumentation is quite difficult, and often beyond the capabilities of mere mortals like the author of this post.

Fortunately, SNMP is not the only instrumentation method available. It is possible to instrument the objects using the remote Smarts API with one of the available languages ASL, Java or Perl, provided that you're familiar with the Smarts API.  read more »

When learning about new products, I often find myself trying to understand what problem the product is trying to solve and often without much success. It is crucial for vendors to express this clearly, yet it's not so easy. We sometimes get lost talking the jargon, the features, etc. and forget about the fundamental question. What is this product good for?

Hence, I remind myself not too loose track of where we (iFountain) have started. RapidInsight is a direct result of number of problems we have run into repeatedly in the field. It's our attempt to have a repeatable solution to common problems that are typically solved as ad-hoc custom projects or by forcing product to perform “unnatural acts”.

So in this series of posts. I'll discuss the problems we have encountered in the field. The problems we are trying to solve with RapidInsight.

Problem: The client is broken  read more »

In the previous couple of posts about Smarts dynamic model, I've added a new class, created new properties and defined events using Smarts MODEL language. Our use case has been monitoring of applications and I've demonstrated how dynamic model can be used to easily add the necessary functionality.

I had not yet worked on how to instrument the object properties (so far used dmctl commands to simulate property value changes). The main instrumentation method in Smarts is SNMP. If there is an SNMP agent that reports the status of applications we'd like to monitor, we can use the SNMP instrumentation mechanism to poll the agent to monitor the status of the applications.  read more »

Since we have released the first version of RapidInsight, our business services dashboard solution, we have been working hard on the next version. We have listened carefully what people in the field tell us, what the most common difficulties they face, and focused on improving RapidInsight to address those needs.

We're excited about the outcome, and we are almost there.

Today, we're announcing the beta program for RapidInsight for Smarts v2.0, our IT operations dashboard solution. RapidInsight is designed to provide access to IT operations information from a web browser and is tightly integrated with Smarts. We're looking for Smarts users who are willing to participate in the beta program and try RapidInsight. We're confident that it will provide significant value to Smarts users.

Given the limited availability of resources customers have, we have taken number of steps to ensure a smooth process that minimizes the burden on our customers:  read more »