Integration

Rivermuse (core) is an open source event management platform that has been gathering a lot of attention primarily since it has been founded by the original founders of Micromuse and promises an open source alternative to Netcool.

We've just released in the RapidOSS plugin for Rivermuse. This first version of the plugin provides seamless bi-directional integration between RapidOSS and Rivermuse, bringing alerts from Rivermuse into RapidOSS and forwarding user actions from RapidOSS to Rivermuse.
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Press Release - May 13, 2009

iFountain, an innovative independent software vendor specializing in IT Operations Management announced that its RapidOSS product is the winner of the EMC® Velocity² Technology & ISV Program “2008 EMC Partner Solution Award: Offering of the Year for EMC Smarts®.”  read more »

In my conversations with potential customers and in documentation, I often state that RapidOSS makes it easy to work with external systems. Since "easy" is a relative concept, without some concrete examples this may not mean much to folks who don't have first hand experience working with RapidOSS.

Integration with external systems very often require in-depth understanding of the APIs provided by the external systems. Even when the external system provides standard APIs (SOAP, database etc.) it is not easy to master the variations from the standards, and figure out the structure of the data, how to use it.

In RapidOSS, we use a simple data structure consistently for all external systems. If the data is a single object (record, line, etc.) it is represented as name value pairs, referred to as “Map”. For example, if we want to represent employee information, we could use the following structure:

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In a previous post, I discussed different management systems integration types: data layer integration, functional integration, event integration and presentation layer integration.

Problem:
You have number of different management tools for different management disciplines (fault mgmt, configuration & change mgmt, service desk, etc.), and technologies (Unix, Windows, LAN, WAN, Applications, etc.). Yet services you provide span multiple technologies and platforms, and you need to provide information to internal/external customers about the services they use. We'll consider can think about the scenario described in this post to understand what type of information you may need to provide to your users.  read more »

Scenario: Customer uses Netcool Object Server for event management and requires the events to be enriched with data from a CMDB using RapidOSS. 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.
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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 »

How do (or should) you interact/work/integrate with Netcool Omnibus servers?

If you work on systems integration, it's likely that you've run into this question at some point. There are number of options available depending on your needs. Here is a summary of the options that I could come up with:

Netcool suite components.  read more »

RapidOSS is typically used to provide web based access to events and service status information from management tools such as EMC Smarts and IBM Netcool. However RapidOSS really shines when data from multiple sources gets integrated to provide a consistent, unified, easy to use web interface for all relevant information without the hassle of single signon systems, clients conflicts and having to train users to use different user interfaces of each tool.

In IT operations management, access to data from configuration/change management, and ticketing systems along with events from monitoring systems is often needed. RapidOSS is a great fit to bring all the relevant information to the interested users.

To demonstrate this concept I've added integration with a configuration/change management system (CMS) in our live demo. In this example, users will be able to see the configuration change history of the devices by executing a tool from the right click menu in context. The configuration history data (we've created some mock data) is stored in a relational database.  read more »

RapidOSS 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 RapidOSS 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. RapidOSS data stores just enough data to facilitate the integration of the data and the communications with multiple backend systems.  read more »