Integration

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

RapidInsight 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 RapidInsight 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. RapidInsight 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 »

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 »

XPlanner is one of the tools we use here at iFountain for release/iteration planning. Although XPlanner works pretty well for us, it was a challenge for the development team to keep track of the changes in the system. We needed a solution to inform us when a task or story gets created, assigned to us, etc.

RapidInformer to the rescue! RapidInformer is our latest product that addresses precisely this type of needs.

• It has a simple API and connectors to integrate messages from any system.

• It puts the user in control of which messages to receive and how, sort of self service notification solution.  read more »

IT services more and more consist of services provided by external providers. Significant portions of the infrastructure are not directly managed by the IT departments. The latest trends in the enterprise space, Shared services, SaaS, SOA, outsourcing, etc. suggest that this is not a temporary phenomena.
IT organizations (as well as IT management vendors) need to adjust to the new requirements introduced with this new landscape.

So the question is: how can you do end to end management of a service when the infrastructure for the service depends on combination of multiple internal and external service providers?  read more »

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:  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 »