opensource

Integration is a core activity in IT management. There are different tools for different technologies (apps, servers, network, etc.) and diffferent functional areas (fault, performance, ticketing, etc) and these tools need to be integrated in order to be able to support IT processes that span technologies and functional areas effectively.

We call RapidInsight "an integration, automation and presentation suite for IT operations management", typically used to integrate management information from disparate management systems and present to users through a simple, unified, consistent web based user interface.
RapidInsight adds to event correlation/management approach by consolidating not only events but all information related to IT operations management from different management systems.

What do we mean by that? RapidInsight OpenNMS integration serves as a good example of the differences. With events, the integration typically refers to sending traps from one management system to the other. This is in fact the available integration between OpenNMS and Netcool (or Smarts), where OpenNMS sends traps to Netcool using scriptd. and a Netcool probe processes traps to create/clear events in Netcool.  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 »

In the previous post, I'd announced the Groovy4Netcool project. In this follow up post, I'll go through a simple script as an example to demonstrate how it can be used. The objective is to work with an event in the Netcool server, to get the value of a field and update that value.

First, I should highlight the files in this project are NOT required to use groovy to work
with Netcool server. Groovy language has inherent support to work with database via jdbc. The files in this project provide an infrastructure to make it easier to work with Netcool so that one does not have to know or deal with JDBC and SQL,
although they are available.

First, I need to set the connection parameters for the Netcool server in the NetcoolDataSource.groovy file.  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 »

Majority of the tools in the IT management tools marketplace either have a proprietary scripting language, or set of configuration files so complex that become mini languages on their own right, and require extensive “product training” to accomplish anything significant. As a result, these tools are often “knowledge islands”. One has to investigate significant time learning them, there are “certification” programs, training classes, etc. and the skills are often not transferable.

We wanted to explicitly avoid this phenomena, hence resisted inventing a new language, or using very complicated configuration files as much as possible, and worked hard at this. As many things in life, this has been harder than we had thought.
Through our journey, we have worked with several different languages and I must admit the urge to come up with our own to meet our specific needs has been strong, but we have managed to resist for the most part :)  read more »

We've been working RapidInsight and RapidInformer for quite some time now. Yet, it would have been inconceivable to bring a product into market in such a short time if it wasn't for number of high quality components available in the public domain.

I wanted to talk about some of these components/products that we have leveraged in developing RapidInsight and the rational for choosing/using these components.

One of the key design goals we've had for RapidInsight and RapidInformer has been developing a product that is extremely easy to implement. We wanted to be able to have anyone bring the solution up and running within 15 minutes, regardless of the server platform.  read more »