RapidInsight

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 infrastructure needs to be managed holistically. Its a given. How do we do that? It's been a painful
journey.

First there was the “frameworks” (Tivoli/CA). The idea of building all management tools on a common
framework so that they would all be integrated, have common user interface, etc. was very appealing. But the execution did not match the promise.

A single framework to manage the entire IT infrastructure turned up to be a pipe dream. Too costly, too difficult and too painful to buy, implement, and maintain. After spending hundreds (millions?) of thousands of dollars, many IT organizations abandoned the framework projects or significantly scaled them down. Most people who worked on framework implementation projects can still feel the bad taste left in their mouth.  read more »

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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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 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 »

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 »

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 »

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 previous post, I discussed different management systems integration types: data layer integration, functional integration, event integration and presentation layer integration. RapidInsight provides presentation layer integration functionalities as described in the post.

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 »