RapidInsight

As we work on customer projects and requests, we've developed number of valuable features for RapidOSS. We typically add these features as sample "solution templates". These solutions are typically distributed as part of the product under solutions directory. Solution templates serve as examples, demonstration of what's possible and starting points for customers.

In a series of posts, I'll mention some of these seemingly small features that seem to be important to some users.

I'll start with the audible alarms. Many customers want to be able to configure their PCs to warn them by playing a distinct sound (aka beep) to get their attention when there is a critical event, etc. Sounds simple enough, no?

Surprisingly this is quite cumbersome to implement with many IT management tools, requiring users to install software on the PCs, distribute scripts, audio files, etc. creating unnecessary administrative overhead. It is also hard to get it configured in such a way that is useful to the users.  read more »

Couple of weeks ago, we had announced that RapidOSS UI for mobile devices (Mobile IT management comes to town) and presented how RapidOSS mobile support enables users to work with management tools like Netcool and EMC/Smarts from their mobile devices.
Initial support was restricted to iPhone and Android devices. Today I'm happy to announce that RapidOSS web UI works as a read/write user interface on all mobile devices, including Blackberry devices.  read more »

Careful eyes may have noticed that RapidInsight product has disappeared from our website! Need not worry, it's still alive and kicking :) RapidInsight has just gone through a name change and has become RapidOSS.

We've found out that "Rapid Insight" is a registered trademark of Rapid Insight Inc, and we were asked not to use this name as our product name. That'll teach me to be more careful with trademark searches. Four years ago when we selected this name I had not found this trademark. My guess is that I had not thought of searching it as separate words at the time, and Google did not have much to say either. A useful tip: if you're doing trademark searchs, a new website called Trademarkia is pretty useful.

It'll be tough for us to let go of RapidInsight mentally since we have been using it for quite sometime but we'll manage. King is dead, hail the new king. Please welcome RapidOSS to your IT management arsenal :)

In the previous post, I had discussed why and how we had build a web based UI specifically for iPhone and hinted that this means Netcool users now can work with Netcool from their iPhones. In this post, I'll go further into what this means and how it works.

- RapidOSS is already integrated with Netcool:  read more »

Some observations:

1. One of our key objectives has been to provide a unified, web based user interface for IT operations. We believe users should be able to navigate through management information seamlessly rather than being forced to jump between disparate tools and inconsistent user interfaces.
2. Users are no longer content being forced to watch a specific console (or worse multiple consoles!)  on a computer screen and should be empowered to control how (IM clients, email, SMS, etc.) and when they receive the information, and act on the information as necessary.
3. After many years of anticipation, mobile revolution is here. iPhone is a viable computing device for many business applications, and there are 10s of millions of them (iPhone and iPod Touches) out there.

Conclusion:
We need to ensure users can work with management information from their iPhones (and other mobile devices) to be able to do their jobs effectively. So how should we do this?  read more »

Topology maps and events lists (aka alerts/alarms/notifications) are two most commonly used UI patterns to present monitoring data to users in network monitoring. The usefulness of topology maps is not an agreed upon subject in the network monitoring community. Some folks think maps are "must have" for a monitoring tool, others don't care for them at all.

Most monitoring tools in the market do offer some kind of maps functionality, but the quality varies significantly, not all maps are created equal. I think usefulness of the network topology maps highly depend on the design of the solution. Network monitoring field is full of people scarred by the experience of manually maintaining the hierarchical maps (a la HPOV NNM). I personally think maps indeed can be useful when implemented right, and many people do request it hence we've added Maps to RapidOSS.
Distilling the experiences of the past, we've steered clear of the most common pain points associated with maps. Here is how/why RapidOSS map component is different:  read more »

“Polling” and “listening” are the most common monitoring techniques. Polling is where monitoring systems periodically call monitored systems to check whether the systems is operating as it should, and collect data (performance, etc.).  Listening is where monitoring system waits (listens)  for monitored systems to either directly or indirectly (through other systems, etc.) send information. In network monitoring, monitoring system polling SNMP agent of the devices, etc. is an example of polling technique, and processing of traps and syslog messages are examples of the listening technique.

Heartbeat monitoring is another technique that can be considered an enhanced form of listening. Some systems periodically send information,(events) aka heartbeats, to signal that the system is operating as it should. In this case, the absence of these heartbeat events and not events themselves indicate a problem, hence these events need to be processed differently than typical events.  read more »

Handling of the planned/unplanned maintenance of IT infrastructure is an essential event management activity, yet it seems to be an after thought in most tools.  The accuracy of the information presented to users is essential. Users need to know what it truly a problem that requires immediate action and what is not.  read more »

Stop the presses! We've been notified by EMC Smarts that our RapidOSS product has been awarded “2008 Offering of the Year Award”

As you can imagine we're thrilled about this! iFountain has been an EMC development partner for several years now and we have developed number of solutions that complement the EMC Smarts production suite. It is very nice to get some recognition and appreciated by everyone in the company.

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:

 read more »