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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:
Google revolution is spreading. Prior to search, hierarchical directories (like Yahoo) were the dominant
way to organize and find information on the web. As the amount of information increased, the directory paradigm run into problems handling the scale, and Google's search paradigm with it's simplicity has become ubiquitous way to find information. Users are at ease with search, as a result, search paradigm has been spreading.
Search had already come to desktop. Google Desktop brought powerful search engine into the desktop. And with Windows 7, Microsoft went beyond search as an application and put search at the core of the user experience. Just as search has displaced the directories on the web and become the primary mechanism to find information, it has become the primary mechanism in Windows 7 for most things from starting applications to finding files, displacing Windows Explorer. read more »
The problem is well known and stated over and over again throughout the last decade. Most IT organizations are structured around functional silos of expertise and too focused on technology, hence there is a gap between IT organizations and the business. It is mostly agreed that IT organizations need to move toward service management, but there are different schools of thought on how to get there.
My personal journey in this realm started over a decade ago when I worked for a very large system integrator/outsourcing company that was organized in very distinct, geographically dispersed silos. read more »
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.
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When learning about new products, I often find myself trying to understand what problem the product is trying to solve and often without much success. It is crucial for vendors to express this clearly, yet it's not so easy. We sometimes get lost talking the jargon, the features, etc. and forget about the fundamental question. What is this product good for?
So I remind myself not to loose track of where we (iFountain) have started. RapidOSS is a direct result of number of problems we have run into repeatedly in the field. It's our attempt to have a repeatable solution to common problems that are typically solved as ad-hoc custom projects or by forcing product to perform “unnatural acts”.
So in this series of posts. I'll discuss the problems we have encountered in the field. The problems we are trying to solve with RapidOSS.
Problem: The client is broken read more »
Fault management, performance management and event management trio of tools are typically at the heart of network management solutions. Although there are some integrated solutions that do offer components for all these management disciplines, organizations with large or mission critical networks often choose to use combination of tools that have the best functionality at each area . As a result, integration among these tools becomes crucial for the overall solution to be effective is supporting IT operations. read more »
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 RapidOSS "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.
RapidOSS 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? ?RapidOSS 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 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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