Smarts

OK I admit that only a few people would use the words "IT management" and "cool" at the same sentence, but here I go! You can now work with your managements systems from your IM client. The latest release of RapidInformer now supports AOL IM, Google Talk, Jabber and IBM Sametime. You no longer have to be glued to the glass to stay informed or have a console running to interact with your management systems. Via the bidirectional IM interface, notification come to where you are and you can execute commands directly from your IM client or email. "ESM via IM" so to speak.

Let's review what this thing can do:

Notifications: Notifications can be send via email, SMS, instant messaging, or any system that has an API or command line interface. Not much new here other than Sametime support, moving right along.  read more »

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 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 »

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?

Hence, I remind myself not too loose track of where we (iFountain) have started. RapidInsight 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 RapidInsight.

Problem: The client is broken  read more »

In the last couple of posts, I've talked about a scenario and some concepts to lay out the framework to discuss the integrations between tools used for different management disciplines.

I should note that I don't intend to talk about the integration between specific management tools (though I may use specific tools as examples), rather, I'll attempt to analyze integration requirements between tools used in different management disciplines. Although tools from different vendors each may have their differences, we should be able to talk about the functional areas in more generic terms, hence I hope that the discussion will be useful for a broader audience.

In this post, I'll start going through the process flow described in our scenario and focus on the integration between the event management and the trouble ticketing systems which is probably the most common integration implemented in the field.  read more »

We have been releasing solutions that we use in the field as open source tools available for the community. Last couple of weeks we have released Smarts Trap Processing Monitor and Smarts Discovery Reporter. Both of these solutions were built on top of RapidWatcher independently, hence had conflicts (Thanks for the heads up Karl!)

The latest release of RapidWatcher includes the necessary files for both these solutions as part of the RapidWatcher package. Discovery Reporter is active but Trap processing Monitor is inactive by default. Of course, you can turn on Smarts Trap Monitor by following the directions in the previous post about it.  read more »

If you have already checked out our RapidWatcher product (you should! :), you are already familiar with how it can help you monitor various systems and take actions accordingly. You should also be familiar with RapidWatcher's status updates in the form of an RSS feed.
In this post, I will explain how an RSS feed from RapidWatcher can be used to create notifications in the Smarts server with the help of a simple RapidConnector adapter. The example can be modified to feeds other than RapidWatcher.

Building the solution

Once you have your RapidWatcher up and running, you can get the status information on managed systems by accessing the RSS feed URL (http://localhost:9191/RapidWatcher/ManagedObject/rssFeed) using a feed reader or browser. To see how a feed looks like, you can take a look at the RSS feed from the RapidWatcher demo.More...
RSS feed is of course an alternative to getting the same information via the web based user interface or the web services API.Here is a sample RSS feed from RapidWatcher.
 read more »