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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Press Release - May 13, 2009
iFountain, an innovative independent software vendor specializing in IT Operations Management announced that its RapidOSS product is the winner of the EMC® Velocity² Technology & ISV Program “2008 EMC Partner Solution Award: Offering of the Year for EMC Smarts®.” read more »
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:
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.
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?
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 »
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 »
RapidOSS 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 RapidOSS context. read more »
RapidOSS 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 RapidOSS 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. RapidOSS data stores just enough data to facilitate the integration of the data and the communications with multiple backend systems. read more »
*** UPDATE ***
This is an old post. The information and screenshots in this post refers to an older version of RapidInsight. More up to date information on RapidInsight and Netcool can be found here.
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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. 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 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 »
