web interface

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 »

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 »

RapidOSS 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 RapidOSS 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. RapidOSS 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 RapidOSS 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 RapidOSS and the rational for choosing/using these components.

One of the key design goals we've had for RapidOSS 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 »

*** 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 »