iFountain's blog

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 »

I am already a fan of declarative programming. We've been using OpenLaszlo as our RIA platform and have had first hand experience with the power of this approach. So I was intrigued when I saw the "declarative living" term coined by I (think) James Governor.  read more »

IT services more and more consist of services provided by external providers. Significant portions of the infrastructure are not directly managed by the IT departments. The latest trends in the enterprise space, Shared services, SaaS, SOA, outsourcing, etc. suggest that this is not a temporary phenomena.
IT organizations (as well as IT management vendors) need to adjust to the new requirements introduced with this new landscape.

So the question is: how can you do end to end management of a service when the infrastructure for the service depends on combination of multiple internal and external service providers?  read more »

Supporting many different platforms (windows, flavors of unix, etc.) is a major challenge for software vendors. One one hand vendors would like to support as many platforms as possible simply because customers demand it, on the other hand every supported platform brings extra support overhead and spreads the resources which is not good for anyone.  read more »

The value of working with the best people cannot be overstated, nor needs any explanation. As such, I'm thrilled to announce that Shai Benjamin will be working with us.

I had the privilege to work with Shai previously at Smarts prior to the EMC acquisition. Shai has a rare blend of qualities, combining supreme understanding of the theory, extensive field experience, and great social skills that make it pleasure to work with him. As good as it gets quite frankly.  read more »

I think it's safe to say that blogging is no longer limited to the techie realm. There are now blogs about anything and everything. Technorati is currently tracking more than 57 million blogs, 100,000 new blogs per day. Amazing numbers!

Yet I find myself struggling to find blogs about IT that are written by IT folks. To be sure, there are many blogs about IT, written by vendors, analysts, consultants, etc. but very few blogs by the people who are in the field. I've gone through the blogrolls, searched google, technorati etc. and found only a handful blogs (granted it may be my search skills). Not only that there aren't many blogs by IT people, the participation in the existing blogs via comments, etc. is also quite low. Why is that?

As I reflected on before, blogging as a communications tool is invaluable for us, but I think blogging as a means to connect with others would be even more valuable for the people in the trenches. Share experiences, exchange stories, learn from one another, find out what works and what does not, etc.  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 »

Last month, I've read a post by James Governor of RedMonk (an analyst firm specialized enough to actually know what they are talking about :) where James talked about the “best practices” vs “best infrastructure” inquiring whether SMBs would be better off using infrastructure provided by large service providers like Google, Yahoo, Amazon, etc. and if SMBs do choose to use these services more and more what would be the impact of this in the industry.

In the comments, I had pointed out the differences between the “best infrastructure” and “best service (support)”. I keep running into this theme so I wanted to write more about it, if for no other reason to clarify my own thinking.  read more »

In a series of posts on dynamic model, I've gone through extending the Smarts model using the dynamic model capabilities. As discussed, extending the model is not all that hard. Some things are very straight forward, others require looking at some examples etc. Unfortunately, using SNMP instrumentation is quite difficult, and often beyond the capabilities of mere mortals like the author of this post.

Fortunately, SNMP is not the only instrumentation method available. It is possible to instrument the objects using the remote Smarts API with one of the available languages ASL, Java or Perl, provided that you're familiar with the Smarts API.  read more »