ITManagementTools

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 »

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 »

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 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 »

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 »

So you want to create a dashboard and provide IT management data such as status of services, events, trouble tickets, etc. to your internal/external customers. Problem is that you have a shared infrastructure, the tools you are using contains management information for all customers, and many management tools out there in the wild do not provide a mechanism to control who should have access to what, who should be able to do what, etc.  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 »

Since we have released the first version of RapidInsight, our business services dashboard solution, we have been working hard on the next version. We have listened carefully what people in the field tell us, what the most common difficulties they face, and focused on improving RapidInsight to address those needs.

We're excited about the outcome, and we are almost there.

Today, we're announcing the beta program for RapidInsight for Smarts v2.0, our IT operations dashboard solution. RapidInsight is designed to provide access to IT operations information from a web browser and is tightly integrated with Smarts. We're looking for Smarts users who are willing to participate in the beta program and try RapidInsight. We're confident that it will provide significant value to Smarts users.

Given the limited availability of resources customers have, we have taken number of steps to ensure a smooth process that minimizes the burden on our customers:  read more »

In the last couple of posts, I've been looking into potential uses of Smarts dynamic model functional that are simple enough to be used by mere mortals (non-developer) like myself. I've looked at how to add new properties and then how to use events to generate notifications. In this post, I'll go one step further, and take advantage of the propagation between classes.  read more »

In the last post, we've looked at how we can simply extend the ICIM model by adding new properties to existing classes. In this post, we'll go one step further and look at what we can do to take advantage of the events functionality and generate notifications in Smarts.

The objective

Monitor applications with synthetic transactions and depending on the response time, create a notification that states either the application is slow (degraded) or down.

The model changes
We will extend the ICIM_LogicalElement class since it seems to be appropriate for an application. There may be a more appropriate class but this one will do. First, the properties we need to use in monitoring:  read more »