How to

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 »

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 »

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.

Typically most tools do provide a way to filter events, but event based filtering is often not enough. For example, if you want to provide data about network devices (containment, etc.) to the customers, you also need to be able to provide access to some devices and not others.

And what if you want the users be able to take some actions? For example, how can you control, which users can acknowledge or update an event and which cannot? In addition, how do you do all this, if there are multiple management tools with varying degrees of authorization control?  read more »

In the previous couple of posts about Smarts dynamic model, I've added a new class, created new properties and defined events using Smarts MODEL language. Our use case has been monitoring of applications and I've demonstrated how dynamic model can be used to easily add the necessary functionality.

I had not yet worked on how to instrument the object properties (so far used dmctl commands to simulate property value changes). The main instrumentation method in Smarts is SNMP. If there is an SNMP agent that reports the status of applications we'd like to monitor, we can use the SNMP instrumentation mechanism to poll the agent to monitor the status of the applications.  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 »

As mentioned on the previous post, Smarts dynamic model is a powerful functionality added to Smarts. It allows extend the ICIM model in the field using the MODEL language. To be sure, adding sophisticated capabilties requires mastering the MODEL language and available information (documentation, example code, etc.) is scarce, yet there are many uses of dynamic model that does not require in depth knowledge. In a series of posts, I'll give some examples to demonstrate these simple uses.  read more »