ITManagement

Rivermuse (core) is an open source event management platform that has been gathering a lot of attention primarily since it has been founded by the original founders of Micromuse and promises an open source alternative to Netcool.

We've just released in the RapidOSS plugin for Rivermuse. This first version of the plugin provides seamless bi-directional integration between RapidOSS and Rivermuse, bringing alerts from Rivermuse into RapidOSS and forwarding user actions from RapidOSS to Rivermuse.
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As we work on customer projects and requests, we've developed number of valuable features for RapidOSS. We typically add these features as sample "solution templates". These solutions are typically distributed as part of the product under solutions directory. Solution templates serve as examples, demonstration of what's possible and starting points for customers.

In a series of posts, I'll mention some of these seemingly small features that seem to be important to some users.

I'll start with the audible alarms. Many customers want to be able to configure their PCs to warn them by playing a distinct sound (aka beep) to get their attention when there is a critical event, etc. Sounds simple enough, no?

Surprisingly this is quite cumbersome to implement with many IT management tools, requiring users to install software on the PCs, distribute scripts, audio files, etc. creating unnecessary administrative overhead. It is also hard to get it configured in such a way that is useful to the users.  read more »

Couple of weeks ago, we had announced that RapidOSS UI for mobile devices (Mobile IT management comes to town) and presented how RapidOSS mobile support enables users to work with management tools like Netcool and EMC/Smarts from their mobile devices.
Initial support was restricted to iPhone and Android devices. Today I'm happy to announce that RapidOSS web UI works as a read/write user interface on all mobile devices, including Blackberry devices.  read more »

In the previous post, I had discussed why and how we had build a web based UI specifically for iPhone and hinted that this means Netcool users now can work with Netcool from their iPhones. In this post, I'll go further into what this means and how it works.

- RapidOSS is already integrated with Netcool:  read more »

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 »

Topology maps and events lists (aka alerts/alarms/notifications) are two most commonly used UI patterns to present monitoring data to users in network monitoring. The usefulness of topology maps is not an agreed upon subject in the network monitoring community. Some folks think maps are "must have" for a monitoring tool, others don't care for them at all.

Most monitoring tools in the market do offer some kind of maps functionality, but the quality varies significantly, not all maps are created equal. I think usefulness of the network topology maps highly depend on the design of the solution. Network monitoring field is full of people scarred by the experience of manually maintaining the hierarchical maps (a la HPOV NNM). I personally think maps indeed can be useful when implemented right, and many people do request it hence we've added Maps to RapidOSS.
Distilling the experiences of the past, we've steered clear of the most common pain points associated with maps. Here is how/why RapidOSS map component is different:  read more »

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 »

Handling of the planned/unplanned maintenance of IT infrastructure is an essential event management activity, yet it seems to be an after thought in most tools.  The accuracy of the information presented to users is essential. Users need to know what it truly a problem that requires immediate action and what is not.  read more »

Google revolution is spreading. Prior to search, hierarchical directories (like Yahoo) were the dominant
way to organize and find information on the web. As the amount of information increased, the directory paradigm run into problems handling the scale, and Google's search paradigm with it's simplicity has become ubiquitous way to find information. Users are at ease with search, as a result, search paradigm has been spreading.

Search had already come to desktop. Google Desktop brought powerful search engine into the desktop. And with Windows 7, Microsoft went beyond search as an application and put search at the core of the user experience. Just as search has displaced the directories on the web and become the primary mechanism to find information, it has become the primary mechanism in Windows 7 for most things from starting applications to finding files, displacing Windows Explorer.  read more »

The problem is well known and stated over and over again throughout the last decade. Most IT organizations are structured around functional silos of expertise and too focused on technology, hence there is a gap between IT organizations and the business. It is mostly agreed that IT organizations need to move toward service management, but there are different schools of thought on how to get there.

My personal journey in this realm started over a decade ago when I worked for a very large system integrator/outsourcing company that was organized in very distinct, geographically dispersed silos.  read more »