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All I want for the new year is a BSM Profile for ITM 6.x
by doug
One of the foundations of Business Service Management (BSM) is to see things from the business perspective. To get there, one of the best ways to do that is to instrument for BSM at the source. The majority of all server agent deployments for HW/OS monitoring and COTS application agents (DB, AppServer, etc.) are deployed in a pure out of the box (OOB) manner. Most clients will take what their vendor offers up within these OOB configurations as their own “best practices” and leave it at that. Some may take the time to modify thresholds in an effort to control the signal to noise ratio in the event console. This practice generally leads to a “needle in a haystack” approach for event management and a bad reputation for the tool in use for monitoring.
There will always be a need for the “best practice” OOB monitoring offered by vendors in their solutions. The primary audience is the NOC, EOC and support organizations. They speak this language and have been programmed to know what to do when the “95% CPU Utilization” event comes in. The BSM Profile concept is to help organizations move beyond this to focus how these lower level things may impact the business services, applications and activities that help the business meet its goals and objectives.
I want to see things change. I want to see the ability to configure monitoring with a purpose that’s above and beyond the OOB configurations. The establishment of a BSM Profile for managing the server HW/OS and deployed applications enables visibility into what that server or application really exists for - supporting the business.
The ideal BSM Profile for ITM 6.x would include the following:
1. Custom instrumentation into very specific business service, application and transactions ALIGNED to the LoB, services, applications and key business activities that they enable (and impact).
2. Custom free form text fields that enable creation of a specific and unique message relative to the above.
3. Mapping into custom event fields/slots of the ideal BSM Event Format.
4. Generate purpose built events, KPI/KPM or other data for the purposes of driving a service model or dashboard
In an effort to collaborate on how to create such a BSM Profile, DevCampTivoli has been created. The theme for this event is “Collaborative Development of End-to-End BSM Solutions”. The desired outcome is to come up various approaches for developing a BSM Profile for ITM 6.x, necessary configurations within the Tivoli EIF probe, Netcool/OMNIbus and TBSM 4.x that can be easily customized and implemented at any client. Whatever the DevCampTivoli produces will be freely available to anyone to take, modify and use to improve their BSM deployments.
Take a few minutes to visit DevCampTivoli. This event will be the May 17-18, 2008 which is the weekend before the annual IBM Tivoli User Conference Pulse 2008 in Orlando, FL. The thought and hope is that SME’s and practitioners in ITM, Netcool/OMNIbus and TBSM will already be coming to Pulse 2008 and will be able to come in a couple days earlier to participate.
More to follow…
The original link
My ITM 6.x BSM Profile should include a BSM Descriptor File
by doug
Our TADDM product has a pretty nifty capability to help it along in its discovery process. You have an option to create files called Application Descriptors that are simple XML files that describe what business applications are deployed onto the server, what components make up the application and how these various components are organized, grouped or have relationship to the business application. Examples of TADDM Application Descriptors are available here.
What if we took this extremely simple concept and turned it into something for the ITM 6.x BSM Profile? What if we had a BSM Descriptor File? It may contain many different sub-components that help me to express the unique characteristics of what this server and installed software do to support business services and applications.
The BSM Descriptor File may contain:
* Business Service Descriptors: Information on the business service(s) this component supports/enables
* Business Application Descriptors: Information on the business application(s) this component supports/enables
* Transaction, Process or Activity Descriptors: Information on key transactions, processes, daemons, batch jobs, etc. that this component supports/enables
* Impact Descriptors: Information on how this component may impact the business goals and objectives, revenue, customer experience, metrics, KPIs, etc.
* Compliance Descriptors: Information on compliance controls that this component must adhere to.
* Risk Descriptors: Information on business risks that may be associated with this component
* Security Descriptors: Information on security policies applied to this component
* Business Schedule or Calendar Descriptors: Information on when there may be important times during the day, week, month that this component may need to be managed differently (end of month batch jobs, financial runs, maintenance windows)
* Operations Support Descriptors: Information about the on call group, escalation paths, etc.
Part of the XML tagging within the BSM Descriptor File should include annotation on how these unique components are mapped into events generated from individual ITM 6.x monitoring agents and their BSM Profile. With this information flowing freely into the event stream, making use of the powerful capabilities within Netcool/OMNIbus and TBSM 4.x become very easy. These BSM Descriptor concept maps very nicely to the TBSM Design Patterns that I’m also currently blogging about.
In an effort to collaborate on how to create such a BSM Descriptor and the ITM 6.x BSM Profile, DevCampTivoli has been created. The theme for this event is “Collaborative Development of End-to-End BSM Solutions”. The desired outcome is to come up various approaches for developing a BSM Descriptor File and BSM Profile for ITM 6.x, necessary configurations within the Tivoli EIF probe, Netcool/OMNIbus and TBSM 4.x that can be easily customized and implemented at any client. Whatever the DevCampTivoli produces will be freely available to anyone to take, modify and use to improve their BSM deployments.
Take a few minutes to visit DevCampTivoli. This event will be the May 17-18, 2008 which is the weekend before the annual IBM Tivoli User Conference Pulse 2008 in Orlando, FL. The thought and hope is that SME’s and practitioners in ITM, Netcool/OMNIbus and TBSM will already be coming to Pulse 2008 and will be able to come in a couple days earlier to participate.
More to follow…
The original link
Is your Tivoli Monitoring, Netcool/OMNIbus or TBSM Organization Structure a Barrier to BSM Success?
by doug
Many of the clients I work with have dedicated groups within the IT organization, operations or monitoring group based on common monitoring or product areas. For example, many larger Tivoli clients have a dedicated distributed systems monitoring group that is responsible for all ITM based monitoring, another group responsible for event collection and management with Tivoli TEC or Netcool/OMNIbus and yet another group tasked with deploying application discovery and mapping (TADDM) and business service management solutions (TBSM). Sometimes these groups fall under the same first line manager, but more often than not they do not.
I get the need for silo based organizational structures such as functional area and product specific groupings. This is the old school way of organizing the SMEs and getting work done. It’s the assembly line, work comes in and work goes out, add a monitor here, threshold there and move on to the next request or problem. It develops and reinforces the SME concept within these areas. Great, we have “lifers” who do one thing or another for a long time.
Business Service Management (BSM) is all about the instrumentation and visibility into the end-to-end service. BSM solutions depend on the ability for highly accurate information flowing from all of the core business service monitoring domains. BSM absolutely requires being able to work within an organizational structure that promotes collaboration and communication between the functional organizations within IT, operations or monitoring groups AND external to these comfort zones out into the business service SME groups (dev, support, etc.) AND most importantly with the LoB. BSM requires a common vocabulary, workflow and “style” that old school monitoring organizations are just not very “hip” to. I find many areas of the traditional IT organizational structure flawed and many are plagued by folks with “blinders” on (not my job, not invented here, etc.) and nobody with a sense of end-to-end ownership for business service management and monitoring. These cancerous attitudes and organizational structures are significant barriers to Business Service Management success.
In an effort to find the ideal collaborative and organizational approaches for creating powerful, value added BSM solutions, DevCampTivoli has been created. The theme for this event is “Collaborative Development of End-to-End BSM Solutions”. The desired outcome is to identify optimal approaches for how to best organize and collaborate within the typical IT, operations or monitoring organization so that the ITM, Netcool/OMNIbus and TBSM groups can work better, smarter and faster with an explicit focus on implementing BSM solutions within those products. We will experiment with various approaches and techniques and share our findings and success (of failure) stories. Whatever the DevCampTivoli produces will be freely available to anyone to take, modify and use to improve their BSM deployments.
Take a few minutes to visit DevCampTivoli. This event will be the May 17-18, 2008 which is the weekend before the annual IBM Tivoli User Conference Pulse 2008 in Orlando, FL. The thought and hope is that SME’s and practitioners in ITM, Netcool/OMNIbus and TBSM will already be coming to Pulse 2008 and will be able to come in a couple days earlier to participate.
More to follow…
The original link
- In Search of a BSM Situation and BSM Event from ITM 6.x
- by doug
In this series of thought provoking posts I’ve asked for the ability to instrument for Business Service Management (BSM) at the managed system source and introduced a concept for an ITM 6.x BSM Profile and BSM Descriptor File. I’ve also proposed new organizational concepts that would establish end-to-end ownership for BSM within the typical monitoring tools group. As I peel the layers of this ITM 6.x product back, I’m now in search of the capability to create purpose built BSM Situations and BSM Events directly from ITM 6.x.
The first level of maturity in Business Service Management (BSM) is achievable by ensuring that a solid foundation in the fundamentals of network, system, application and service management and monitoring is in place. Where we’re failing our clients is not providing the necessary BSM best practices to help them use ITM 6.x with BSM as the end state. If clients have a well instrumented IT environment and if ITM 6.x has this capability, all events generated from ITM 6.x monitoring should include core BSM contextual information that establishes the most basic level of IT – Business alignment.
There’s no reason this needs to happen using more complex technology or products such as Netcool/Impact, TADDM or a CMDB. Sure, it may help make things easier, but the fact of the matter is that not all clients will have the ideal Tivoli environment with all of our enabling technology and products. Every client I’ve been to in the last two years has a heterogeneous environment with core products from all key vendors. If we don’t think about enabling fundamental BSM capabilities in ALL of our core products, we’re letting our clients down.
This BSM Situation and BSM Event concept would enable ITM 6.x clients to build BSM Situations that generate purpose built BSM Events. The key here is that every situation within ITM 6.x needs to allow for a purpose built BSM Situation with its own BSM contextual information, policies, thresholds, business calendars, etc. to be associated with it. This would then enable key BSM Event field information to be mapped into the core event emitted. BSM Situations and BSM Events may stand on their own and never be seen by the traditional NOC/EOC or support operator. Think of certain information such as common system information, metrics, KPIs, performance or capacity data that simply flows northbound to build or drive the BSM models and scorecards within TBSM.
Some of my initial questions:
* What capabilities do we have to do something like this?
* Could a BSM Situation be triggered by another situation and map in key BSM information into the generated event?
* What attributes can be mapped in?
* Is there a limit?
* Can attributes read from a file (the BSM Descriptor file) on the managed system?
* Can there be custom attributes defined in the BSM Situation?
* How many?
* How and where does information get mapped into the event format?
* How can every field of a generated event be controlled, overwritten or customized? (message summary, custom fields, etc.)
* Can I create custom slots/fields in the outgoing event?
* How many?
My initial queries to the experts and skimming of our manuals and other internal training materials leads me to the conclusion that these fundamental systems management capabilities do not exist in ITM 6.x. I hope I am wrong. I hope there is some way to do this. My end state objective here is that I get events flowing northbound from ITM 6.x monitoring that convey the critical BSM information within the event such as business services, applications, transactions, LoB, Clients, server OS, location, support group, compliance/risk classification, business impact, etc. I do not want to have to add this upstream unless it’s absolutely necessary.
In an effort to collaborate on how to generate powerful events that convey the most fundamental IT - Business alignment and help clients reach the first phase of Business Service Management, DevCampTivoli has been created. The theme for this event is “Collaborative Development of End-to-End BSM Solutions”. The desired outcome is to come up various approaches for developing a BSM Situations and BSM Events from ITM 6.x and the necessary configurations within the Tivoli EIF probe, Netcool/OMNIbus and TBSM 4.x that can be easily customized and implemented at any client. Whatever the DevCampTivoli outcome is it will be freely available to anyone to take, modify and use to improve their BSM deployments.
The original link
