Chris Boos on Automation

Last week I attended Pulse Comes To You 2010 in Frankfurt. This great one-day event series tries to capture the Pulse spirit and bring it to a number of major cities around the globe. The german issue, which attracted round about 180 people, was hosted by Tivoli’s General Manager Al Zollar in Frankfurt.

The agenda was split into a generall session in the morning and workshop sessions in the afternoon. After German Tivoli Business Unit Executive Oliver Grell’s welcome note, Al Zollar took the stage and presented IBMs vision on Integrated Service Management, which is the foundation for their Smarter Planet vision. He showed how Tivoli tools like Maximo Asset Management will help us to manage growing complexity of IT systems and plenty of other devices beeing around in todays technical infrastructure. After presenting a couple of case studies from various customers and annouced partnerships with Ricoh, Johnson Controls and Juniper Networks.

 A second keynote was held by Forrester Research Director Thomas Mendel, Ph. D. who presentend Forresters view on IT Management 2.0. He made some interesting comments on the importance of infrastructure & operation for 2010 spendings and said the that the biggest concern for IT managers is, that they fear to be unable to support business growth in these troubled times. A new approach for IT Management 2.0 that Forrester promotes is  “Do less. But do those things superbly!“, which is quite a step-up from the much overstressed “Do more with less” meme. More interesting comments from Forrester were, that ‘Service Catalogues’ are currently the second most requested topic at Forrester and the  recommendation to build a “Just enough CMDB“, which from my point of view should be common sense, not to mention the usual call to “Break down the silos” and “know your Business” for Operations. Mendel concluded that Tivoli should grow into an abstraction layer between infrastrure/applications and the business processes.

Following the Forrester keynote was an fresh talk from geman author, management trainer and lateral thinker Anja Foerster, who tried to motivate the audience to expand their horizons and go for unconventinal solutions. After an excursion into examples of cross-industry innovations, she described homogeneity as the true killer of innovation and asked the audience to forster diversity amongst their subordinates and coworkers. Contradiction lays ground for creativity.

After the lunch break PCTY2010 contiued in 4 parallel workshop tracks, headlined

• Late-breaking Service Management
• Service Management for IT
• Service Management for Development and Deployment
• Technical News

where IBMers, partners and german customers presented a number of  Tivoli and Service Management related sessions (see Agenda). The day closed with a Get-Together and Dinner, where all attendees had the chance to get hold of the specialists and to continue the discussion.

All in all I had a great day, talking to many people and listening to interesting talks and sessions, but I’m confident that next year I will have the chance to go for the “real thing” in Las Vegas again.

What was really a pity that there was no Social Media coverage at all: There have be a handfull of Tweets – about 90 percent of them were sent be me (@rjudas) and some by IBMer Ingo Averdunk (@ingoa). I haven’t found any picures on Flickr, nor any blog article, yet, so:

Come on IBM, you can do better.

As we are not really consultants for modeling IT infrastructure, we are always looking for a good way to minimize our manual effort when installing our automation engine, I actually thought it should be easy to load the necessary M-A-R-S information out of any CMDB, but so far that has proven much more difficult than expected. Most CMDBs we have looked at, did either not supply the needed relationship and interdependency data or did not contain the static node information we need to bind rules. BUT yesterday we had a workshop at the IBM briefing center in Mainz to take a look at the IBM CCMDB. And tell you what: It looks like we found a CMDB that actually contains all the data we need to load the IT interdependency model. Even if some organizations keep attributes we need for rule binding in excel sheets or other strange data sources we can load them off the IBM CCMDB through its federation technology.

But that is not the whole story. We were quite exuberant about the depth of relationship and interdependencies stored in the CMDB, but it really got amazing when we saw in an actual environment, that most of the interdependencies were detected automatically. Someone at IBM actually did the work of modeling quite some ssh connections and scripts to pull this information out of netstat and other system calls. Well going though firewalls without losing the network angle seems to be a difficulty that means actual real time detection of different zones of trust is not really possible, but what we are getting out here is much better than anything we have seen before. It will save us about 80% time on implementing automation for highly complex applications. Also the time our customers need to maintain the model in place while they change their IT landscape is probably greatly reduced. We will look into creating a persistent interface to the IBM CCMDB and while we are at it to their event bus and execution facilities as well.

You know my comments on other CMDBs and our difficulties of reading anything more than SML out of them. Normally I am quite taken aback and don´t say much, but this time I am really happy.