BPPM Implementation Considerations - Part 5: Customize at the right place

Unless you are a very small business, you will need to customize BMC out-of-box solutions to address the particular issues in your IT environment.  It is unrealistic to expect a one-size-fits-all solution from BMC. Fortunately BPPM was developed with customization in mind.  It provides extensive tools to help you develop your own solutions that seamlessly extend BMC out-of-box solutions.

BPPM suite has three major components: BMC ProactiveNet, BPPM Cell (BEM), and PATROL. Both BPPM Cell and PATROL are more than 10 years old.  One of the primary reasons that they are still going strong today is because they both allow you to add your own solutions to them seamlessly.

Before you start developing your own custom solutions, take a step back to think about what options you have and where you should place your customization.  What would be the impact on accessibility and resource consumption on the underline servers?  What would be the impact on deployment of your custom solutions?  What would be the impact on future maintenance and upgrade?

In PATROL, you can develop custom knowledge modules and you can also plug in your own PSL code as a recovery action into a parameter.  In BPPM Cell, you can develop your own event classes, MRL code, dynamic tables, and action scripts to extend the out-of-box knowledge base.

In general, if you have a choice between customizing PATROL and customizing BPPM Cell to manage events, customizing BPPM Cell would require less effort and result in less impact to the servers that are being monitored.  Here are a few reasons:

1) PATROL is running on the servers you don't own, have limited access, and may not be familiar with.  For example, I was recently helping a client debug a custom KM running on AS400.  I had to get help from AS400 sysadmin just to add one line in its PSL code.

2) PATROL is often sharing the server with mission critical applications.  Poorly written PSL code could potentially impact the mission critical applications negatively.

3) The same custom knowledge module may need to be running on more than one server, thus requiring more time to deploy and upgrade.

4) BPPM Cell is running on your own infrastructure server.  It is infinitely scalable as a peer-to-peer architecture. If resource has ever become an issue, you can add more cells either on the same server or on a different server (even with different operating system).  you can split a cell horizontally by processing phases, or you can split a cell vertically by event sources.