BPPM customization is essentially development work. BPPM provides well-structured development framework. All you need to do in customization is to fill up the holes between frames with code modules.
BPPM uses proprietary programming languages for development. PSL (PATROL Scripting Language) is used to develop customization in its PATROL component. MRL (Master Rule Language) is used to develop customization in its BPPM/BEM cell component. We provide training for both PSL and MRL development.
There are three areas you can customize in BPPM to fully realize the ROI from BPPM.
1) Adding new features that are not out of box
Your business may require you to monitor an application that BPPM does not monitor out-of-box. This requires you to develop a custom knowledge module in PATROL. Having personally developed more than 100 custom PATROL knowledge modules, I can tell you how much every enterprise can benefit from custom-developed monitoring features.
Your business may require you to aggregate multiple alerts into one incident ticket when they all refer to the same incident. This requires you to develop event processing rules in BPPM/BEM cell that are not available out-of-box. Without this customization, each alert will result in a separate ticket. Someone will have to analyze them and manually merge multiple tickets into one. This customization will help your IT organization cut down its cost.
2) Integration with non-BMC products
In my opinion, integration gives you the best bang for the buck. If you are like most enterprise IT organizations, you are already running all kinds of monitoring software as the best of breed such as Solarwinds for network, Oracle OEM for Oracle database, and Microsoft SCOM for Windows servers, etc. How about open source tools such as Nagios and OpenNMS, security monitoring tools such as ArcSight, your home-grown cron-job scripts, and self-monitoring devices such as APC UPS?
When you integrate these non-BMC products into BPPM/BEM cell, not only you have one GUI to view all alerts together, you can also take advantage of the back-end incident management system connected with BPPM for automated incident ticket creation.
After I finished IBM Netcool integration with BPPM for a client, they realized how much it saved them from paying for an expensive Netcool-Remedy gateway license and how much more reliable an automatic BPPM integration fail-over is comparing to the manual Netcool-Remedy gateway fail-over. Then they decided to integrate every non-BMC monitoring software into BPPM for automated Remedy ticketing.
Understandably, this is the area that BMC doesn't want to talk much because it could lower their sales on PATROL license.
We have been a big believer on the best of breed and integration for the last decade. We have developed a proprietary methodology to seamlessly integrate any non-BMC monitoring software into BPPM cell. Our methodology is so reliable, repeatable, and universally adaptable that we are willing to take fixed-price contracts for your integration projects (as well as your other development projects). Please contact us for price details.
3) Automation in BPPM Operations
This is a lesser known area comparing to the other two. I will postpone the detailed discussion to the next post. Basically this is the secret how my client can run a large IT monitoring operation with just a 3-person team comparing to at least 6 people in similar sized organizations.
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