Does your BPPM customization process look like building a Winchester house?
For those who are not familiar with it, Winchester House is a famous house located in San Jose, CA. This giant 160-room house was gradually built during a period of 38 years with no overall planning and consistency. Often staircases lead to the ceiling and doors open to solid walls. Visitors are warned not to wander away from the touring group. Otherwise they can be lost for hours.
All my "rescue mission" projects involved substantial effort of reverse engineering, re-designing, and re-implementing the previous customization that suffered from "Winchester House" syndromes. "Winchester House" syndromes substantially increase the cost to maintain and extend BPPM customization.
Here are some examples of typical "Winchester House" syndromes:
1) In custom PATROL knowledge modules, some KMs read data input from pconfig, some KMs read data input from external files. And there is no standard location for external files.
2) In custom BPPM cell knowledge base, some events use mc_object slot to determine their Remedy support group, some events parse the msg string to determine their Remedy support group.
3) In custom BPPM cell knowledge base, different events use different rules for update even their requirements are the same.
The root cause of "Winchester House" syndromes is lack of development experience. As stated in the previous post, many BMC customers use the same resource for installation and for customization. Maintaining an accurate and up-to-date documentation can help reduce "Winchester House" syndromes. However the key to eliminate "Winchester House" syndromes is to have an experienced developer to set up a well-defined framework, name convention, and best practices at the beginning of BPPM customization.
Eliminating "Winchester House" syndromes can dramatically lower your total cost of ownership. We will discuss best practices for BPPM customization in the next few posts.
Monday, November 17, 2014
Monday, November 10, 2014
Total Cost of Ownership of BPPM - Part 5: Have separate resources for customization and operations
I have been to several rescue missions when a customization or integration stopped working on a different type/version of input and the client had no idea how to modify it. Because there was very little accurate document about the customization or integration, I had to reverse engineer the whole thing from various source code, configuration files, and test cases to understand how the customization or integration was done. Then I needed to make necessary modification to make the customization or integration work again. After that it took me some time again to write the complete documents that should have been there at the first place including release notes, deployment guide, and troubleshooting guide.
All the time spent in reverse engineering and re-documentation increased the total cost of the ownership to the client. Sometimes, the customization or integration had to be completely re-written because the original one was not architected right. In this case, the total cost of ownership would be increased even more. However this cost along with the headache can be completely avoided if the customization or integration was done right at the first place.
How did this happen? A typical story goes like this: The IT organization hired an employee or long-term consultant responsible for day-to-day operations support including installation, configuration, reporting, user support, and trouble shooting. At the same time, the same person is required to develop customized solution, to program PSL and MRL, and to integrate 3rd-party monitoring software into BPPM.
We all know operations and development require different skill sets. A person who is good at repetitive work in day-to-day operations support often does not have enough experience to develop robust and maintainable solution for customization and integration. A person who is good at developing customization and integration is often bored with day-to-day operations. Requiring one person to do both operations and development is often the root cause of many troubled BPPM operations.
As an example, here is job description from a recent job ad:
- Administer and configure Enterprise Systems Management/Monitoring systems such as BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management (BPPM),BMC Event Manager (BEM) and TMART.
- Integrate end to end Infrastructure solutions to BEM for Unified Event Management
- Integrate enterprise solutions such as Netcool , Omegamon, CA Wilyto BEM/BPPM
Because the hourly rate of operations support staff is lower than a developer and there are many more people with operations support skill than people with development skill, most IT organizations end up hiring an operations support staff and also requires him/her to develop customization and integration. On the surface, it appears that it would lower the cost due to lower hourly rate. In reality, the opposite is true. Due to lack of experience and skill, it takes considerably longer for an operations support staff to complete the development work of customization and integration. And the solution is often hard to maintain, extend, or troubleshoot. The one who developed the solution is often the only person who can understand and maintain it. The entire solution falls apart when this person moves out of the organization.
To avoid this mistake, it is highly recommended to hire an experienced developer to develop a robust and well-documented solution for your customization and integration requirements. A good developer can develop a robust solution quickly and hand over his/her finished work to your operations support staff for maintenance. The hourly rate of a good developer may be higher than an operations support staff, but the time required to complete the development is much less. Development work is a one-time cost. When the development is completed, there is no need to keep the developer around anymore. Do a math on your total budget vs just the hourly rate. At the end it should cost you less on your total budget by hiring a good developer.
We have been doing customized BPPM development for the last 12 years. To further eliminate a client risk, we offer fixed-price quotes on well-defined requirements that will fit your total budget. For example, if you estimate that it will take your operations support staff 6 weeks at $75/hr to finish an integration project, we can take the project to fit your total estimated budget ($75 x 240 = $18,000). We can afford to do this because we have developed a time-approved methodology for any integration and most of source code has already been developed. Of course, we will be able to deliver the solution to you in far less than 6 weeks.
All the time spent in reverse engineering and re-documentation increased the total cost of the ownership to the client. Sometimes, the customization or integration had to be completely re-written because the original one was not architected right. In this case, the total cost of ownership would be increased even more. However this cost along with the headache can be completely avoided if the customization or integration was done right at the first place.
How did this happen? A typical story goes like this: The IT organization hired an employee or long-term consultant responsible for day-to-day operations support including installation, configuration, reporting, user support, and trouble shooting. At the same time, the same person is required to develop customized solution, to program PSL and MRL, and to integrate 3rd-party monitoring software into BPPM.
We all know operations and development require different skill sets. A person who is good at repetitive work in day-to-day operations support often does not have enough experience to develop robust and maintainable solution for customization and integration. A person who is good at developing customization and integration is often bored with day-to-day operations. Requiring one person to do both operations and development is often the root cause of many troubled BPPM operations.
As an example, here is job description from a recent job ad:
- Administer and configure Enterprise Systems Management/Monitoring systems such as BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management (BPPM),BMC Event Manager (BEM) and TMART.
- Integrate end to end Infrastructure solutions to BEM for Unified Event Management
- Integrate enterprise solutions such as Netcool , Omegamon, CA Wilyto BEM/BPPM
Because the hourly rate of operations support staff is lower than a developer and there are many more people with operations support skill than people with development skill, most IT organizations end up hiring an operations support staff and also requires him/her to develop customization and integration. On the surface, it appears that it would lower the cost due to lower hourly rate. In reality, the opposite is true. Due to lack of experience and skill, it takes considerably longer for an operations support staff to complete the development work of customization and integration. And the solution is often hard to maintain, extend, or troubleshoot. The one who developed the solution is often the only person who can understand and maintain it. The entire solution falls apart when this person moves out of the organization.
To avoid this mistake, it is highly recommended to hire an experienced developer to develop a robust and well-documented solution for your customization and integration requirements. A good developer can develop a robust solution quickly and hand over his/her finished work to your operations support staff for maintenance. The hourly rate of a good developer may be higher than an operations support staff, but the time required to complete the development is much less. Development work is a one-time cost. When the development is completed, there is no need to keep the developer around anymore. Do a math on your total budget vs just the hourly rate. At the end it should cost you less on your total budget by hiring a good developer.
We have been doing customized BPPM development for the last 12 years. To further eliminate a client risk, we offer fixed-price quotes on well-defined requirements that will fit your total budget. For example, if you estimate that it will take your operations support staff 6 weeks at $75/hr to finish an integration project, we can take the project to fit your total estimated budget ($75 x 240 = $18,000). We can afford to do this because we have developed a time-approved methodology for any integration and most of source code has already been developed. Of course, we will be able to deliver the solution to you in far less than 6 weeks.
Monday, November 3, 2014
Total Cost of Ownership of BPPM - Part 4: Customization in BPPM operations
In the previous posts, we discussed the first two types of BPPM customization: adding new features and integration. In this post, we will focus on the third type of BPPM customization: automation in BPPM operations.
When you build a house, the time you will be living in that house is much longer than the time you spent to build your house. It would make sense to add some extra features to the house during the construction to make your life easier after you move in. For example, you may want to wire for surrounding sound speakers and Ethernet during construction.
The same applies to BPPM implementation. For every BPPM implementation, its costs more in many years of operations than in a few months of implementation. It would make sense to add the necessary customization during implementation that will cut down the cost of operations. For every full-time staff you save in operations, that is about $100K saving year and year.
Although some automation for BPPM operations can be added after implementation is completed, majority of the automation should be planned as part of the implementation. As an example, I am going to share how our 'cell extension' product has kept large BPPM operations manageable with a small support team.
BPPM support team spends majority of their time to: 1) Gather user requirements on monitoring, email notification, and ticketing assignments; 2) Configure or customize BPPM to meet user requirements; 3) Optionally develop customization in dev environment; 4) Test configuration and customization in UAT environment; 5) Deploy configuration and customization in production environment under change control; 6) Set up blackout period for scheduled and on-demand maintenance windows; 7) Trouble shoot when things don't work as they should be.
Our 'cell extension' product is a BPPM cell knowledge base applied on top of BMC's out-of-box knowledge base. It includes all the common features in BPPM operations such as event updates, repeats, aggregation, delay, blackout, rewording, email notification, Remedy ticketing, etc. For PATROL and Portal events, no cell policy configuration or rule programming is required. For all 3rd-party events, you only need to provide slot mapping from the 3rd-party events by following our clear sample code as a one-time setup. As an added bonus, it also provides plug-and-play interfaces for 2-way integration with any 3rd-party monitoring software.
Our 'cell extension' product is entirely data driven thus it works for every BMC customer. It uses a few simple forms for user input. All these forms can be viewed and updated offline without BPPM access. An end user can fill up those forms with the help from BPPM support team initially. Many end users even choose to own those forms and put them under source control system. Through these forms, an end user can tell BPPM what events they are interested, how they want the message to be formatted, who to email, which group the ticket should be assigned to, etc. BPPM support team only needs to help end users to fill up the forms or fill the forms for them, check the forms for error, and load those forms directly into BPPM. And the same forms are used for dev, UAT, and production environment.
Since data input has been dramatically reduced, and there is no need to configure cell policy or develop cell rules, you only need a small BPPM support team to run a large BPPM operations. Troubleshooting will be much easier since all events follow the same flow. Human input error will be minimized when data are input only once. BPPM cells will process events faster since no event policy is used. A user requirement can be completed in minutes instead of days.
If you are interested in finding out how our 'cell extension' product can work for you, please feel free to contact us by clicking the link on top of this page.
When you build a house, the time you will be living in that house is much longer than the time you spent to build your house. It would make sense to add some extra features to the house during the construction to make your life easier after you move in. For example, you may want to wire for surrounding sound speakers and Ethernet during construction.
The same applies to BPPM implementation. For every BPPM implementation, its costs more in many years of operations than in a few months of implementation. It would make sense to add the necessary customization during implementation that will cut down the cost of operations. For every full-time staff you save in operations, that is about $100K saving year and year.
Although some automation for BPPM operations can be added after implementation is completed, majority of the automation should be planned as part of the implementation. As an example, I am going to share how our 'cell extension' product has kept large BPPM operations manageable with a small support team.
BPPM support team spends majority of their time to: 1) Gather user requirements on monitoring, email notification, and ticketing assignments; 2) Configure or customize BPPM to meet user requirements; 3) Optionally develop customization in dev environment; 4) Test configuration and customization in UAT environment; 5) Deploy configuration and customization in production environment under change control; 6) Set up blackout period for scheduled and on-demand maintenance windows; 7) Trouble shoot when things don't work as they should be.
Our 'cell extension' product is a BPPM cell knowledge base applied on top of BMC's out-of-box knowledge base. It includes all the common features in BPPM operations such as event updates, repeats, aggregation, delay, blackout, rewording, email notification, Remedy ticketing, etc. For PATROL and Portal events, no cell policy configuration or rule programming is required. For all 3rd-party events, you only need to provide slot mapping from the 3rd-party events by following our clear sample code as a one-time setup. As an added bonus, it also provides plug-and-play interfaces for 2-way integration with any 3rd-party monitoring software.
Our 'cell extension' product is entirely data driven thus it works for every BMC customer. It uses a few simple forms for user input. All these forms can be viewed and updated offline without BPPM access. An end user can fill up those forms with the help from BPPM support team initially. Many end users even choose to own those forms and put them under source control system. Through these forms, an end user can tell BPPM what events they are interested, how they want the message to be formatted, who to email, which group the ticket should be assigned to, etc. BPPM support team only needs to help end users to fill up the forms or fill the forms for them, check the forms for error, and load those forms directly into BPPM. And the same forms are used for dev, UAT, and production environment.
Since data input has been dramatically reduced, and there is no need to configure cell policy or develop cell rules, you only need a small BPPM support team to run a large BPPM operations. Troubleshooting will be much easier since all events follow the same flow. Human input error will be minimized when data are input only once. BPPM cells will process events faster since no event policy is used. A user requirement can be completed in minutes instead of days.
If you are interested in finding out how our 'cell extension' product can work for you, please feel free to contact us by clicking the link on top of this page.
Monday, October 27, 2014
Total Cost of Ownership of BPPM - Part 3: What to customize in BPPM
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.
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.
Monday, October 20, 2014
Total Cost of Ownership of BPPM - Part 2: Customization
BPPM out-of-box solution provides basic monitoring features, so do
many other low-priced and open-source monitoring solutions. The reason
you have paid a premium price for BPPM is not just for the brand name, it
is for its flexibility to customize the solution to fit your unique business requirements exactly. That is how you can fully realize the
ROI from BPPM.
Your implementation is not just installation and configuration. Every enterprise IT ended up customizing BPPM - some did it well planned but some did it as a rescue mission. I have been to enough rescue mission to tell you that a well planned customization will cost you far less time, money, and headache.
One of the major components that will largely affect total cost of ownership is customization. How can customization affect your total cost of ownership?
1) Negatively, it costs you extra time and money in your implementation project.
2) Positively, it adds the functionaries that your business requires to improve your business bottom line.
3) More positively, it reduces the work in maintenance/operations through automation and consistency so you need a smaller operations team - that is a big cost saving year after year.
Many people might think customization increases maintenance/operations work. Well, that would be the case if customization were not done right. I have seen some clean customization that streamlined maintenance/operations work. I have also seen some messy customization that simply became maintenance nightmare. Similar to the customization made in your house, if the customization follows standards and consistency, it will reduce maintenance/operations work. A simple example would be a customization you do to the light switches in your house that allows you to control all lights through a mobile app remotely. We will talk about standards and consistency in later posts.
Not only you need to budget extra time and money for customization in your implementation project, you also need to hire the right developer for customization because customization is primarily code development and it requires totally different skill set from installation.
Unfortunately customization is often under-addressed by both BMC and BMC customers. BMC just tells you that BPPM is totally customizable without providing you the necessary training and best practice on customization. BMC customers are aware of the need for customization but have no solid understanding what detailed features/automation they need and what it takes to get there.
As a consulting practice for the last 12 years, we specialize in BPPM customization. Please feel free to contact us if we can be any assistance for your BPPM customization. We also provide training in BPPM customization including advanced MRL programming and PSL programming that are not available in BMC.
Your implementation is not just installation and configuration. Every enterprise IT ended up customizing BPPM - some did it well planned but some did it as a rescue mission. I have been to enough rescue mission to tell you that a well planned customization will cost you far less time, money, and headache.
One of the major components that will largely affect total cost of ownership is customization. How can customization affect your total cost of ownership?
1) Negatively, it costs you extra time and money in your implementation project.
2) Positively, it adds the functionaries that your business requires to improve your business bottom line.
3) More positively, it reduces the work in maintenance/operations through automation and consistency so you need a smaller operations team - that is a big cost saving year after year.
Many people might think customization increases maintenance/operations work. Well, that would be the case if customization were not done right. I have seen some clean customization that streamlined maintenance/operations work. I have also seen some messy customization that simply became maintenance nightmare. Similar to the customization made in your house, if the customization follows standards and consistency, it will reduce maintenance/operations work. A simple example would be a customization you do to the light switches in your house that allows you to control all lights through a mobile app remotely. We will talk about standards and consistency in later posts.
Not only you need to budget extra time and money for customization in your implementation project, you also need to hire the right developer for customization because customization is primarily code development and it requires totally different skill set from installation.
Unfortunately customization is often under-addressed by both BMC and BMC customers. BMC just tells you that BPPM is totally customizable without providing you the necessary training and best practice on customization. BMC customers are aware of the need for customization but have no solid understanding what detailed features/automation they need and what it takes to get there.
As a consulting practice for the last 12 years, we specialize in BPPM customization. Please feel free to contact us if we can be any assistance for your BPPM customization. We also provide training in BPPM customization including advanced MRL programming and PSL programming that are not available in BMC.
Tuesday, October 14, 2014
Total Cost of Ownership of BPPM - Part 1: Introduction
The total cost of ownership of BPPM includes the cost of hardware, software license, implementation, day-to-day operations and maintenance. The total cost of ownership must be kept in mind starting in the planning phase and through the entire implementation phase as well as the operations phase. But most importantly, how BPPM is implemented makes a huge difference not just on your implementation cost but also your operations cost year after year.
Implementing BPPM is like building a house. Not only you care how fast the house can be built, you also care if the house has enough features and options to fit your needs. And more importantly you care how much it will cost you for maintenance, repair, and utilities year after year.
Several years ago when I bought my first newly-built house, I knew very little about total cost of ownership. Because the house was poorly insulated during the construction, I have been getting costly air conditioning bill every summer. Had I known what I know now, I would have been more selective when I picked up a builder.
Similarly, if you are responsible for your enterprise system monitoring, you may want constantly ask these questions during implementation: How many people do I need for operations? How much can be automated and how much must be manual work? What customization do I need? Can this customization be easily extended in the future? Are different components in the implementation consistent enough so the knowledge can be transferred easily? Can most of the operation procedures be created and understood before implementation is complete?
If you hire consultants for BPPM implementation, you need to work closely with the consultants to make sure the total cost of ownership is part of the objectives of the implementation. Don't assume that a consultant will automatically keep the total cost of ownership in mind since it may require more work during implementation. The difference between a good consultant and a mediocre consultant is not just how fast the implementation can be done, but how the implementation meets your needs and most importantly how much it can save you in operations.
What should be a good size for your operations team? As an example, one of my clients with 7 monitoring solutions (BMC and other vendors) needs only a 3-person team for the last 5 years to keep mission-critical multi-hospital operations running without experiencing any down time. And no one needs to work overtime. I have seen many similar-sized IT operations need 6-10 people in the team just to keep up with operations support. If you can cut down just one operations staff in the team with a right implementation, that is a minimum $100K saving year after year.
In the next few posts, we will go through some best practices on how to reduce the total cost of ownership.
Implementing BPPM is like building a house. Not only you care how fast the house can be built, you also care if the house has enough features and options to fit your needs. And more importantly you care how much it will cost you for maintenance, repair, and utilities year after year.
Several years ago when I bought my first newly-built house, I knew very little about total cost of ownership. Because the house was poorly insulated during the construction, I have been getting costly air conditioning bill every summer. Had I known what I know now, I would have been more selective when I picked up a builder.
Similarly, if you are responsible for your enterprise system monitoring, you may want constantly ask these questions during implementation: How many people do I need for operations? How much can be automated and how much must be manual work? What customization do I need? Can this customization be easily extended in the future? Are different components in the implementation consistent enough so the knowledge can be transferred easily? Can most of the operation procedures be created and understood before implementation is complete?
If you hire consultants for BPPM implementation, you need to work closely with the consultants to make sure the total cost of ownership is part of the objectives of the implementation. Don't assume that a consultant will automatically keep the total cost of ownership in mind since it may require more work during implementation. The difference between a good consultant and a mediocre consultant is not just how fast the implementation can be done, but how the implementation meets your needs and most importantly how much it can save you in operations.
What should be a good size for your operations team? As an example, one of my clients with 7 monitoring solutions (BMC and other vendors) needs only a 3-person team for the last 5 years to keep mission-critical multi-hospital operations running without experiencing any down time. And no one needs to work overtime. I have seen many similar-sized IT operations need 6-10 people in the team just to keep up with operations support. If you can cut down just one operations staff in the team with a right implementation, that is a minimum $100K saving year after year.
In the next few posts, we will go through some best practices on how to reduce the total cost of ownership.
Monday, October 6, 2014
PatrolCli - Part 7: Dynamically activate diagnostic data collection in PATROL
If you monitor web applications using BMC TM-ART or a similar product, you will receive a critical event in BPPM cell when the response time exceeds your threshold. When this happens, you would wish that you can collect detailed performance data at EJB level to help you diagnose the poor response time. So you probably end up developing a custom PATROL knowledge module to collect detailed EJB data from your J2EE application server.
However, you don't want to have your EJB KM running all the time since it is resource intensive. It would make sense if you can activate and deactivate your EJB KM dynamically. When your BPPM cell receives a critical event about slow web application response time, your EJB KM will be activated automatically. When the same web application response time goes back to normal, your EJB KM will be deactivated automatically.
As you can see it here, BPPM cell is the only component that knows when to activate and deactivate your EJB KM because it receives and clears the slow web application response time alert.
Since PATROL agent is normally installed on BPPM cell server, you can use PatrolCli to activate and deactivate your EJB KM.
For example, if your have a custom PATROL KM called EJB_KM, you can activate it by including the following PatrolCli command in an OS script called activate_ejb_km.cmd located on BPPM cell server:
execpsl "set(\"/EJB_KM/active\", 2);"
Then simply invoke activate_ejb_km.cmd in execute() function of a MRL rule from BPPM cell when BPPM cell receives a critical event for slow web application response time.
Similarly, you can deactivate EJB_KM by including the following PatrolCli command in an OS script called deactivate_ejb_km.cmd located on BPPM cell server:
execpsl "set(\"/EJB_KM/active\", 0);"
Then simply invoke deactivate_ejb_km.cmd in execute() function of a MRL rule from BPPM cell when the previous critical event is cleared in BPPM cell.
However, you don't want to have your EJB KM running all the time since it is resource intensive. It would make sense if you can activate and deactivate your EJB KM dynamically. When your BPPM cell receives a critical event about slow web application response time, your EJB KM will be activated automatically. When the same web application response time goes back to normal, your EJB KM will be deactivated automatically.
As you can see it here, BPPM cell is the only component that knows when to activate and deactivate your EJB KM because it receives and clears the slow web application response time alert.
Since PATROL agent is normally installed on BPPM cell server, you can use PatrolCli to activate and deactivate your EJB KM.
For example, if your have a custom PATROL KM called EJB_KM, you can activate it by including the following PatrolCli command in an OS script called activate_ejb_km.cmd located on BPPM cell server:
execpsl "set(\"/EJB_KM/active\", 2);"
Then simply invoke activate_ejb_km.cmd in execute() function of a MRL rule from BPPM cell when BPPM cell receives a critical event for slow web application response time.
Similarly, you can deactivate EJB_KM by including the following PatrolCli command in an OS script called deactivate_ejb_km.cmd located on BPPM cell server:
execpsl "set(\"/EJB_KM/active\", 0);"
Then simply invoke deactivate_ejb_km.cmd in execute() function of a MRL rule from BPPM cell when the previous critical event is cleared in BPPM cell.
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