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Posts Tagged ‘BMC Forum’
Delayed report from the BMC Forum about Discovering Configuration Items (CIs)
Observations on discovery technology based on sitting in on the BMC IT Discovery Suite presentation at last month’s BMC Forum
Tools for discovering your IT assets are a new area to me, so if I get the technology all wrong, let me know. I attended this session Wednesday of the BMC Forum after having breakfast with some cool people who work in change management at Temple Inland here in Austin (Stephen, one of the brothers in the photo from this post is one of them). They all had Blackberries which seems to be the support gadget of choice — my husband the system administrator carries one as well. I’ll get back to the Blackberries as part of the IT discovery in a minute.
Mike Ramos, a technical services expert who works in Dallas, presented to about 40 attendees. He offered methods for answering the questions, What assets do I have? How are assets related? How are assets configured? An example of a customer request he’s helped with: “I need a quick asset count of the 20,000 desktops I’ve got, plus I need patch management for those 20,000 desktops in less than 3 to 4 weeks, can it be done?” His answer is “Yes, and here’s an overview of how to do it.”
BMC offers Marimba Configuration Discovery for configuration discovery when you want to gain visibility and control over IT assets, so it’s agent based. BMC Discovery Express (he also called it Dex) populates and validates the CMDB with inventory of deployed assets (agentless) using SNMP v1 or v2 (items like a switch, router, or firewall) but doesn’t know about relationship info, so the third piece is BMC Topology Discovery, which tells you the connections. I’m probably completely confused on what you can buy as a package, but your sales rep could help you figure it out, or poke around on the links I’ve embedded.
Questions and answers from this session include:
Q: Can you marry the application to the network things that you know about?
A: Yes, any topology you already know about can be configured.
Q: Can you add connections to servers in the map by hand?
A: Yes, it’s in a right-click menu.
Q: What is that Route to Value graphic?
A: The Route to Value graphic shows categories of the methods you can use to achieve Business Service Management. Marimba works in the Change and Configuration Management Route to Value, but the other two products work in the Asset Management and Discovery Route to Value. I think that just goes to show you that you don’t have to take just one route to get to value.
Q: Are there any gotchas in a VMWare or UNIX partition environment in terms of discovery?
A: As you might guess, VMWare can have issues because of the display aspect, causing you to have to customize the view, but
there is an expert module for VMWare / Citrix is due in a November patch of the product.
Q: What about discovery of handhelds?
A: There are workarounds for Blackberry and Palm devices, but PocketPC is the only officially supported discoverable device.
So that’s how I’ve returned to the ubiquitous Blackberry. I also want to let the Marimba folks know that your radio transmitter/receiver/repeater analogy is quite good in my eyes. It scales well and seems to be familiar to most people. I’ve been explaining architecture for distributed system for about five years now, and your analogies make the best diagrams I’ve seen.
Photos from the forum
I took some photos at the BMC Forum in Dallas October 2005
I had some fun with my digital SLR pretending to be a photojournalist. Here are some photos of activity at the forum.
Chip and Stephen work for Dell and Temple-Inland, respectively, in Austin, Texas, and they’re brothers. I had to ask them if I could play paparrazi and snap some shots.
Checking email between sessions like a lot of us were doing.
A lively discussion in the hallway requiring hand guestures and everything.
Another discussion after the Marimba 101 lesson.
Here’s a partial shot of the expo area where you can go see products in action.
Tuesday BMC Performance Manager session at the BMC Forum 05 in Dallas
Reporting from a conference room set at 60 degrees Fahrenheit, here’s your roving blogger reporting from Dallas
Blogging live is harder than it sounds. Fortunately the wireless connection is behaving in two of the session rooms I’ve been in so far. But, beyond the technology (which is the easy part), it’s difficult to take notes and figure out what to report on. So here goes. Let me know if you’d like to hear more.
There are plenty of sessions to choose from and at least five tracks. This morning I went to the BMC Performance Manager Roadmap and Strategy session with about 35 attendees. Sean Duclaux started with a trick question by asking for a show of hands. How many PATROL Express customers? (a few) How many PATROL Classic customers? (a bunch) How many BMC Performance Manager customers? All! We’ve changed the PATROL product name to BMC Performance Manager. Of course with a product evolving like this, lots of questions ensue. I’ll try to capture the questions and answers here.
Q: How do you decide which to use, agent-based or agentless monitoring?
A: Based on collection policies that you set, the agent might deploy automatically, perhaps by pushing a lightweight local presence onto the computer to be monitored. More on this below the question/answer set.
Q: What kind of pricing is available for people who are already invested in the PATROL Classic product line?
A: The licensing scheme has been completely redesigned in a few ways. One is that there’s a CPU metric, so if you want to monitor a server, it doesn’t matter if it’s Windows or UNIX or Linux — you can switch between them. Also there are tiers of deployment that are simplified, such as a departmental license. I’m sure I’m missing some layers here but the overall answer is that PATROL Classic is not going away, but you will see infrastructure cost savings as you upgrade and decommission old infrastructure.
Q: What technological help is available for upgrading our KMs?
A: The BMC Performance Manager SDK was just released in August and you can request it (it comes free with BMC Performance Manager). With this SDK you can create application classes and XML config files that will pick up all the info that your KMs do (as long as it makes sense to do so), and there are third party implementers being trained on the SDK right now. (OTL is in Austin this week for training, apparently).
Q: What about about the install footprint — how much disk space for this lightweight local presense?
A: It shouldn’t be a big space hog. Just looking at my own Marimba client install I’m seeing a less than 50 MB install, and Marimba is the one that gathers the most information, not a lightweight local presense. I’m guessing lightweight should be MUCH less than this.
Q: What about bandwidth, will it fill up my network sending data back and forth?
A: This is all configurable, but typically only when an event is raised will it be sent back. Of course if you’re going from PATROL 3, which apparently didn’t send data anywhere (I’m no expert on this but that’s what was said), you’re going to see a difference in network capacity.
Q: The Million Dollar Question (according to a guy in a UNIX-only shop) — will the RSM (Remote Service Monitor) run on a UNIX box or is it Windows only?
A: The product manager and architect are arm wrestling over that right now. The basic answer is that we (well, the architect) wants to do everything, but … a Windows RSM can monitor both Windows and UNIX, but a Solaris/UNIX RSM can only monitor UNIX, so we need to know whether that’s worth building — does it fit into the environment that you envision? UNIX doesn’t exactly listen well (ok, at all) to perfmon information, for example, so there’s no monitoring of Windows with a UNIX RSM.
Q: Will a lightweight local presence (LLP) incorporate auto recovery actions?
A: Even if you are managing a solution remotely, as long as dynamic connection can happen, we’ll let you do recovery actions for remote connections (not til after December though.) PATROL Express can do remote restarts right now.
The gee-whiz factor for me with the new direction is the combination of agent-based and agentless options. Both are available now with a single view point, meaning your PATROL Express data can be viewed alongside your PATROL data. You can apply a policy to determine whether you monitor something with an agent or not. Here’s an example of a policy application out of the BMC white paper, “Effortless System Management.”
Policy example: If a small file/print server is reassigned to serve the office of the company’s chief executive,
the IT staff may decide that it wants an autorecovery capability on that server. The IT staff simply sets the
new performance management policy for that server, and BMC Performance Manager makes the
appropriate changes, which may include pushing an LLP out to the server.
Another recurring topic so far is compliance efforts such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPPA, Basel II. As Sean put it, “You don’t want to see your CEO on the cover of a magazine in an orange jumpsuit.” So, if Sarbanes-Oxley or other compliance efforts are your concern, figure out how to get your policies in place. I’m hearing this over and over.
All the presentations are available with a username and password, so if you’re attending, here’s the site to download the presentations. Your packet has the username and password.
