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.