NetIQ

Mar 10 2009   1:24AM GMT

IT Process Orchestration Revisited

Posted by: Ryan Shopp
BMC, CA, enigmatic, HP Software, uc4, stratavis, Opalis, NetIQ, LANDesk, IBM Tivoli, iwave, RBA, Run Book Automation, data center automation, IT Process Automation

I decided it was time to review and make an update to the IT Process Automation, Process Orchestration, Run Book Automation, Data Center Automation, IT Process Integration, or whatever name each vendor, customer or analysts choose to call it.  Since my last update to the Data Center Automation Blueprint (DCAB) there have been some industry changes with some vendors going a different direction, other being acquired, etc.

A quick review of this space from the DCAB is first up.

Process Orchestration
Description - Cross-silo automation for mundane manual or high occurrence tasks. The capabilities are focused around helping individual technology domains (e.g., network, windows, unix, database, etc) communicate and collaborate to automate tasks that before required numerous people and passing around a trouble ticket.

Top 5 Capabilities
1) Drag/Drop graphical interface for designing process workflows
2) Common, normalized Data Model of common/primary attributes
3) Library of pre-defined, re-usable actions/triggers/processes for usage out-of-the-box (bigger the better - even a community that shares is a plus)
4) Policy/Desired-state engine driving things
5). Sandbox, simulator to help test workflows without impacting actual resources/instances within the production enterprise.

The Vendors
BMC (formerly RealOps)
CA (formerly Optinuity)
Enigmatec
HP (formerly Opsware, formerly iConclude)
IBM (formerly Micromuse Impact)
iWave Software
LANDesk (Process Manager product)
NetIQ (Aegis product)
Opalis
Stratavia
UC4 Software

So since the last update, what has been going on in the space….

It’s interesting to see Stratavia tweaking their company positioning as the “independent” choice.  Makes sense considering we’ve had a wave of consolidation with the big 4 ensuring they have coverage for this functional area, and also other well known (larger) management vendors (LANDesk & NetIQ) adding capabilities.

Optinuity was acquired by CA in October and naturally that changed some things for Opalis which had a previous OEM relationship with CA.  Opalis in turn also trumpets the “independent” choice and has gone further into talking about how this doesn’t serve the customers since those vendors are using those acquisitions to bring their own products together and not looking at it from a heterogenous standpoint of I have 5 products from 3 vendors and I need them all to work together smoothly.  One last area that I need to do some more exploring around is something I felt a year ago would eventually happen and the lines would start blurring between Business Process Management (BPM) solutions and IT Process Orchestration.  The are starting to compare/contract with BPM and also talk more Business Intelligence (BI) messaging.  It’s nice to see a vendor lay out in plain site some recommended evaluation criteria for all customers and even competitors to see…great way to set the bar.

Those are a couple key things i’m seeing at a glance…what else is going on out there.  Who else is in the space these days, what is their key differentiator versus the players listed above.  Drop you comments in below if you a vendor or a customer using one of these vendors or another one I don’t have listed.  I’ll make updates to the DCAB if it’s appropriate.

Apr 17 2008   9:58PM GMT

Performance and Availability Management vs. Analytics - Part 1 of ?

Posted by: Ryan Shopp
Network monitoring, Performance management, BMC, NetIQ, Alcatel-Lucent, NetScout, Analytics, CA, Systems monitoring, Application monitoring, SolarWinds, InfoVista, IBM Tivoli, HP Software, Quest Software, Netuitive, Integrien, NetQoS, Compuware, Fluke Networks, Network Instruments, Opnet, Entuity, Brix Networks, Keynote, Gomez, Xangati, Apparent Networks, Packet Design, Groundwork, Hyperic, Nagios, OpenNMS, ZenOSS, Firescope, Indicative, DCAB, eg innovations, cittio, nimsoft

I’ve had an opportunity to be briefed over the past couple months by a number of current Data Center Automation Blueprint’s Performance & Availability vendors (e.g., CITTIO, eG Innovations, InfoVista, Integrien, Nimsoft).  With that and some further research I think I’m ready to take another pass at this area of the blueprint.

First up, all these vendors use a variety of techniques to collect a variety of data from as many points of view as possible.

• Their own server agents that collect data about systems, services, applications, databases, etc and then aggregate back to a centralized console
• Agent-less centralized consoles that leverage infrastructure standard communications protocols (e.g., SNMP, RPC, ODBC, WMI, SSH, TCP, UDP, HTTP) to query or connect remotely to collect data from networks, systems, services, applications, databases, etc.
• Passive traffic flow collectors (which can be an agents or appliance) that are either in-line with the traffic flows or receive an exact copy of all traffic flows traversing a network connection (e.g., switch port uplink) through hardware vendor capabilities (e.g., spanning)

These data collection points can be statistics about a specific IT infrastructure resource ; physical devices, virtual devices, physical connections, virtual connections or resources running on physical or virtual devices like services, processes, applications, databases, etc.

Or the data collection points can be traffic flows or end-to-end specifics including passive traffic flows, synthetic transactions or even as simple as a pinging from remote points.

Metrics that are captured, typically revolve around throughput, errors, utilization, latency, up/down status, etc. (there are way to many to mention here).

After saying all this, there is a list a mile long of vendors (a number already noted on the DCAB) that capture these predominately time-series oriented data points about performance, capacity, availability using any/all these methods or vantage points (I know, passive traffic flows are not time-series data but patterns/usage/performance etc can be determined from them).

So, with all that data, what most these vendors offer are two primary types of functionality; 1) a variety graphical reports and 2)metric thresholding capabilities that produce a list of outstanding issues/alerts/alarms/events/concerns (whatever you want to call them).

Ok, so why did I organize and point all this out. So I can draw a line around where most of the innovation from my perspective is occurring. The above is for the most part in my eyes a commodity these days. Most companies have had collection/reporting/thresholding capabilities spanning multiple technology silos since pretty close to the start of the enterprise networking. The reports continue to get fancier, the number of data sources a single product collects from continues to expand, etc.  Another sign of commoditization is related to the variety of economic business models offering these products; open source, managed service providers, internet distributed products, appliances deployment models and indirect sales forces, large enterprise direct sales force, completely flexible frameworks for service providers to basically “build their own,” etc.

For the most part where the majority of technical innovation is occurring these days is the next layer above this data collection, reporting and alerting. Now let me say this, yes…there is some great innovation still occurring in the data collection realm (e.g., Xangati offering real-time Netflow down to a user level, PacketDesign monitoring routing messages, NetQoS leveraging advanced TCP/IP theory to analyze where end-to-end bottlenecks are occurring). But, for the most part these new data sources are being used to augment or replace currently deployed data sources in an attempt to see things from either as many vantage points or the best vantage points to avoid surprises within their unique enterprise IT environment.

So where is the serious innovation coming from…stay tuned for part 2.

Mar 11 2008   1:27PM GMT

EMC adds Service Desk to Data Center Management portfolio

Posted by: Ryan Shopp
Performance management, Symantec, BMC, EMC, NetIQ, HP Software, BladeLogic, NetQoS, Xangati, Packet Design, DCAB

EMC made a move yesterday that continued to show their intent and desire to compete against the Big 4 in IT Infrastructure Management (e.g., BMC, CA, HP, IBM).  All those other players have their own Service Desk offering, so it was time to join those ranks.

Infra Corporation, was acquired by EMC’s Resource Management Software Business Unit for undisclosed financial terms.

Combined with their previous acquisitions:

SMARTS - Availability & Performance Management - Q1 2005
nLayers -  IT  Resource Reconciliation (e.g., CMDB) - Q3 2006
Voyence - Configuration & Change Management (for Network Devices) - Q4 2007

This acquisition shows a slowly increasing pace of their acquisitions (within the software group).  With that being said, looking at their portfolio, I would be surprised if we don’t see another one or maybe even two (depending on the size) before the year is out.  Areas they could benefit from (aka we could see) would be Configuration & Change Management (for Systems/Applications) or a move to strengthen their Availability & Performance Management offering; specifically more application performance centric.

On the CCM front there are numerous virtual & physical system configuration vendors sprouting up these days, versus before the primary game in town was BladeLogic (or Opsware before HP acquired them).  Meanwhile, on the Performance Management front they have a variety of options that could include grabbing a smaller application performance appliance vendor (e.g., Mazu, Xangati, Packet Design)  or something bigger like maybe a NetQoS.  Or even bigger and more interesting (but convoluted) could be buying out NetIQ who continues to innovate within Attachemate (e.g., Aegis product) or the artist formerly known as Precise Software (and now again known by the same name after Symantec spun them back out).  Probably long shots but just thoughts to ponder as the EMC Resource Management Software portfolio could use portfolio expansion in either or both functional areas of the DCAB.

Bottom line from my outsiders perspective is EMC is one or two moves away from changing conversations from the big 4 to maybe the big 5.

Jan 25 2008   9:00AM GMT

Couple recent notes on CMDB, aka Resource Reconciliation

Posted by: Ryan Shopp
Symantec, BMC, NetIQ, DataCenter, CA, CMDB, Opalis, Scalent

Another great post by Glenn O’Donnell; CMDB is the new integration mechanism. I’m looking forward to seeing his forthcoming book on the same topic!

2007 TechTarget Products of the Year - Data Center include (categories by DCAB functional categories):

Resource Reconciliation (category combined with Configuration & Change) solutions from CA, BMC and Scalent

A couple other categories that map to the DCAB are;

Process Orchestration solutions from Symantec, Opalis and CA

Performance & Capacity solutions from NetIQ, BalancePoint and CiRBA

I find the CiRBA solution very intriguing after my read and post on Innovations in Performance Management yesterday.

Jan 21 2008   1:43PM GMT

Quick Monday Summary of events from late last week/weekend

Posted by: Ryan Shopp
Symantec, BMC, NetIQ, NetScout, Quest Software, NetQoS, Compuware, Indicative

 Symantec to sell off Application Performance Monitoring group.  Looks like Precise Software is back and the Symantec Data Center group will focus in on the configuration and change management side of things.

BarcampESM took place over the weekend.  Here are some materials to take a look at.  BSM by Doug,  Discussions around open software and open standards, the desire for an “open agent” .  From this point forward keep track of things via the Open Management Consortium discussions.

Application Performance Management(APM) rolling review continues at InformationWeek - recently highlighted, ProactiveNet (recently acquired by BMC).  Previous reviews include Quest Software Foglight (Dec 2007), Network General (Nov 2007), Nimsoft Nimbus (Oct 2007), Compuware Vantage (Oct 2007), NetIQ AppManager (Sept 2007), NetQoS SuperAgent (Sept 2007),  Indicative (Aug 2007).  As you can see this is a very congested space, pardon the pun, but it is sized to be over $2B in size by Forrester.

Now that we’ve run through the entire 6 functional areas of the Data Center Automation Blueprint we plant to discuss the impact of virtualization over the next couple posts.  Thanks in advance to those I’ve been talking with and their perspectives on this topic.

Jan 17 2008   7:14PM GMT

What are the most desired features in IT Process Orchestration (e.g. RBA)?

Posted by: Ryan Shopp
LANDesk, BMC, NetIQ, DataCenter, IBM Tivoli, HP Software, Opalis, Optinuity, RealOps, Stratavia, RBA, Run Book Automation, IT Process Automation, Enigmatec, Scapa Technologies, OpTier

Alright, looking for feedback on this one. After talking about the players in the IT Process Orchestration space, I’m wondering what are the primary capabilities people are looking for?

Here are my top five, please feel free to throw down yours in the comments below:

1. Drag/Drop graphical interface for designing process workflows
2. Common, normalized Data Model of common/primary attributes
3. Library of pre-defined, re-usable actions/triggers/processes for usage out-of-the-box (bigger the better - even a community that shares is a plus)
4. Policy/Desired-state engine driving things
5. Sandbox, simulator to help test workflows without impacting actual resources/instances within the production enterprise.

Beyond these five core capabilities, depending on the processes you wish to automate you need to verify what interaction/communications protocols are supported (e.g., SNMP, WMI, JMX, ODBC, Telnet/SSH/FTP to CLI, XML/Web Services). Make sure they have what you need to communicate with.

Of course, it also goes without saying (just like with any commercial product) table stakes require RBAC security, reporting, logging, appropriate hardware/software requirements.

Bottom line, I guarantee if your a medium to large enterprise you have current manual processes that these products can automate for you! Reducing errors due to the mundane nature of that task, freeing up people currently doing the task for other projects or tasks and also the intangible benefit of it’s simply faster which provides better customer service depending on the process that is automated. Make this a priority in 2008 and get one of these vendors in there to help out!

Disclosure: I have no relationships with any of the vendors in this space. The comments are all made based on my personal experiences and perspectives.

Jan 14 2008   8:42PM GMT

Digging into the DCAB 6’s functional areas: Process Orchestration

Posted by: Ryan Shopp
LANDesk, BMC, NetIQ, DataCenter, IBM Tivoli, HP Software, Opalis, Optinuity, Stratavia, RBA, Run Book Automation, IT Process Automation, Enigmatec, Scapa Technologies, OpTier, GridApp Systems

Alright, back on track with our review of the 6 functional DCAB areas. We are now onto the hottest, fastest growth areas! First up, Process Orchestration or what Gartner has coined as Run Book Automation?

These products offer the ability to define, build, orchestrate, manage, monitor and report on workflows that automate specific IT intra or inter domain processes (intra = between different products for the Windows Server team or inter = between the application and network team). There are a ton of case studies and examples on most the players websites.

A couple quick examples to get a flavor include:

A monitoring product identifies a specific condition (e.g., an outage), it then checks a configuration auditing product to see if a recent change was performed for that system.

A configuration auditing product monitoring if a device is in or out of compliance notices an situation and then automatically opens a trouble ticket. Later, it notices again the situation has been resolved and it adds the appropriate details to the ticket and automatically closes it out.

Here are the companies I know about (as always, in alphabetical order)

BMC (formerly RealOps)
Enigmatec
GridApp
HP (formerly Opsware, formerly iConclude)
IBM (formerly ThinkDynamics)
LANDesk (Process Manager product)
NetIQ (Aegis product)
OpTier
Opalis
Optinuity
Scapa Technologies
Stratavia
UC4 Software
xTigo

As always, who am I missing. What are the opinions out there from users or evaluators for each platform (please chime in down in the comments section). I have personal product exposure and experience with only BMC, Stratavia. Some of the key features that I learned from those products included the value of having a normalized, common data model and “action” abstraction capabilities so you re-use previous process actions in new workflows.

Here are a couple good reviews and write-ups for further reading if desired.

Data Center Manager Primed for IT Process Automation
IT Process Automaton Overview and review of some players

Dec 28 2007   11:31PM GMT

Digging into each of these 6 functional areas: Performance and Capacity

Posted by: Ryan Shopp
Network monitoring, Performance management, Symantec, BMC, EMC, NetIQ, Alcatel-Lucent, NetScout, DataCenter, CA, OSS, Systems monitoring, InfoVista, IBM Tivoli, HP Software, Quest Software, Netuitive, Integrien, NetQoS, Compuware, Fluke Networks, Network Instruments, Opnet, Entuity, Brix Networks, Keynote, Gomez, Xangati, Apparent Networks, Packet Design, Groundwork, Hyperic, Nagios, OpenNMS, ZenOSS, Zabbix

First things first, we have many of the same vendors from the Availability & Notification functional area of this Data Center Automation Blueprint in this category. Which probably begs the question, do we combine Availability & Notification with Performance & Capacity? I know in the OSS (not Open Source Software but telco-oriented Operational  Support Systems) model they do this and call it “Service Assurance”, another name could be Service Level Management as they two monitoring-centric functions are about ensuring service levels are met…or simply I call it Availability & Performance? I’ll come back to this at the end after I type up the players in this Performance & Capacity area:

• BMC - Performance Manager & ProactiveNet Analytics
• CA - eHealth (former Concord)
• IBM - Netcool Proviso (former Quallaby that Micromuse acquired), Monitoring
• HP - Performance Manager, Performance Insight, Operations
• Quest Software - Foglight, PerformaSure
• Symantec - i3 (former Precise product line Veritas acquired)
• EMC - IP Performance Manager

But then, we have a slew of others that have been around for quite some time now…

• InfoVista - In January ‘07 Microsoft announced a $15M licensing deal of their product
• NetQoS -
• Netscout - nGenius & Network General (acquired in November ‘07)
• Compuware - Vantage
• Alcatel-Lucent - VitalSuite (former INS)
• Fluke Networks (they also OEM NetQoS’ products)
• Network Instruments (also have reseller relationship with NetQoS)
• NetIQ - AppManager
• Opnet
• Entuity
• Brix Networks
• Keynote
• Gomez

And some innovative up-and-comers in some unique technology/approaches…

Real-Time Behavior/Pattern Analysis through Dynamic Thresholding

• Netuitive
• Integrien

IP Traffic/Packet Flow Monitoring & Analysis

• Xangati
• Apparent Networks
• Packet Design

Open Source Software (OSS) vendors

• Groundwork
• Hyperic
• Nagios
• OpenNMS
• ZenOSS
• Zabbix

Whew..that was more work then I expected to pull together and I’m not done yet…  Please throw into the comment who I’ve missed (I know there has to be a few).

The major challenge here is organizing and breaking down this functional area.  There are so many approaches to obtain performance metrics from/for the data center.  Some of the techniques and perspectives include;

• passive vs. active
• agent vs. agent-less
• in-line appliance vs. out-of-band appliance (e.g., span a port)
• proprietary vs. leverage infrastructure mgmt. capabilities (e.g., Cisco Netflow)
• outside the data center looking in vs. inside the data center itself.
• Reactive troubleshooting vs. Proactive Predictive

I’m going to need to have a part two (and maybe more) for this functional category breaking down the pro’s and con’s of various approaches.  Which vendors do what, etc.  I also need to revisit that question from the top of do we combine this into a single “availability & performance” functional category???  For now, this first pass will have to do…

Dec 24 2007   5:52PM GMT

So let’s start to dig into each of these 6 functional areas: Availability and Notification

Posted by: Ryan Shopp
BMC, EMC, NetIQ, DataCenter, CA, IBM Tivoli, HP Software, Quest Software

So it’s time to start refining the Data Center Automation Blueprint. One way I hope to do that is through these next 6 blog posts (one for each functional DCA category) that will:

1) create list of vendors I know about that have some capabilities for the data center in the specified functional area

2) during this first pass attempting I also hope to breakdown each function by some major capabilities.

*NOTE: Help me out if I miss some vendors, miss some products within vendor product lines etc. Again, the focus is for current/future complex data center so I won’t be including tools like Ipswitch What’s Up Gold or products that are on their way out (end-0f-life) by vendor (e.g., NetView).

Event consolidation & root cause analysis

• BMC - Performance Manager
• CA - Spectrum
• EMC - SMARTS
• HP - Network Node Manager, Operations Manager
• IBM - Netcool
• Microsoft - Systems Center Operations Manager
• NetIQ - AppManager
• Quest Software - Foglight

A new product segment that has materialized that for now I’m going to go place here is log management where you maintain historical event/message/alert logs and then have historical reporting and applying advanced indexing and searching technology to quickly find the “needle in the haystack” problems. It also has application beyond operational availability management of the data center within the security space for compliance management.

• LogLogic
• LogRhythm
• Splunk

Next up will be the current Data Center Automation Functional Area of Performance and Capacity.

Dec 4 2007   10:04PM GMT

What are the Six Functional Areas of Data Center Automation

Posted by: Ryan Shopp
Microsoft Windows, BMC, NetIQ, DataCenter, InfoVista, IBM Tivoli, HP Software, Alterpoint, BladeLogic, Opalis, Optinuity, RealOps, Stratavia, IT Process Automation, Cassatt, Scalent, PlateSpin, Veeam, Vizioncore, Netuitive, Integrien

Alright, here is my first pass at a graphic I’m attempting to build that will capture the spirit of my previous posts (this is a work still in progress as previously mentioned);

• Building out a reference model for data center monitoring/automation
• Reference model build out, take two

I’m attempting to come up with a 30,000 foot reference model (functionality focused) for when you’re building out a data center’s software automation architecture.

The yellow areas are the 6 current areas I’ve functionally identified. The tricky part is based on the complexities of each category in the Data Center Infrastructure (e.g., Network vs. System), many of the functional areas require technical depth and audience-specific focus (e.g., network engineers vs. SAP administrators). The arrows are trying to capture that.

I know this still needs work but this is an evolution, and I only have a little time each week to currently work on it during these blog posts.

Below the graphic are some current vendors by function that have product(s) in each function that I’ve mentioned during previous blog posting so far.

• Configuration & Change: BMC (Marimba), CA, EMC (Voyence), HP (Opsware), IBM, BladeLogic, Cassatt, AlterPoint, Platespin, Scalent, Veeam, Vizioncore
• Security & Protection: Symantec, IBM, EMC, McAfee, nCircle, Lumension, ArcSight
• Performance & Capacity: BMC, CA, EMC, HP, IBM, Quest, InfoVista
• Availability & Notification: BMC, CA, EMC, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Quest, Integrien, Netuitive, NetIQ
• Process Orchestration: BMC (RealOps), HP (iConclude), Opalis, Optinuity, NetIQ, Stratavia
• Resource Reconciliation: Symantec, IBM, HP, BMC, EMC

I know I’ve missed many and also it would probably be helpful to not simply mention the company but also the product name but that will have to wait until another time.