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Over the past five years we have witnessed an acceleration of open source software (OSS) adoption by both service provider and enterprises alike. As Gartner stated in a November 2008 report, the primary advantages for customers adopting OSS tools were lower cost of ownership, ease of implementation, investment protection against a single vendor and faster time to market.
These key advantages have held true for the open source industry time and again, enabling it to gain significant market share across the entire IT stack, from operating system to middleware to tools to business applications and across enterprises and service providers (see the discussion on this subject on the microSperience blog). In fact, in the Network and System Management (NSM) space, there is already a wide selection of open source monitoring tools that have gained a broad following.
This is our January RiverMuse poll. The poll results archive will be stored within the RiverMuse Community pages.
The concept of Manager of Managers (MoM) has existed for many years but does it mean the same today as it always has?
MoMs were introduced to overcome the problem where lower order management systems e.g. Element Management Systems (EMS) gave a very fragmented view of the network, leaving it up to operations staff to piece together the puzzle to form a picture of the complete network and its current status. This picture often only existed in the mind of the user and the detail of that picture dependent on the individual’s experience. Correlation of events across the diverse ‘stove pipe’ solutions was primarily a visual correlation on the part of the user.
The introduction of MoMs enabled Network operations staff to pull together management information into one central point. Thus providing a single integrated view of the entire network and enabling the introduction of automated correlation systems. This is why MOM is sometimes referred to in some circles as the ‘single pane of glass’. While the concept was fine, in the early days the practice was somewhat limited by the lack of integration capabilities supported by the lower order systems. Standard interfaces and APIs were few and far between. It probably wasn’t until the development of standards such as the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) that MoM capability became a reality. With the advent of web services enabling more federated integration between individual management systems this has received further impetus.
Today we see the adoption of MoM concepts being widely used, although ironically the term itself seems to have faded from our common vocabulary. While the term ‘MoM’ has traditionally been associated with consolidation of lower order systems into the Network Layer, the same principles are now being applied for managing systems, applications, services, customers or business units etc. Effective management at these higher levels still depends on the collection of data and information from the underlying systems. So the deployment of MoMs continues to gather pace and indeed some existing network centric MoMs are being re-positioned for managing at these higher layers with varying degrees of effectiveness. Undoubtedly, we will see wider adoption of Service Management Systems, SLA Management Systems, Business Management Systems and so on, each a new generation of MoM in their own right. For example, the BSM (Business Service Management) dashboard is a type of MoM albeit designed less for real time operations support than for broader business and technology alignment.
The question remains whether any of the current crop of MoM type technologies is ready to take on the mantle for real time dynamic infrastructure support? More about that in a later blog.
Ian Best
On this community page you can view the latest RiverMuse slide set offering an overview of the company, the event & fault management landscape, our objectives, architecture and key benefits. This is in Slideshare format and can be shared and copied. You can also post comments and questions directly on the page.