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RiverMuse PRO includes a Reusable Business Logic (RBL) engine to streamline the creation of all configuration components in a single reusable package.
The configuration is loaded through a text file; it is then parsed and converted by a back-end engine that updates the configuration of multiple components within the RiverMuse product. This is a vast change from traditional Manager of Managers (MoM) solutions as configurations from multiple components are incorporated in a single configuration.
The RBL engine serves to:
- Map organizational processes into the product through one configuration channel
– Fuel the creation of a community driven repository (aka App Store). Configuration packages can be shared or bought. (i.e. a configuration package for grouping events by event type, and performing isolated problem correlation; a configuration package for interpreting Cisco alarms and integrating with Cisco inventory tools to populate RiverMuse dynamic variables).
RiverMuse PRO also incorporates a presence management engine that can discover entities on demand.
This is most useful when new alarms are reported for devices/entities not yet present in a CMDB or inventory management system. A RiverMuse Business Logic Package can first lookup Configuration Item information from the CMDB, and if nothing is found, attempt to perform a discovery using the RiverMuse Presence Management System. This will provide many additional variables that can be leveraged through correlations, automations, and escalations.
RiverMuse PRO includes a centralized rules management wizard.
Whether there are 1 or 50 remotely deployed collectors, rules are configured in a central location through a GUI. Within a traditional Manager of Managers (MoM) solution, the process of obtaining events, performing correlation, and providing business context are usually separate and distinct. Legacy MoM architectures typically require business logic rules to be updated at various levels and multiple components within their system and frequently using different, proprietary scripting languages. This creates a management challenge – and makes it hard for operations teams to keep up with infrastructure shifts.
RiverMuse PRO provides the facility to consolidate your Data Center Operations in a single pane of glass, and achieve Operational Excellence by automating tasks and streamlining processes.
RiverMuse Core, the first enterprise-class open source Real-time Consolidated Operations Console system ideally collects information via SNMP traps and Syslog messages out-of-the-box. Additionally it supports 8 standards-based APIs to obtain data from virtually any source (gSOAP, Perl, Java, C++, XML, PHP, Python, and Ruby on Rails). RiverMuse PRO builds on top of RiverMuse Core and provides a presence management discovery engine, a powerful enterprise desktop console, dynamic alert enrichment from external systems, enhanced scalability, and additional functionalities to streamline organizational processes and dramatically simplify system maintenance.
Perhaps the most compelling reason for pursuing a Consolidated Operations Console solution is being buried in a myriad of tools. And more importantly having little or no business context mapped to the results. The need for a so-called Manager-of-Managers MOM solution becomes more evident the more complex and dynamic an infrastructure becomes – thus requiring various tools to manage and monitor the environment. While multiple monitoring tools are great for specific tasks such as application monitoring, transaction monitoring, or communication device monitoring, problems that affect more than one silo take longer to identify and isolate.
RiverMuse PRO solves this problem by centralizing data across all the different tools, and retrieving events directly from devices when needed. To perform this, RiverMuse PRO includes passive as well as active collectors such as the RiverMuse VMWare agent. This active collector natively interprets CIM (Common Information Model) formatted data streams. Events from different environments are consolidated in one repository, where cross-domain correlation can occur. This allows operations personnel to quickly identify the problem and associated symptoms.
RiverMuse PRO incorporates the event processing scalability of leading commercial Manager-of-Manager solutions without sacrificing granularily.
In other words, all events related to a specific alert are kept in our system and made available on demand including through a launch in context tool. Additionally, correlation can occur against events and alerts. Other leading Manager of Managers tools are also resource intensive and require several install instances to provide value. In contrast, RiverMuse PRO was incorporates a small footprint to curb the overhead and maintenance requirements of legacy MOM solutions without sacrificing elegance and functionality.
(This is a Guest contribution on the RiverMuse Blog).
We loved your post and thanks for reading the Telesperience blog Microsperience!
We believe that even though we’re now officially post-crunch in telecoms, many CSPs have taken a good, long and hard look at how they buy and consume software. Interest in open source software by CSPs of all sizes is definitely on the increase. As you know, one of the “dirty little secrets” of the telecoms industry has been that open source tech can be found in virtually all CSPs’ IT stacks at some level – in fact many ISVs have been using it to lower their own costs for years while still publicly keeping on-message that it’s not really suitable for mission-critical BSS-OSS.
Our research has shown, however, that this situation is changing fast. Partly this is because a new generation of open source solutions like yours (not just technology or tools), are coming to market, and partly because CSPs in many markets are faced with having to do more with less. So to fund innovation they need to look hard at their cost base and reduce waste in the BSSOSS, using these savings to finance new projects.
We’ve also found that interest in open source tech is higher in the telecoms vertical than in other highly transactive industries. We recently asked a range of different types of large companies from telecoms, banking, automotive, computing/IT and government sectors whether they’d consider using open source technology. Eighteen per cent told us they were already using it, 9% are actively investigating using it, 55% said they would not rule out the possibility and 18% said they had no plans to use it. In a separate study we asked just telecoms SPs the same question and this found that, like the previous study, 18% were already using it. However, in contrast 27% were actively investigating using it, 46% would not rule out using it and only 9% said they had no plans to use it. This shows that telcos are more advanced in utilizing or evaluating open source solutions than the average enterprise.
Not only is interest in open source solutions high in the telecoms vertical but we discovered interesting trends amongst those adopting it. The (uninformed) consensus is that CSP adopt open source to lower costs. In fact, although this was certainly why many were attracted to open source initially, it’s not why they stayed. Far more attractive to them than just lower costs was the fact that many open source solutions are built using the most up-to-date technology available, and that they were capability-rich due to the sheer speed of innovation.
My advice to CSPs is therefore to not get hung up on what is essentially an alternative business model, but instead to evaluate open source solutions on exactly the same basis as any other software. One of the big hang ups in the telecoms software market has been that many CSPs are wary of being held hostage by a single vendor, and also that they realize that differentiation is increasingly going to come from software not networks. Open source seems to have a strong message for this fear – take control of your own destiny and don’t just accept a generic one-size fits all offering. There’s some really good software out there in the market today. Some of it is from ISVs and some from open source vendors. There’s no single ‘best’ solution for everyone – you have to evaluate the stand-out offerings against your own individual needs. What I’m saying is that dismissing a solution just because its open source is dumb and, if you take a look at the stats above, it’s certainly not what your rivals are doing.
Teresa Cottam
Research Director, Telesperience
Over the last few years, the heightened pace of innovation in service delivery technologies has increased the complexity of IT Operations Management for organizations of all sizes. This problem is particularly acute for Small and Medium Enterprises (SME’s) including regional managed service providers – which have traditionally operated with a lean staff and simpler but silo-based management systems. As long as the technologies they managed were relatively isolated and did not change rapidly, this management and monitoring structure worked fine. However, with the rapid advent of new technologies and the increasing pressure to do more with less – the very fabric of enterprise services has undergone a sea change.
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
A recent ComputerWorld article entitled “Big IT is Back, Say HP, IBM, Oracle, EMC, Cisco” discusses the recent formation of the Acadia joint venture between Cisco Systems, EMC and VMware to provide a complete virtual computing environment for enterprises. This alliance pits itself against similar initiatives from HP, IBM and Oracle aiming to offer a complete virtualized infrastructure stack to enterprises. The central argument is that a single-source integrated stack increases productivity in IT operations, strips cost down and offers a higher level of agility. We at RiverMuse agree that a dynamic IT infrastructure based on a strong virtualization fabric is the path forward for IT. Clearly the mega vendors listed above along with Microsoft are best positioned to sway enterprises over for adoption and that’s a good thing.
However when it comes to managing such abstracted and complex fabric their management platforms fall short and the additional vendors in the space including CA, BMC and Compuware seem severely challenged as well due to a lack of genuine innovation. The systematic recourse of all the large vendors for years, even decades has been an acquisition strategy whereby they absorb products, knowledge and engineering talent and swiftly shift their focus from innovation to integration, touting “synergies” as the new panacea.
As the world of IT embraces more advanced computing and networking environments there is a parallel requirement put onto the management platform to harness them effectively and efficiently. Event and fault management, which is at the very core of any infrastructure and service delivery management offering has fallen prey to this rash of acquisition/integration and witnessed little innovation for a decade. Legacy fault management tools from IBM, CA, HP and EMC are no longer adequate as they were built for a more static world, with a low rate of change, no virtuaiization and a single focus on networks and network elements rather than on a broader computing infrastructure and the IT service delivery chain. Fault management is out, event management is in as it captures, processes and renders all signals coming from the infrastructure whether be network, compute, middleware, service or security-related.
Hence RiverMuse was born out of necessity to address the event and fault management challenges of a dynamic IT infrastructure that mega vendors have so long ignored. Genuine innovation is back and it’s not just technical. See for yourself.
JL Valente
Twice last week I sat in a meeting where there was a casual remark that seemed trivial in nature. The remark went something like this – “I have to look at my spam folder, I registered for the community but didn’t get the confirmation email”. Two people saying this within days of each other caught my attention. After a little investigating (helped by the fact we knew the email addresses of the two people) we discovered about 12 RiverMuse Community membership applications had arrived by a non-standard path sitting in a queue requiring manual authorization. Of course we fixed the problem and contacted each of the community members who had been in limbo.
This is an example of failing silently, a key concept that we set out to address and mitigate when architecting RiverMuse. We thought we had our registration process clearly defined, simple and effective with no human intervention and with frequent automated checks that the application and SSO manager were working correctly. Reporting shows that membership is growing on a daily basis. What could go wrong…..
In the even more complex world of fault management platforms that have rules based workflows, the opportunities to fail silently increase with the scale of the network and systems being monitored. An automation rule on a central server looks for a particular string or identifier but for this event to get this far there is often another rule engine sitting at the element management or probe level. A simple error in rule creation, or an alteration of the string at this layer may well lead to an inability to process or recognize an event as significant enough to create an alert or undertake a trigger action. Now move forwards to the new challenges of virtualization and grid or cloud infrastructures where critical events and services can be nomadic in nature and what was important yesterday is non-critical today or vice versa.
In my own real world example above I had no idea that it was possible to register using an alternative route that we had not planned, not knowing meant that for those 12 people the process had failed, and but for the chance conversation and a similar statement in an email we may never have realized, because all appeared to be well. This is failing silently. In my next post on this subject I will talk about the way we have designed RiverMuse to avoid many of the pitfalls that can lead to this type of scenario.
Meantime I would be interested to hear if you have any experiences of failing silently.
17 years ago I got my big break, and I was lucky enough to cut my teeth in network management working with some of the best colleagues and customers I could have asked for.
Back then we had a dream to make a network management tool that customers could really use and get value for. Mostly the products available were just a massive consultancy exercise in disguise. Along the way with input from thousands of really smart people, both in my direct team and also in the user base we built a great product.
But the dream soured. What began as a revolution ended up becoming that which we set out to fix: zero innovation, far from zero cost.
Which is why we are back, and why we need you as a part of this. RiverMuse aims to put the community at the centre of the next big wave in management technology. It is not good enough to try and assemble the old gang back underneath one roof; it needs all of you who care about a continuing revolution in systems and network management to make sure that we can produce the best and most innovative way to manage networks now and forever. And maybe as an open source project we can pay back a little of the good fortune we had all those years ago.