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.

A common feature of current generation IT Event and Fault management systems is that you have to encode into the configuration of the system, a knowledge or representation of the logic that you use to manage the network, or device, or application. For example, a typical system management scenario is where you have a series of servers, routers and applications that you poll for specific data, which you then place conditions on to test for exceptions. Each exception can generate an alert that triggers actions.

All pre-existing approaches in legacy IT event and fault management systems prior to RiverMuse, encode the logic in a heavily scripted way, or, require detailed understanding of the topology or configuration of the managed system integrated in with the rules you write.

For example, in a typical probe rules file, to add an entry you need to include specific information, i.e. an IP address, for every device you want to ping. In others, you can consume an entire topology and output a code book that pattern matches the alert streams looking for particular root causes.

From a RiverMuse 
perspective, either of these approaches results in it being difficult to alter the configuration when the underlying network changes. In addition, if you want to collect all the intellectual property that has gone into building the business logic, and take it to a completely different network that is configured in a different way, i.e. different hostnames and IP addresses – this can also be complicated.

Hence, the work of configuring a IT event and fault management system becomes a consultancy driven exercise. You have teams of skilled people, with a deep understanding of the management system being used, and the systems or networks being managed, who execute something akin to a software development exercise.

The result is often a single purpose, environment specific configuration or a particular system or network. If you want to replicate the functionality, or solution elsewhere, you have to start over. If the network changes, you have to repeat large parts of the original exercise. All of these issues RiverMuse terms static and non transportable business logic.

(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

In our new White Paper we discuss the IT Operations Management challenges for mid-size Enterprises and MSP’s. In many ways their environment is starting to look like that of the larger enterprise – only scaled down in size. They have also moved to any-to-any IP networks, VoiP phone systems, Virtualized datacenters and SOA based application architectures just like their larger counterparts. In fact the gap in requirements for operations management tools required by mid-size businesses and larger ones is rapidly closing.

In this scenario, small and mid-size enterprises (SME’s) need to make the leap to the next-tier of IT management sophistication. What has been a huge barrier until now is the high cost and complexity of Enterprise-class operations management tools. Not any more – as a new breed of tools including RiverMuse Core and Pro is bridging the gap of cost, simplicity, functionality and business models to enable SME’s make the move.

As we discuss in the WhitePaper some of the key IT Operations Management challenges that mid-size enterprise and MSP organizations face today include -

i) Rise in the Volume and Complexity of Events  – more applications, dynamic infrastructures, rapid changes, distributed components – are all contributing to an explosion in the number of operations events and faults that IT has to contend with.

ii) Moving from Infrastructure Operations to Service-Centric Operations - it is no longer enough to just manage a component of the network or the datacenter – the IT manager in the mid-size enterprise has to be able to define, monitor and assure end-to-end services.

iii) Swivel Chair management of multiple monitoring Systems – specialized components with their own management mechanisms have a created a veritable zoo of management consoles. The result? No complete view of the service and silo-based operations that slow down operational response.

iv) Lack of Centralized, Enterprise Wide Operations Management – with event and performance data sitting in different databases and reporting systems – any kind of intelligent correlation is left to the skill of the operator. And as the volumes of event scale up – this process is well but broken. 

v) The Demand for Scalable, Real-time Operations – most of the new application services demand near real-time operational response. Think VoiP, video conferencing, social media based collaboration and so on. The issue is mid-size monitoring tools weren’t built for high volume, scalable event processing and hence critical insight into the infrastructure is lost as they filter out most events – even critical ones.

Do you agree with the set of challenges described above? Do you think there are other problem areas with regards to IT Operations management that we miss here? Let us know.

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.  

For example, converged communication services today no longer carry only data, but latency-sensitive voice and video packets that require considerable systems and application processing. Virtualized systems have completely overturned the conservative “one application per server” rule that was a costly, but safe choice for many IT managers. Expectations on utilization rates of virtualized servers are now pegged at more than fifty percent, instead of single digit rates.  Return on investment expectations has likewise increased considerably, and focuses on the effective delivery of end-to-end services (like say web apps, voice or video) rather than individual infrastructure availability. And lately, cloud based architectures are making resource allocation and monitoring even more dynamic and distributed.

While all of these changes have helped reign in IT budgets and do more with less, they also have introduced more specialized service components within scalable multi-tier architectures that are far more complex to manage and monitor. Many of these components are dynamic and can be moved or re-allocated based on advanced automated tools – for e.g. the movement of virtual machines across a server farm or entire applications from the enterprises premises to the cloud. Interestingly enough, while the first adopters of virtualization were large enterprises, recent analyst reports predict that x86 virtualization adoption in SME’s will outstrip large enterprise penetration levels in the next few years.

The implication of the structural shift in the nature of service delivery technologies and management is that SME’s will have to contend with vastly different kind of operational challenges going forward.

If you work in an SME or mid tier MSP organization – what kind of challenges do you see? On our part we will try and relate what we hear from our customers on this topic in later posts.

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.

 And with RiverMuse last year, we have now launched the first and only open source IT Operations Management platform. By our definition, Operations Management includes at its core the disciplines of IT event and fault management. This is the primary platform that operations teams rely upon to keep their services and infrastructure running and healthy 24/7.

The founders at Rivermuse recognized early on that the IT event and fault management market is at the cusp of a major shift. Technology innovation in this market has stagnated for nearly a decade while the infrastructure environment has gone through transformational changes. Existing tools have become overly complex and costly, and return on investment has become questionable. In fact, customers today demand a number of things that legacy vendors are unable to fulfill. These include built-in support for today’s dynamic infrastructures, marked simplification of current management toolsets, significant TCO reduction as required by the new software economics, and the desire of many IT organizations to be liberated from management vendor lock-in. Let’s take a brief look at each of these points.

Most of the legacy operations/fault management platforms were developed to manage network-centric infrastructures that were relatively slow to change. Hence they were built to deal with network-related faults but not much more. Ten years later the entire scenario has completely changed. Today’s infrastructure is abstracted away from the underlying physical assets and governed by policies that relate to business and service priorities. It has evolved to support the need for business agility – new projects can be deployed rapidly, resources can be dialed up or down as needed, and change is easily accommodated throughout a virtualized fabric of computing, storage and networking. The legacy fault management platforms, with their proprietary design, are ill conceived to cope with such a diverse and dynamic environment in an elegant and nimble way.

Second, these management toolsets have extremely rigid architectures built for a different era in computing. Rather than redesigning their products to meet technology and business needs, legacy vendors have responded with bolt-on products from acquisitions or partnerships. Consequently they have multiple user interfaces and programming languages, and do not support standard reference architectures that are needed to fully capture the modern IT infrastructure. This in turn limits their integration and automation capabilities. The number of products and options presented by a legacy vendor to a typical IT organization is a bewildering and convoluted list that only the largest customers can afford. Yet, there is no reason why IT Operations Management platforms can’t be simpler. Vendors like VMWare have delivered simplicity in complex environments of their own. To meet market demands, NSM tools must facilitate agility in IT operations, not get in the way as they often do today and that requires a complete change of attitude and engineering design.

Third, the overall solution cost of legacy operations / fault management tools is prohibitive, particularly in the areas of support and maintenance and ongoing administration. How is an IT organization to achieve ROI on the top of these exorbitant costs? For example, IBM Tivoli Netcool, the most widely deployed enterprise fault management solution requires months of setup, has minimal configuration automation capabilities among other limitations – all contributing to push its TCO through the roof. This is a losing proposition. As more enterprises, Tier 2 and 3 service providers, and managed service providers recognize the need to adopt a new class of IT Operations Management tools, they mandate a level of affordability that only a fully functional open source platform like RiverMuse can deliver.

RiverMuse arrived and will meet market demand because IT organizations have asked for change. The IT world evolves quickly and these organizations simply can’t afford to keep waiting for promised features and integration that never make it past the roadmap slides of many IT vendors. Too much ‘lock-in’ power rests with the legacy vendors. It is time to shift the balance of innovation and control from a few oligopolistic vendors to the many practitioners,  and end users who ultimately know best what IT operations management capabilities they really need and when. It’s time for RiverMuse – and its open source roots to shake up the status quo and move the needle forward.

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.