According to one of our motor cycling enthusiast software developers, the majority of Harley Davidson owners are likely to be 45-year-old accountants from Ann Arbor, Michigan. In fact, a minute on Google brings up the stat that the majority of motorcycle owners are on average 41 years old, and earn $77,714 in annual household income.

The reason these ‘unlikely’ Harley Davidson owners give is that nothing beats riding down the highway, on a warm sunny day with no fixed timetable and no place to be… It is controlled risk, a type of safe rebellion.

I believe it has similar parallels to why our customers look to invest in RiverMuse, a new entrant in an established industry. Just like the Harley Davidson owners, our customers are taking a controlled risk; the software is not a decade old, but this is where safe rebellion has its advantages. With RiverMuse you are acquiring new functionality that you cannot get from existing players, technology that is modern and meets the needs of datacenter and network operations today.

And as a customer of a new entrant into the industry, you are able to exert a stronger influence on the future direction of the RiverMuse technology, so as to assist in developing functionality that you need for your network, datacenter or cloud implementations.

Another advantage of safe rebellion is that you avoid that feeling of being a ‘small fish in a big pond’ mentality you get from the legacy IT event and fault management companies. Aided by the simplicity of its platform, RiverMuse offers a new layer of interactivity with a downloadable “try and buy” model. And we are more responsive to your needs and ready to ride the extra mile to make things work for you.

Controlled risk in new entrants such as RiverMuse brings the advantage of being seen to be close to the leading edge of technology. You are technically investing in the future of IT.

According to those Harley owners, a Harley is not just transport; it is a legend and a way of life. So in the workplace, join us in bringing safe rebellion to the IT operations management industry, and creating another legend.

IT Operations Consoles can be a great asset to an organization, as all pertinent events are consolidated and accessible from a single pane of glass. An effective IT Operations Console also requires comprehensive correlation capabilities. This allows organizations to reduce alarm noise to only those that are meaningful and actionable. It also allows organizations to ensure that operator actions are efficient and impactful in business terms.

RiverMuse Pro offers a broad rules-based correlation engine. One of those rules can perform topology-based correlation by looking up relationships from a CMDB, then performing upstream or downstream suppression. Another rule can lookup procedures from a 3^rd party knowledgebase, and execute them through an external action. Through my years in data center operations, perhaps the 3 most popular correlations include:
-       Suppressing duplicate events
-       Sliding time window based correlation (escalate if X events occur in Y minutes), and last but not least
-       Mapping business impact of outages.

De-duplication has been so commonplace with enterprise-class event management systems that it can easily be taken for granted. But the fact remains: de-duplication is the first and primary method of reducing alarm volumes to manageable levels. Some leading tools in the market lose granularity when de-duplicating events. All they know is the first time the problem occurred, the last time it occurred, and how many times it occurred. RiverMuse addresses this issue with a 2-tier event/alert model. Raw incoming ‘events’ are managed separate from processed de-duplicated ‘alerts’, and reside in separate subsystems. This allows RiverMuse to scale and de-duplicate events without sacrificing granularity.

How many times have we seen a link flapping? Or numerous CPU spikes? The problems are auto-remedied within seconds or minutes, but their frequency hides other problems. User transactions might hang or fail. The 3-hour file transfer had 10 seconds left for completion, only to stop unexpectedly. Deploying a time-series or ‘throttle’ based correlation through RiverMuse Pro can detect these recurring flaps, and escalate the problem(s).

In most IT Operations Consoles, there is zero to little notion of business context. Perhaps the most popular correlation method is determining business impact of an outage. Under the covers, this correlation is based on parent-child relationships. These relationships can be based on a service topology present in a CMDB, or other service management tools. Through the use of dynamic variables, RiverMuse can query external tools, such as CMDBs to lookup impacted business services, and other dependent Configuration Items (CIs). Business impact analysis can then be performed.

RiverMuse offers a wealth of correlation capabilities to address an organization’s business and operational needs. Download RiverMuse available free for 30 days and check it out. And if there are specific type of correlations that you would like to set up in your environment let us know. It would be great to discuss that in our RiverMuse Pro Community.

By posing fundamental questions about machine intelligence, Turing believed that human minds could one day be mimicked by electronic circuitry. In a theoretical paper published in 1936, Turing described an imaginary device, which would later become the electronic computer, behaving as if it were a human being and given problems to solve.

The concept of the computer program grew directly out of this research, and the ability of a machine to enact cold, hard logic at high speed is now the reality – able in many ways to outperform humans at many tasks.

This is because there is a natural desire for humans to do two things, create narrative, and create structure. In other words, we see two disconnected events and try and create a story that links them together, quite often inventing causes that are not there – try “googling” “JFK conspiracy theories”! Therefore, when people look at networks, a lot of the issues associated with network management arise when people create narratives for alerts, and see their own “phantom” causes. For example, they see that CPU is high, and memory is low, so the two must lead to an action that actually might not be linked.

Also people will see structure in randomness that is not there. A simple trick to illustrate this is to ask people to bet on the flip of a coin. Often if a sequence of heads or tails occurs (not as uncommon as you might think), the natural tendency is to bet against the sequence; even though, we know that the odds are always still 50/50, we have convinced ourselves that we have seen a pattern in the results.

The reason a network management platform such as RiverMuse exists is to do away with the seemingly random irrelevance and noise – if you will, these systems exist to de-bunk the “conspiracies” that the human mind creates naturally allowing you to see what is actually going on. You do not have to look at the data that pertains to random patterns, but instead you can investigate the information that is more causal.

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 our January RiverMuse poll.

The poll results archive will be stored within the RiverMuse Community pages.

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.

Network World have posted a slide-show of their Top 10 IT Management Start Up’s to Watch.  You can see it here.

We are delighted that NetworkWorld have named RiverMuse as one of their top 10 IT management start up’s to watch in their annual review announced today.

You can read the full article here.

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