The next mega fix pack for TBSM 4.2.1 is available today with many fixes for core TBSM and TIP bugs impacting core functionality and performance and a few new capabilities to boot. The README is available here. A separate README for the Discovery Library Toolkit is available here. The fixpack is available for download here.

My advice is for you to read the README. Then READ it again. Then REVIEW your systems and TBSM implementation. Note the DISK SPACE requirements. I’d double them to be safe. READ the README again. Review all of your TBSM implementation customizations. READ THE README AGAIN. Do a full end-to-end backup of your TBSM system (on each component) before you start. Think carefully about bypassing the fixpack backup procedure. Consider applying appropriate WebTop 2.2, WebGUI 7.3 or OMNIbus 7.x fixpacks/interim fixes. You do know that TBSM maintenance releases never include core Netcool/OMNIbus maintenance right?

If you’ve already installed TBSM 4.2.1 FP1, your installation time for TBSM 4.2.1 FP2 should be improved compared to your FP1 installation experience. If you haven’t installed TBSM 4.2.1 FP1 and are installing the all inclusive TBSM 4.2.1 FP2, be prepared for a significant installation time. This can and will vary widely by hardware and operating system type/version. Don’t interrupt the installation process!

Before you start, READ THE README AGAIN! Pay attention to the post installation tasks and configurations which may be required. Let me know if you have any problems, I’ll be watching for PMRs closely.

The TBSM 4.2.1 Documents have been updated appropriately here. I’ll try to point out some new features in follow on posts.

If you’re using TBSM v4.2.1 FP1 with OMNIbus 7.3 GUI you should take a look at getting this interim fix (IF) installed. If you are not seeing normal behaviors with the interaction of the service tree, service viewer and the service details portlet, it’s likely this WebGUI (WebTop) IF is required.

The most common symptom is that when you click on something in the tree or topology, the service details portlet isn’t filtering the events to what was selected.

For more information, check out this support note.

alm00128949 / IZ69508
=====================
Short Description: PROBLEMS WITH THE AEL AND LEL ON TBSM 4.2.1 WITH OMNIBUS 7.3

Summary: AEL not shown when it is launched in a new TIP tab from TBSM 4.2.1 Service Tree with incorrect filter and view. The problem is caused by calling setAspect method from JavaScript before AEL is fully initialized.

The problem is fixed by ensuring setAspect can handle cases when it is called after AEL is initialized. If it is called before AEL is fully initialized, AEL should use filter, view and data source as provided by setAspect.

ALM00128818 / IZ69498
=====================
Short Description: THE LEL CANNOT DISPLAY ANY EVENT DATA FROM TRANSIENT FILTERS

Summary: The LEL cannot display any event data from transient filters. It is caused by data misalignment. The LEL is applying a default hard-coded view to event data that has been retrieved from the ObjectServer with the correct view. The correct view is being applied to the SQL query, but the returned fields are not aligned with the view that the LEL has applied in the client.

This issue is resolved by performing failback checking for system and then user transient filter.

In TBSM v4.2.1 FP1 a new role has been introduced to allow control over TBSM View Definitions. The new role is called ‘tbsmViewDefinitionAdmin’ and should be added to appropriate groups as appropriate to allow editing View Definitions via the TBSM Service Viewer GUI.

Note that after applying TBSM v4.2.1 FP1, this new role isn’t applied. You may notice that all View Definitions are “grayed out” and unable to be edited. Apply this role to the appropriate groups to gain access to editing View Definitions.

For a review of all TBSM v4.2.1 FP1 roles, review the documentation here: http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/tivihelp/v3r1/topic/com.ibm.tivoli.itbsm.doc/adminguide/bsma_opscusers.html

TBSM v4.2.1 FP1 has been in the wild for a few weeks now. I’ve seen numerous issues with this fix pack related to local server disk space requirements.

Please review each server’s available disk space before starting your FP1 installation. Make sure you have plenty of space available (> 5GB ++) specifically in the /tmp, /home and where you choose to do a backup. Make sure the tbsm install user has permissions to write to that backup location.

If you do not want to do a backup (ie new install & patch), you can use the flag ./install.sh -DNO_BACKUP=true to skip the backup step.

This weekend marks the start of what has to be the single biggest service management invasion in recent history as IBM Tivoli Pulse 2010 and the Pink ITSM 2010 conferences converge in Las Vegas. With IBM Tivoli camped out at MGM Grand and Pink at Bellagio, Vegas will be packed with practitioners, vendors and companies peddling their wares and sharing their successes with IT Service Management.

While I’d love to have time to visit the “other show”, my week will be slam packed with Business Service Management! This year’s Pulse 2010 conference feels like it’s taken a radical change in direction from the past events. The tempo feels different. The buzz is in the air. The content within keynotes, break out sessions and on the demo floor will be a different experience.

I’ve never seen this many clients participating! I’m very excited that we’ll have a high “signal” and low “noise” ratio this year where our clients will be front and center with the opportunity to share their own personal journeys towards Business Service Management (BSM). Heck, I don’t even get to present in a breakout session this year!

Here are some of the many featured BSM track sessions. Don’t forget to visit the Meet the Experts areas, attend the BSM Birds of a Feather (BoF) session and mingle around the BSM demo peds 48 and 50. If you really want to dive in on BSM with me, track me down at demo ped 50 or in the Meet the Experts area or at a favorite watering hole where I’ll “tell it like it is”. I’ll be monitoring twitter (@dmcclure) or ping me via email/phone.

* Transforming Data Center Operations into a Business Operations Center with FDC – Monday at 5pm

* Trends That Are Transforming the Way IBM Thinks About and Delivers Service Management with Dan Tabor – Monday at 2pm

* Managing Complexity at Banco Santander with TBSM – Monday at 3:30pm

* Business Service Management at T-Systems using TBSM v4.2 – Tuesday at 10:30am

* Business Service Monitoring at Bank of America – Tuesday at 2pm

* Integration between TBSM and Transaction Monitoring – Tuesday at 3:30pm

* Evolution from Event Management to Business Service Management: A Customer Case Study – Tuesday at 3:30pm

* Deployment of IBM Tivoli Monitoring Solution for Rail Transportation at SNCF – Tuesday at 5pm

* Business Service Management BoF – Tuesday at 6pm

* Transitioning from Device Monitoring to Business Service Management – Wednesday at 9:30am

* Business Service Management – Architecting and Deploying End-to-End – Wednesday at 3:30pm

I’ve been asked to contribute to the efforts shaping up over at BSM Review. Their vision is sound and the things they’d like to achieve for the community are desperately needed. They are lock step in tune with things that have been talked about on my blog and with many of you for years. While the appearance today may be slanted and lofty, their intentions are right for the long haul.

I’ll be helping BSM Review keep firmly grounded in helping real people succeed with Business Service Management (BSM) where others have struggled in the past. I’ll keep their focus on real world success, application, methodologies and value adds to get real people on their way towards BSM’s broader value proposition. I’ll help them focus on closing the gaps found in typical IT organizations today, building bridges between IT, IT Operations, Business, Business Operations, Finance and their unique languages, priorities, expectations and objectives.

I’ve spoken to many of you about my BSM Book, BSM Wiki, BSM Maturity Model, BSM Assessments (Vendor, Analyst, Deployment), BSM Executive Workshops, BSM Transformation for IT Operations amongst many other things. I’ll be taking advantage of this opportunity to collaborate and contribute via this partnership in addition to my normal blogosphere contributions here. I’ve had a few years head start, and BSM Review will pull from me to execute on their very similar vision.

I’ve submitted my first article “Getting Started With Business Service Manangement: An IT Operations Centric Approach” which has been published on the newly redesigned BSM Review portal. Take a look and let me know what you think. Your feedback, comments and guidance for the future are always welcome. I look forward to sharing my insights from where I sit here at IBM being uniquely involved with some of the largest BSM journeys in the world today.

Links that I have found interesting for January 12th:

• WSO2 launches new Business Activity monitoring – Application Development & SOA : News – Open source SOA firm WSO2 has launched Business Activity Monitor (WSO2 BAM) that provides real-time visibility into service-oriented architecture (SOA) processes, transactions and workflows.

  The company claims that the new BAM system is designed to support the heterogeneous SOAs that dominate the enterprise landscape, providing a lightweight and easy-to-deploy alternative to traditionally large business activity monitoring offerings.

• What Do Business Transaction Monitoring And Twitter Have To Do With Each Other? « Application Performance Management Software – Why did Nastel® add Twitter to their software? Because it improves the ease with which communicated alerts reach a changing audience. Because it eliminates the need to know what technology is on the receiving end of an alert transmission. Now the IT team that is responsible for your company’s transaction management has the assurance that the messages that AutoPilot generates will get through to their destination.
• How End-User Monitoring “Graduated” from APM – So what does End-User Monitoring really mean? Once again, the answer is: it depends.

  -If you ask Web Monitoring vendors, End-User Monitoring means monitoring the performance of Web applications from outside the corporate firewall.

  -If you ask networking vendors, End-User Monitoring means capturing packet flow data and using this information to estimate the speed of applications as experienced by business-users.

  -If you ask vendors that provide desktop-based solutions for application monitoring, it would mean, first, identifying the number of users or applications impacted by performance issues, second, business processes that are suffering or, third, learning about problems with end-user experience before end-users call a help-desk.

  -If you ask BTM vendors, it means monitoring application speed and availability for each transaction.

  The bottom line is: the quality of end-user experience is not a metric, it’s a concept.

• New Relic .:. On-Demand Application Management – New Relic® RPM™ is the revolutionary on-demand tool used by more than 3,000 companies to monitor, troubleshoot and optimize their Java, Ruby, and JRuby applications. RPM works for apps in the cloud or in the datacenter. Get the power of expensive, complex IT tools – without the expense or the complexity! Simple. Powerful. On-Demand Application Performance Management

As I look back at how the BSM industry evolved in 2009, my thoughts focus around 2009 as the year of “Hybrid BSM” players coming into their place in the market. Another term I use here is “BSM for SMB” or even “BSM Lite” to some degree but I feel “Hybrid BSM” is best fitting as it describes what these solutions provide. I see a “Hybrid BSM” product as a single product that incorporates many aspects of fundamental infrastructure, application and service management and monitoring along with some fundamental and foundational BSM capability. These don’t fit into a stand alone “Pure Play BSM” product category nor do they need to have additional stand alone products playing together to achieve BSM value as a “Portfolio BSM” solution would.

So who were the players in 2009? Here’s my ten second highlights reel.

Nimsoft launched their initial BSM story with the release of their solution incorporating their Indicative Software acquisition. FireScope continued to dominate much of 2009 with new releases and solutions in “upline” areas such as compliance. Zyrion was launched and really came out as the one to plug into the “BSM for SMB” space. Manage Engine leveraged their heritage AdventNet portfolio with the IT360 offering and launched the first “BSM as a Service” with Manage Engine on Demand offering. AccelOps came out of stealth mode and launched their extensive hybrid solution with both a SaaS and Virtual Appliance delivery model for broad based IT management and BSM. Monolith Software picked up speed and clients with strong focus on IT operations needs and core BSM foundations. The second half of 2009 saw many of these companies jumping on the virtualization and cloud computing band wagon. This is a natural fit for the target markets many of these vendors play in as virtualization and cloud computing took off in 2009 and will grow exponentially in 2010+.

Apart from the typical vendor “we do that” announcements of doing BSM for X, Y or Z in 2009, I haven’t seen any real innovation from the typical “Big 4″ or “Other 6″ vendors who participate in the BSM space. Releases throughout 2009 focused on portfolio consolidation, integration and optimization as well as incorporating “new” capabilities or extending support for the 2009 buzzwords around cloud computing, virtualization, green IT, optimization, etc. I think there are a couple vendors who’ve made significant improvements across their portfolio in 2009, especially in capability consolidation, ease of use and licensing innovation as well as some key acquisitions that have the potential to be “break out moves” for their BSM capability in 2010+.

Regarding my virtualization and cloud computing band wagon comment, I still struggle to see this as anything but a natural evolution and application of a vendor’s standard IT management and monitoring fundamentals. Until we have innovative vendor solutions that can truly manage the “end-to-end”, “top to bottom”, “side to side”, “domain to domain”, “provider to provider” services, across any and all technologies, on premise or off, in the cloud or not, from a transactional flow, workload performance, user experience and ultimately with an understanding of the state of the business’ goals, objectives and outcomes, I’m just challenged to be impressed at this point. Yes my expectations are high. Yes I’m sure many are “working on it”. The industry must set the “bar high” and start addressing the broader based “death from a 1000 cuts” problem in IT operations environments today.

In addition to 2009 being the year of “Hybrid BSM”, I also consider 2009 to be a year filled with innovation and growth in many key BSM enabling technology and product areas. End user experience (EUE), real user monitoring (RUM), quality of experience (QoE) and business transaction management (BTM) vendors and solutions matured and improved in 2009. OpTier, Precise, Nastel, Correlsense, AmberPoint, Aternity, Symphoniq (Coradiant), Knoa, Keynote, Gomez (Compuware), Digital Fuel, Oblicore (CA) and newScale all kept my interests peeked with advances in their capabilities and techniques for providing visibility into some of the most critical areas of service delivery and the things that often have the most direct impact on business goals, objectives and outcomes.

My thoughts for 2010 swirl around the continued M&A potential in the space. As I type this today, the independent SLA player Oblicore looks to be snatched up by CA. I think that more consolidation will take place in the BTM area by folks in the “Hybrid BSM” camp, “Big4″ or “Other6″. These BTM vendors are rapidly evolving and addressing deep technology challenges within the constantly emerging technology and protocol landscape. The capability to have rich end user experience visibility is so valuable some vendors may want to extend beyond their synthetic or limited sampling approaches. My thoughts on any M&A activity in this new decade are that it must be around portfolio and product consolidation, addressing gaps and striving for a simpler, more efficient footprint for anyone desiring to achieve broad based coverage. Gone should be the days of “add ons” and more “stand alone” products. Simplify, simplify, simplify. If it’s not broke, think about it differently and you may see that it really is “broke”! Make the right decisions to fix or simplify it. The “Not Invented Here” (NIH) mentality often leaves you standing at the alter when others have acquired capability and made the right decisions to move their products and solutions forward.

Will there be any significant, game changing BSM innovation in 2010? Time will tell. I’ve seen some pretty interesting concepts being tossed around in the industry lately. It’s a matter of market timing and client maturity in most instances. Any mis-timing, things come across as “gimmicky” or just another fad. Hit the market right because a foundation has been built helping clients and the industry realize what they need, know what they don’t know, then these will certainly be game changers. Those vendors who go to market with as much emphasis on the people, process, organizational and political challenges of BSM understood, addressed, acknowledged and mitigated will see deep, broad based BSM adoption and success. 2010-2013 will be the pivotal years for this.

I look forward to the next decade of Business Service Management! My passion remains high, my vision clear, and belief that the value and benefits from BSM can be realized unshaken. BSM can provide measurable value to the typical IT operations organization and business. How you choose to achieve that value is a journey filled with many decisions, challenges, roadblocks and times of uncertain pain and reward. My hope is to help you get there!

These are my links for January 8th through January 9th:

• IBM Education Assistant – WebSphere software – The IBM WebSphere Business Process Management Suite contains a comprehensive set of collaborative, role-based capabilities that help you model, simulate, run, change, monitor, and optimize core business processes. The IBM BPM Suite brings together capabilities from across IBM that make it easier for you to get started with BPM.
• Learn BPM BlueWorks – This demo provides an overview of some of the new features in WebSphere BPM v7. Find demonstrations of new features from the following products:
  WebSphere Business Compass v7
  WebSphere Business Modeler v7
  WebSphere Integration Developer v7
  WebSphere Process Server v7
  WebSphere Business Monitor v7
  WebSphere Business Events v7
  WebSphere Services Registry and Repository v7
  Business Space
• Nursing Facility Turns To SaaS For Network Management – With just five IT professionals to support critical functions such as electronic medical records and financial and payroll applications for 1,000 staff members, Navarro wanted a product that could be brought online quickly while also meeting his budget. One company that appeared on his radar was AccelOps, a Silicon Valley startup that offers service management software as both a virtual appliance and as a service. AccelOps offers integrated datacenter monitoring, alerting, analysis and reporting across performance, availability, security and change management.
• Excel Dashboards Webinar – A Quick and Easy
  Way to Set Up and Maintain Excel Dashboards

Links that I have found interesting for January 7th:

• Four Key Trends in the Network Monitoring Market – Network performance monitoring solutions are not one of those “cool” technologies that get a lot of coverage in the media and these products are sometimes perceived as using an old approach to solve new problems. It’s all about capturing and analyzing packet flow data, right? Well, not really. Not many people realize how much this market has changed over the last 3-4 years.

  It is About Applications on the Network, Not the Network Itself

  Between these two rounds of interviews, metrics, such as application response times and application availability, became the top indicators of the health of enterprise networks. These changes in end-user needs had a major impact on network monitoring vendors.

• TM Forum – Business Agreements – TMF506, Service Quality Management Business Agreement, V1.5 – This document defines the requirements for the exchange of management information and the assurance of service quality with a model of FAB functions as documented in TM Forum’s Telecom Operations Map. Specifically, this document will focus in the area of Assurance with regards to performance management of IMT-2000 services (hereafter referred to as ‘services;).

  Whilst this document is focused on third generation mobile services many of the concepts are equally applicable to other telecommunication services. The purpose of this document is to address the Service Quality Management functionality of the Telecom Operations Map.

• Zyrion Enables Unified Monitoring of Diverse and Complex IT Infrastructure Across Distributed Datacenter Footprint – Datacenter Edition of its flagship Traverse network management platform. Traverse Datacenter enables monitoring a complex mix of business services, IT infrastructure and applications based on next-generation technologies, such as Virtualization, Cloud Computing and Grid Architectures. Traverse Datacenter also now monitors a variety of power and environmental equipment and infrastructure, such as, HVAC, UPS and Generators. The new monitoring capabilities expand on Traverse’s proven support for vendor and custom applications, servers, network devices and storage.

  Overcomes the limitations of traditional IT monitoring systems that focus on measuring just the technical metrics and trends of individual IT components. Traverse Datacenter’s integrated network monitoring and BSM capabilities allows datacenter operations teams to rapidly identify the affected business processes or services when problems occur in the complex, inter-related, distributed and virtual IT infrastructure

• IBM – TBSM 4.2.1 adds support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11 operating system. – TBSM 4.2.1 adds support for the following SLES 11 on System z, SLES 11 on x86-32 systems and SLES 11 on x86-64 sys