Efficient Solutions

Some product/consulting companies charge upto 25K USD for integration of FM-FM/FM-PM products. One has to be careful of such offerings because not only they have a one time cost, but also they come with a continual license fee for the gateway. BAD!! So let me save you some money by generalizing this process by an example of integrating two highly used NMS solutions – Tivoli Netcool [from IBM] and NAGIOS [Open source offering]. Integration from Nagios to Netcool is simple [not sure why people pay tones of money for this] and can be done in couple different ways:

Overview

1. Asynchronous uni-directional data flow [from Nagios SBI to Netcool] : In this method of integration, Netcool shall receive events  as forwarded, but shall not acknowledge the event back in Nagios. This is useful when Nagios is not used by operators for RT monitoring.
2. Synchronous bi-directional data flow: An event in Nagios will flow to Netcool and will be confirmed back in Nagios as recieved by Netcool. On every update on the event [such as journal entry, acknowledgements] the event in Netcool, status shall be updated in Nagios.

Either options work based on the business/solution requirements. So without further ado:

Implementation:

1. Asynchronous uni-directional data flow [from Nagios SBI to Netcool]

To understand the implementation, I shall divide the steps as southbound implementation and northbound implementation. Southbound implementation refers to the changes/configuration on Nagios end, and Northbound implementation refers to updates in Netcool.

Southbound updates [On Nagios];

a) Create a script to send tcp socket messages or snmp traps or direct JDBC insert to NBI.

You can use snmptrap command for writing the script, if you are not a SNMP guy you can use a simple script to do socket message communication/JDBC inserts into Objectserver. Test this script.

sample snmp script:

Send trap

# Arguments:

# $1 = Management Station

# $2 = Community String

# $3 = host_name

# $4 = service_description (Description of the service)

# $5 = return_code (An integer that determines the state

# of the service check, 0=OK, 1=WARNING, 2=CRITICAL,

# 3=UNKNOWN).

# $6 = plugin_output (A text string that should be used

# as the plugin output for the service check)

#

# Sample

# /usr/bin/snmptrap -v 2c -c $2 $1 ” NAGIOS-NOTIFY-MIB::nSvcEvent nSvcHostname s “$3″ nSvcDesc s “$4″ nSvcStateID i $5 nSvcOutput s “$6″

b) Define a global event handler in Nagios: Global event handler will help execute the script on every state change on Nagios instance and will communicate, failure and seizure of the problem. How to configure GEH: http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/2_0/eventhandlers.html

Northbound updates [On Netcool]

If SNMP:

a) Download the Nagios MIB and compile with MIB2Rules

http://sourceforge.net/projects/nagiosplug/files/nagiosmib/

b) Update the rules file and include it  in mttrapd main ruleset

If socket:

a) Update the socket probe to parse message based on delimiters

b) Ensure all mandatory objectsesrver fields are accounted for

If JDBC:

a) Ensure all mandatory objectsesrver fields are accounted for

b) **CAUTION** Watch the objectserver profiler for IDUC consumption, as this is not so much of a conventional approach

DID YOU CATCH THE HEADFAKE?

Nagios an Netcool were just examples, you can integrate most FM-FM/FM-PM solutions using the aforementioned procedure, you just need to know the NBI data model, SBI data model, right triggers on the SBI system and right listner on NBI system. Made your life easy, din’t I? So start saving your company some money now!!

In the next post, I will talk about method 2 {bidirectional data flow}. Keep visiting!!

For those in the Service and Network management industry who are not aware of what is going to hit us in the next 5 years, I would like to give an overview of what LTE and SAE and then talk about the effects of these technology evolution on our ways of working. I am Software solutions expert and not a Network scientist and had to get in touch with a lot of folks, do a lot of research and dig a lot of books to find this data. Below are very high level abstract explanation of LTE and SAE networks and the purpose they serve.

LTE [Long term evolution] is the one of the proposed 4th generation radio access network technology and if all goes as planned the world will be wireless and with much higher data rate after a successful implementation. Recent tests on the field have been successful and all the  investments planned by US telecom market indicates that this is definitely going to be the future of access Networks. The main node of this network would be the eNodeB which would encompass the functional behavior of multiple nodes of our current network paradigm. The end goal architecturally is to have a flat architecture for 4G networks. End goal from user perspective is increased data rate and quality, along with reduced cost and access anytime/anywhere.

SAE [System Architecture Evolution] on the other hand will be the core for the 4G networks, is focused on a all IP, flat architecture, improved data rate and reduced CAPEX/OPEX expenditures. Evolved packet core [EPC] to which the eNodeB will connect, serves as the central functional unit of the core architecture.

Now, what does all of the above mean to Service and Network management  as it is known today to what it would become in the coming years of 4G networks. Will get to this in my next post. Stay tuned!

References:

http://www.radio-electronics.com/info/cellulartelecomms/lte-long-term-evolution/sae-system-architecture-evolution-network.php

“Self-configuring and self-optimizing network use cases and solutions: Release 9”; 3GPP TR 36.902; Sept, 2009

For a BSM/SQM/Service Assurance solution, initial solution architecture document is one of the most crucial artifacts which not only details the strategic objectives of the solution but also provides a competitive analysis and an alignment to the existing capability of the organization. Furthermore, it provides an insight into the driving requirements, architectural background and key organizational context to ensure that the solution being built for the organization and is not something rammed down the throat off-the shelf.

Detailed below is the template:

1 Executive Summary

CONTENTS OF THIS SECTION: This section an overview of the content of the rest of the report, giving key facts that management would like to know about its contents.  The executive summary should give the most important aspects of the report while omitting details and some supporting information.  Generally speaking, the summary should be not longer than 1 page and preferably as short as possible while conveying the required information.

1B  [Optional, for mature organizations] Strategic Capability Network

Analysis of how the strategy aligns with the organizations capabilities and resources. You can safely skip this section if you already have a defined BSM strategy and a competitive analysis document detailing the value propositions that drive the business. For details refer the patent here and my analysis with an example here.

2 Introduction

CONTENTS OF THIS SECTION: This section gives the name of the system and describes its high-level functions.  This is expanded upon by the history and stakeholders sections.

2.1 History

CONTENTS OF THIS SECTION: This section provides the historical context for the system.  It answers how the system was developed and by whom.

2.2 Stakeholders

CONTENTS OF THIS SECTION: This section provides a list of the stakeholder roles important to the system.  For each, the section lists the concerns that the stakeholder has that can be addressed by the system.

3 Architecture & Problem Background

CONTENTS OF THIS SECTION: The sub-parts of Section 3.1 explain the constraints that provided the significant influence over the architecture.

3.1 System Overview

CONTENTS OF THIS SECTION: This section describes the general function and purpose for the system or subsystem whose architecture is described in this SAD.  Include a high-level context diagram of the system and summarize major inputs and outputs.

If you don’t know how to build an accurate context diagram, look here.

3.2 Goals and Context

CONTENTS OF THIS SECTION: This section gives the name of the system and describes its high-level functions that the BSM solution is offering and more importantly how the solution would fit into the current value chain of the organization.

3.3 Significant Driving Requirements

CONTENTS OF THIS SECTION: This section describes behavioral and quality attribute requirements (original or derived) that shaped the software architecture. Included are any scenarios that express driving behavioral and quality attribute goals.

This section should only list the key driving requirements and not detailed requirements for the solution.

4 Competative Landscape

CONTENTS OF THIS SECTION: This section lists and briefly describes the major competitors of the system.  Competitors are those systems that do the same thing as the system or those systems that could otherwise be used in place of the system.  It also gives a high level overview of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the system explained in more detail in the following sections.

4.1 Strengths

CONTENTS OF THIS SECTION: This section describes the functions that the system does well either in comparison with its competition or in absolute terms.

4.2 Weaknesses

CONTENTS OF THIS SECTION: This section describes the functions that the system does poorly in relation to its competitors or in absolute terms.  Also included could be features that competitors have but the system does not, or features that the system should have but does not given the stakeholders and high-level requirements described in the previous section.

4.3 Opportunities

CONTENTS OF THIS SECTION: This section describes what the opportunities are for the system.  Opportunities are factors external to the system (e.g., in the overall environment) such as general trends or actions of competitors that enable the system to increase its market share or usefulness to stakeholders.

4.4 Threats

CONTENTS OF THIS SECTION: This section describes the threats that the system is likely to experience.  Threats are factors external to the system such as general trends or actions of competitors that decrease the market share of the system or its usefulness to stakeholders; in the extreme case, threats might render the system obsolete.

5 Referenced Materials

CONTENTS OF THIS SECTION: This section provides citations for each reference document.  Provide enough information so that a reader of the SAD can be reasonably expected to locate the document.

6 Directory

6.1 Glossary

CONTENTS OF THIS SECTION: This section provides a list of definitions of special terms and acronyms used in the SAD . If terms are used in the SAD that are also used in a parent solution description document and the definition is different, this section explains why.

6.2 Acronym List

If you work in telecom or finance world, you would know as i do, the TLA’s [Three letter acronyms] are annoying from organization to organization. So, don’t assume – take 10 minutes and add value to your BSM document.

Acknowledgements:

SEI Architecture documentation

Professor Jeff Thompson

Professor J Vayghan

Having been a firm believer of using formal techniques for building BSM solutions; I have studied SEI documentation guidelines over the years and implemented them time and again. This has been one of the biggest reasons for most success that I have attained in my career. For this reason, I have decided to share a step by step documentation guidelines series with my readers to influence the BSM community towards building solutions BETTER!!

I would like to acknowledge Professor Jamshid Vayghan and Professor Jeff Thompson who have been instrumental while teaching Enterprise Architecture and Software Solutions Architecture which have given me an insight into how delivering Architecture related artifacts better.

This series shall detail the documentation guidelines for BSM solution strategy, architecture planning, implementation and lifecycle management. This series shall not include troubleshooting, production support and maintainance related documentation as these aspects will depend on tool suite, hardware, software and organization enviornment.

Those who know me also know that I have been a Nagios supporter for a while; but have had my share of complains about the solution. Since past few months, I have been hearing/trying out GroundWorks open source solution as it provides a better integrated value offering when compared to Nagios; so did a study that I would like to share with my readers.

Groundworks 5.3 community edition is hosted on enterprise class application server/database, this came as a big relief after using Nagios which had some scalability issues. JBOSS and Mysql have given a good foundation to GroundWorks and provide some really nice Web 2.0 features like AJAX driven views/role driven dashboards etc… Furthermore GWS also provides some really cool reporting features. Note that the reporting functionality is for both realtime and historical information.

Hardware requirements for GWS are pretty straightforward i.e. 4 Gigs of RAM, 3 GHz CPU speed, 160 Gigs of harddrive, etc.. Net net – Nothing earthshaking.

What was really interesting is that GWS had a lot of plug ins incorporated, intuitive UI driven hostgroup/host setup, servicegroup/service setup, dependency control and service metric reporting features. This was a BIG plus and provided value of the shelf… For the existing Nagios users, GWS provides an seamless port over of existing functionality. Whats more is that installation took only 30 minutes!! Well do not confuse installation with ready solution — PLEASE. I am only referring to base solution.

If all of the aforementioned was not enough, the GWS solution provides a feature to discover  devices based on ping sweep and tcp layer discovery option as well; Auto discovery for free — Neat!!

So to summarize, GWS community edition turned out to be a very useful time investment due to following reasons:

1) Easy to install 20 minutes of initial setup

2) UI driven hostgroup/host/servicegroup/service/commands/dependencies

3) Historical and Realtime reporting features

4) Auto Discovery via ICMP protocol

5) AJAX driven role based views/dashboards

6) MySql archive

7) Checks for SNMP alarms [passive]

8 ) Active service checks [loads of them]

I would be interested to hear the feedback from others who have used enterprises edition on GWS BSM features provided in enterprise version of the solution.

The success of a business or service is tied to the human factors like relationship management, communication, motivations, aspirations, org. of human chain, delivery models, planning of human resources etc – Yet WE (the community) most often than not neglect, if not completely ignore the human aspect of BSM.

So what are the various “Human” dimensions/perspectives of BSM

1. Skills: If you thought you can get BSM/Service Assurance implementations done by a bunch of system engineers with expertise on a bunch of tools; you are heading for a disaster. What you need is someone who can envision solution, understand the organization, communicate the ideas and implement them with agility. System engineers are an important part of the implementation, but they have biases towards what they know best which works out ok if what they know can scale to the needs of the organization.
2. Ability to work with end users is another very important aspect for the success of the BSM solution; a word of caution here – If you heard sales presentations saying BSM is only for VP’s, Directors to know the “global strategic view”; stay away!! BSM belongs as much to the VP’s as it belongs to the technician “Joe” sitting in the Operations Center trying to understand why his walk in the datacenter and him pulling the cable can cause a loss of millions of dollars.
3. P2P of value chain: No P2P is not peer to peer but people to people communication of “value” of BSM solution and understanding the importance of communication of service impacting information to all expected stakeholders.

So, next time you are working on BSM implementation, try this – WALK AROUND!!  Ensure BSM is a part of every individual goals and objectives, the value that the VP’s and Director’s are expecting out of the solution is communicated to as many folks as possible. Also, the value that the technician Joe is expecting is communicated back completing full cycle of “value” flow. That is what makes the business better!! Have you ever seen all of the aforementioned  happening in a BSM implementation? I can bet that the answer in more than 80% of the cases is “NO”; and we ask why 8 of 10 BSM efforts fail to meet the proposed expected value.

BSM will only be “BS” if WE(the community) miss out on the perspective which ensures the alignment of the most important asset/pillar for the success of a business i.e. “Humans”.