Three words that individually carry immense value and when put together makes huge sense. So what the heck does strategic cost analysis really mean?

Costing IMO, fundamentally is a science (there goes the accounting guy) to manage value incurred to the value gained. Now, one may ask – what does that mean? It means everything that you do everyday is being measured for a return on investment, and how the return is calculated might be the decision making point between weather what  you/your team is doing is worth the value or not.

Remember: All cost allocation is arbitrary.

Costing is developed to encourage behavior that is tagged profitable and discourage behavior that is not tagged a good practice. Now the art really is to define the taxable and subsidized  practices. Good practice is subsidized and practice that causes value degradation/erosion is taxed.

So, lets look at an example:

Engineering Operations accountant  gives  you a call and says that your project budget is going really overboard and you need to cut cost, believe me this happens everyday with a lot of us.

Don’t surrender, and say here are the things I’ll do. First understand the allocation structure, understand the breakdown and then make a call on which areas you would want to allocate differently. For example, if you run an operations in the US or UK the cost of the employee overhead is so significant that it almost adds up to 40% of employee wages at times. In that case, approach the facilities management (don’t try this at work, unless you really know what you are doing ); and tell them about the wonderful things you are doing. Brief them about how your project will reduce carbon footprint by X% in coming years and having the project stay where it is critical, if the management finds value in your work and just makes an accounting exception to allocate facilities cost elsewhere, you are off-the-hook.  So, there, not easy as described above, but I have seen in past cost allocations being differed and changed to accommodate behavior that would help organization.

Don’t believe me, take up any balance sheet and look at the goodwill as an asset (mostly technology firms) and you would feel compelled to ask, how the fu** do you quantify goodwill in a dollar amount? There- I told you so!!

So let’s bring this to the OSS/NMS/Engineering world,

• can you add R&D as an asset? – YES
• can you qualify SLA penalties, goodwill loss if Mean-Time-To-Resolve decreases? – YES

Think about if folks, this gives you power like never before. If you know how to get your way across accounting standards for your industry, you will know much more…..

Much more, later!! Good luck…

Various solutions exist, to name a few Emerson Aperture, NLyte and Rackwise – All of which bring important things to the table. But what are the big 4 doing in this space? Do they have any solid solutions out there? Or they are just living with the situation?

Lack of investments in RFID, rack monitoring software has really taken the cost of manually managing datacenter’s higher. The bottom line is datacenter is a piece you cannot just outsource because it is the fundamental part of unique value chain for every company.

The only proposed solutions are:

1. Virtulization mgmt
2. Workflow management – Cable mgmt, Physical and logical asset management
3. Spare management
4. Space, Power, Cooling mgmt
5. On-boarding, offloading management
6. For cloud – customer centric solution management

Unfortunately the quest for finding the right solution continues, but I am not giving up.

4) Increase the font size of below field
DWORD value “el_font_height” – Allows the user to set their preferred font height
Values can be in the range of decimal 8 to 72

5) Restart your Netcool Omnibus Event Conductor and Open an Event list

http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-3000/introduction-1?a=browse

Some more information if you would want to develop modules:

http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-3155

Further reading [Simple and good]:

http://www.vivaunix.com/howtos/www/publish/html/Solaris%2010/SNMP.html

To find where the mib directory is

1) Direct attached storage [DAS ]: This is your jumbo hard-drive attached to the server directly. Tonns of vendors out in the market in this area.

2) Just a bunch of drives [JBOD]: Rack of drives put together with no intelligent functionality.

3) Network attached storage [NAS]: Network attached storage – speed of data is key for efficiency of this solution. Vendors like IBM Tivoli, HP and EMC are competiting in this space with new vendors like Dell and various other startups. These storage solutions generally have redundancy, auto-failover, failback features available.

4) Storage area network [SAN]: Storage area network

a) Drive Enclosure

b) Controllers (Management modules)

c) Switch network

d) Host Bus Adapters

e) HBA Drivers

One other thing that you should know while dealing with storage configuration is RAID model.

Redundant Array of Independent Disks

Level 0 comprises of data stripping

Level 0+1 comprises of data stripping and redundancy

Level 5 and 6 have parity driven data storage techniques but can cause performance bottlenecks

Watch the below video for more info:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J88X_M6s0l4&feature=related

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!!

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

1920: the birth of the term “Network Management”. ATT coined the term Network management, wherein supervisors used to roll on skates to manage the network incidents requiring attention.

1962: the first “Network Control Center” is born at ATT.

1977: the first “Network Operations Center” is born at ATT.

1987-8  was one of the most important years for Network management. The birth of SGMP and SNMP Version 1 protocols by IETF. The birth of ITSM by CCTA’ [Birth of Service Assurance concept]

1987: the first “Topology driven NOC”

1991: the birth of “Network Management as we know it”. Monitoring/surveillance/Operations & Administration assumed by NOC.

1993: birth of SNMP V2

1997: birth of SNMP V3

2001: Telecom bubble burst and highest emphasis on “doing more with less”/”Lean”. Birth of Business Service Management [Searching for hard citations, will update soon]

2003-05: Multiple Mergers and Acquisitions era starts with an effort of consolidation on Enterprise management market

2005: 3GPP goes big with the planning for LTE, SAE etc for defining the 4G networks and industry focus on Virtualization starts

2007: Forrester puts forward a study stating ManagedObjects and BMC as leaders of BSM. Lights a fire under IBM, HP and others to put forward better offerings.

References:

http://www.corp.att.com/history/nethistory/management.html

http://140.134.26.20/wbem/eng/ch2.html

http://www.ir.bbn.com/~craig/

http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200603/msg00182.html

http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/wave%26trade;_business_service_management,_q1_2007/q/id/38931/t/2

1) Make WEBTOP and ISM Web 2.0 >> “WebIsm” WebISM for BlackBerry, WebISMfor iPhone, AJAX enabled WebISM, Dynamic Maps, Name-Face associations etc.. .  No more JSP pages, Groovy based rich clients with more flexible, intuitive and highly accessible web clients. TRADITIONAL CENTRALIZED EVENT MANAGEMENT WITH PEOPLE SITTING IN THE NOC IS GROWING OLD. NOW THE TECHNICIANS WANT TO ACKNOWLEDGE ALARMS WHILE DRIVING THE CAR WITH ONE HAND AND A LATTE IN THE OTHER – AGILE INCIDENT MANAGEMENT IS THE ONLY WAY FORWARD. PLAIN AND SIMPLE: THERE IS NO OTHER OPTION.

2) Integrate Webtop and ISM :  Think about this — NOT ONE COMPANY THAT DOES FAULT MANAGEMENT DOES NOT NEED AN HTTP/S INTERFACE and INTERNET SERVICE CHECKS [ICMP, NTP, DHCP, SMTP etc]  But yet, if we consider the client that have WEBTOP is much higher than clients that have ISM. This is only because of lack of awareness of features that ISM provides with the DATABRIDGE, SLA profiles, Wizard driven rules etc.

ISM will only reach out to the masses when it is integrated where it fits best in Netcool architecture.

3) May not sound good: Open the source for WebTop and ISM to a registered development community: Let’s except the fact that products like Nagios, CACTI provide Internet service monitoring for no cost with similar reliability.  So opening the source would help achieve the 1st improvement easily in lower cost. If the community works for free, no-one pays Still no-one in the industry can use the product because it needs professional licenses.

Ahead of time – Not really! These are fundamental features of next generation of fault management in my humble opinion. History has proved that architectural improvements recommended by end customers have proven to be most beneficial and succesful for software products. Looking at these improvements from revenue model perspective, the revenues might consolidate but profitability attained by the end solution will be phenomenal, in my opinion.

So shout out to the wonderful Tivoli team @ IBM to consider these suggestions with further ATAM, CBAM and CBE’s.