The first session today was in one of my favorite categories, systems management. The demo and discussion in this session revolved around two things:
Discovering a new piece of infrastructure to monitor based on WSDM notifications to Tivoli's CMDB/Provisioning/Asset Management brain and then monitoring that newly discovered thing. Part of the point was to show an agentless way of discovering something and then of monitoring using WSDM. The point here being that you don't need an agent on the box.
The second was a BSM demo of NetCool. The idea of BSM is to related business processes to IT elements rather than just look at the raw IT. So, you know that trading in Japan is broken instead of just knowing that your database cluster is running slow. Of course, once you find out that trading is broken, you want to add more servers to the cluster.
Slow and Steady
The core thing that struck me is how slowly changes happen in the systems management world compared to my "innovation expectations." That's probably why I get so excited about the Systems Management 2.0 folks.
That said, I'm always impressed by discovery demos where things "just work." Never minding the real-world muck, seeing a CMDB fill itself is as I did here, but even more so at the recent Tivoli User's Group in Austin, is thrilling. As someone who coded up enterprise systems management platform, I appreciate the subtle whiz-bang of such stuff.
The largest question I have around all of this is what beyond WSDM the Tivoli world is using for this agentless-y approach. There's plenty of protocols out there to suck from, and having breadth beyond just WSDM is something that a product line the size of Tivoli could seemingly afford. The second item, of course, is that there's a blizzard of consoles, systems, and other things names T-Something. This is fine for systems management wonks like me, but the dead horse of systems management consolidation and simplification seems to have gone zombie.
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