Chicago TTUC Recap (ITM 6.1)

This is a short overview of some of the things that were discussed at the Tivoli Technical User Conference in Chicago last week. This recap will focus on the ITM 6 product.

IBM said that the scalability numbers have been pushed higher. They said that there is no longer a 15 RTEMS limit in a HUBTEMS and that the per/agent to TEMS ratio now scales well over 1k. Also the total agents per HUB now can be 10k+. Buyer beware, IMHO, these are not production/customer numbers. IBM did say they will be releasing a white paper describing the testing results and the trade-offs. Look for it on the OPAL site.

IBM also stated that they would be adding multiple WPA per HUBTEMS support. Currently a WPA only scales to about 1500 open connections (because of Windows RPC). Allowing customers to have multiple WPA's in a HUBTEMS will fix this. This would also address some fire-wall issues for collecting historical data. When this feature is added you could associate a WPA to a RTEMS in a remote location and this would make firewall configurations cleaner for WPA processing.

Another big feature that IBM said they will be adding this year is allowing you to customize historical data collection. In the current release when you turn on historical data collection you get all attributes and rows for a specific attribute group and you get them for all agents of that type. In ITM 5, because the logging was script driven, you could do things like only log processes that have GT 80% cpu. In ITM 6 there currently is no way to do this. In ITM 6.1 if you select Linux Process you get all processes collected in your historical database (i.e., TDW). This new feature will allow you to customize the collections for attributes and it sounds like agent grouping (perhaps by MSL).

IBM said there will be more CLI's added this year. They said that a CLI for adding agents to MSL's will come this year. They also said they are looking at retro-fitting some of the lost functionality of the Framework (i.e., Endpoint policies, Authentication, ???????????????)??

Currently if your TEMS is *nix then then your TEP authentication has to rely on *nix authentication. A lot of customers have been asking for LDAP authentication and it sounds like IBM is aware of this and help is on the way.

UA's are this year's flavor. Anything you need just create a UA. However, I must admit IBM has done an incredible job creating the OPAL site. In fact there was a session about the OPAL site.

TEPS on AIX, then Solaris.

IBM will be providing tighter integration into the TEP. Not just plug in integration. For example they will be adding topology views from their BSM and CMDB systems. The TEP appears to be the focal point for almost all of Tivoli's plans for integration. The TEP is here to stay boys and girls.

IBM setup an integration lab room. I thought this was awesome. They had labs for UA, TEP administration, TADDM, and ITCM. They were all beginners'?labs but if you hadn't worked with a particular product they were great. In my case I was able to work and play with TADDM for the first time. I also talked to a lot of people who hadn't worked with the UA and they seemed to really like those labs.

IBM has an aggressive ITM 6.1 Fix Pack strategy for this year. They are planning four Fix Packs this year with FP02 due in May. They also stated that ITM 6.2 is due Q107. That's a lot of work to get done in one year for both IBM and us.