Showing posts with label ASM. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ASM. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 24, 2017

How Netcool Operations Insight delivers cognitive automation by Kristian Stewart

https://www.ibm.com/blogs/cloud-computing/2017/08/netcool-operations-insight-cognitive-automation/

One important topic that Kristian omitted from his excellent article is the optional Agile Service Manager (ASM) component of NOI. ASM provides a context aware topology view of your applications and infrastructure, which gives you a clear view of the impacts causes by events. Take a look at our other articles and YouTube videos for more information on ASM.

Thursday, July 20, 2017

DevOps and Microservices Architecture done right - IBM Netcool Agile Service Manager

Introduction

Our last article described just how easy it is to upgrade any or all of the components of Agile Service Manager. This article is meant to describe some of the design, patterns and processes that had to go into the application itself to allow a two-command in-place upgrade.

Microservices Architecture

Yes, this is a trendy buzzword these days, and that's only part of the reason I'm using it here. In general, a "microservice" can describe almost anything you access over the web - a website, a document, etc. Absolutely anything. But one very important concept about microservices when designing an application is separating functions that then expose all of their capability through some interface. In ASM, there are several "services", each of which is implemented in a Docker container. Each one of these "services" actually provides a number of related "microservices", which are then exposed via URLs accessible through the host system. All of these services communicate with one another through the exposed microservices. 

ASM's strict separation of functionality allows a lot of flexibility in application development. For example, one service is the File Observer, which is used to read a file of a specific format, which contains topology information. The main purpose of this service is to read a file and convert it into data that is then sent to the Topology service, which is responsible for processing the data for its purposes and ultimately sending it to the Cassandra (database) service, which will persistently store the data on a filesystem that's available on the host and accessible via the Search/ElasticSearch service. Notice that this application pattern is very similar to existing application patterns, but in this case each service is provided by a separate container.

Containers vs VMs

Docker containers are MUCH smaller than full virtual machines. Additionally, Docker has defined and implemented numerous usecases that make containers easier to create, deploy, configure and orchestrate than VMs. So, while ASM could have been delivered as multiple VMs (via OVA files and some type of hypervisor-specific orchestration), the use of Docker containers makes deployment and management much simpler. I'm saying that a similar result could have been achieved with VMWare vSphere, but IBM's Docker solution for this application seems to be sleeker to me.

Containers vs J2EE Applications in an App Server

In many ways, Docker can be seen as similar to a J2EE Application Server like WebSphere - it provides a common architecture with functions, capabilities and services that are shared among the applications/containers running within it. However, Docker containers can run applications written in any language you want - from Java to R to Haskell. Anything you can run on the host OS can be run inside a container. Containers can also be given strict resource limits for CPU usage, memory, file access, etc. To me, containers seem to be much more like atomic units than J2EE applications. 

As an example that I believe many people can relate to, an Application Server can be thought of as your browser, with each tab being an "application". It doesn't happen often, but one tab can crash your entire browser. Docker has been written specifically to avoid this with containers, which is a great thing.

IBM's Design Choices

IBM appears to have chosen this particular pattern in order to make the application as manageable as possible from both perspectives - development AND administration. When upgrading the components of the application, each service/container is basically free to do whatever it wants as long as it continues to adhere to its published REST interface (since REST is the only interface IBM has created for the services).

What does this have to do with DevOps?

DevOps requires frequent building and deploying, ideally in a manner that does not cause any regression test failures. The structure of this application wholeheartedly adheres to this requirement, and it is brilliant. 

I'm certain you can think of thousands of ways that this doesn't apply to some application that you deal with, but you should ignore those thoughts when thinking of the future. I truly believe that most, if not all, enterprise-scale applications will be rewritten using either this pattern or one that's extremely similar to it. And everyone in all areas of IT needs to be ready for the new opportunities and challenges that will come with it.

Thursday, June 29, 2017

More IBM Netcool Agile Service Manager Videos

I think some wires got crossed in YouTube recently as IBM Service Management moved over to the IBM Cloud channel, and it appears that their most recent videos are hidden from any searches. However, thanks to Matt Duggan from IBM who shared the direct links on LinkedIn, I've added them all to my own IBM Agile Service Manager playlist, which can be found here:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxv2WlaeOSG9z_L4LCjHzz-qnZ-vDqnjn

Have fun

Tuesday, June 27, 2017

IBM Netcool Agile Service Manager - What is swagger?

Introduction

The ASM documentation references "swagger" and "swagger URLs" for several different services. The purpose of this post is to describe what this actually means.

What is swagger?

Here's a statement from swagger.io:

The goal of Swagger™ is to define a standard, language-agnostic interface to RESTAPIs which allows both humans and computers to discover and understand the capabilities of the service without access to source code, documentation, or through network traffic inspection.

So the goal of this article is to show what that statement actually means to you in the context of Agile Service Manager.

Swagger URLs for ASM

There are 7 different services that are accessible via a browser. My ASM host is named "asm", and here are the URLs I have for the services:

File Observer Swagger UI
http://asm:9098/1.0/topology/observer/swagger/#/
        
topology-service Swagger UI
http://asm:8080/1.0/topology/swagger#/ 
        
search service Swagger UI
http://asm:7080/1.0/search/swagger  
        
ITNM observer Swagger UI
http://asm:9080/1.0/topology/observer/swagger   
        
OpenStack observer Swagger UI
http://asm:9082/1.0/topology/observer/swagger   
        
Event observer Swagger UI
http://asm:9084/1.0/topology/observer/swagger 
        
Docker observer Swagger UI
http://asm:9086/1.0/topology/observer/swagger 

Topology Service

The Topology Service is the one that will be the one you normally want to visit to view (and even change) data about the resources in the ASM database. Here's what you'll see when you access the URL:

You can click on each section to see the operations associated with each. The section I like is Resources. Here are the operations found there:


From here, you can click on one of the operations, such as the first one: GET /resources. Here's just the first part of what's displayed there:



Notice that it gives you documentation about the operation and lots of other information. Specifically, it provides you with the ability to fill in values for all of the parameters that the operation accepts AND allows you to execute the operation! It also provides you with the 'curl' command that you can run from the command line to execute the exact same operation, with the exact same parameters.

The way to execute the operation is to click the "Try it out!" button at the bottom of the operation documentation.


And there you go! Some data. In this case, what's returned is the ID of the node in the topology that matches the criteria I specified. I can then take this ID and use it as input to other operations in this same group or in other groups.

Try it out and have fun

The above is just an short entry point into ASM's swagger UIs. Play around with them and you'll see that you can do some interesting stuff.

Monday, June 26, 2017

Agile Service Manager UI Introduction

Here's a short video introduction covering the basic features of IBM's Netcool Agile Service Manager.





IBM Netcool Agile Service Manager Thoughts

I recently installed IBM's Netcool Agile Service Manager and wanted to give my initial thoughts on it.

What is Agile Service Manager?


Basically, it's a real-time topology viewer for multiple technologies. Specifically, it can currently render topology data for ITNM, OpenStack and Docker, all in one place. Additionally, it maps events to the topology so you can see any events that are affecting a resource in the context of its topology. So, for example, if you receive a CRITICAL event for a particular Docker container, you will see the node representing that container turn red. Pretty neat. Here's an example of a 1-hop topology of my ASM server's docker infrastructure (you always have to start at some resource to view a topology):



What's so great about it?

Combined Topology View

First, this topology view is wonderful for Operations and Development because it shows a topology view of your combined Network, Docker and Openstack environments, so everyone can see where applications are running and the dependencies among the pieces.

ElasticSearch

Second, it's got ElasticSearch under the covers, so updates and searches are amazingly fast, and the topology view is built extremely quickly.

Custom Topology Information

Third, you can add your own topology information to make it even more useful!

Here's a screenshot where I've manually modified the topology using a combination of the File Observer and direct access to the Topology Service REST API (from the Swagger URL):



Notice also that Time Entry is in a Critical state. That's due to an event that I generated.

History

Fourth, it maintains history about the topology. That means that you can view the difference in topology between 2 hours (or two days) ago and right now.

Is ASM a complete replacement for TBSM and/or TADDM?


No, ASM is not a complete replacement for TBSM or TADDM, but you can definitely think of it as "TBSM Lite". TBSM still has some very unique features, such as status propagation, service rules, and custom KPIs that can be defined on a per-business-service basis.

And TADDM's unique capability is the hard work of actually discovering very detailed data and relationships in your environment.

However, because the search and visualization pieces of ASM are so fast and efficient, I can definitely see ASM being used as at least part of the visualization portion of  TADDM. What would be required to allow this is a TADDM Observer to be written.

Additionally, I think the ASM database and topology will in the future be leveraged by TBSM, though this will take a little work.

Parting thoughts

ASM is a truly useful product, with some great capabilities. It's also incredibly easy to install if you've already got Netcool Operations Insight (or at least DASH) installed - I was able to get it installed in just a few hours. I'm certain IBM will be adding features and add-ons to provide even more functionality in the coming months.