There's an updated cloud in town Part 1: Installing ICO 2.5

IBM Cloud Orchestrator 2.5 was recently released, so I'm installing it in my lab. This new release is based on IBM Cloud Manager with OpenStack 4.3, so quite a bit has changed. This series of posts will discuss some of the issues with installation and overall thoughts as I go through.

Wrong Version of IBM Cloud Manager 

IBM Cloud Manager is included in the eAssembly for ICO, but it's not the required level! The Cloud Manager files included with ICO are JUST version 4.3. However, version 4.3 with at least fixpack 2 is what's required. So after installing Cloud Manager, you will need to go to IBM Fix Central to download Cloud Manager 4.3 fixpack 3, which was released after ICO 2.5.

Cloud Manager: Additional YUM Repository Needed for KVM

If you're deploying a KVM cloud to Red Hat 7 or 7.1, you will need to enable the Red Hat "Optional" repository to have access to several python packages, including python-zope-interface and python-pyasn1-modules.

If your target machines don't have access to the Red Hat Subscription Network, you can get around this by downloading Fedora 19 and add it as a Yum repository. But the Fedora ISO doesn't include the python-pyasn1-modules rpm. So you'll need to download that and add it to a local repository on the ICM Deployer machine. I used the 'createrepo' command to create the repository under /opt/ibm/cmwo/yum-repo/operatingsystem/redhat7.1/x86_64/optional .

I downloaded the Fedora 19 ISO from here: http://www.itsprite.com/free-linux-download-fedora-19-iso-cddvd-images/

And I downloaded the python-pyasn1-modules RPM from here: ftp://ftp.icm.edu.pl/vol/rzm5/linux-fedora-secondary/releases/19/Everything/armhfp/os/Packages/p/python-pyasn1-modules-0.1.6-1.fc19.noarch.rpm I think a better link is: https://archives.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/releases/19/Everything/x86_64/os/Packages/p/python-pyasn1-modules-0.1.6-1.fc19.noarch.rpm

I didn't need any other packages - the Fedora 19 ISO and the python-pyasn1-modules RPM gave my install everything it needed.

Loading the SCCD 7.5.1 Demo Content Package into SCCD (ICD) 7.5.3

This tip is specifically for SCCD 7.5.3.

Problem

When trying to install the SCCD 7.5.1 Content Pack into SCCD 7.5.3, you'll get an error about the column named GMAPSDISTANCEMATRIX. Specifically, the error will state that there is no default value and no values for that column in the data. The first round of errors come from the Data/SCCD_SI_MAPMANAGER.xml file in the content pack. If you manually download the content pack, you can view the file to see that the data it's complaining about really isn't there. And once you fix the errors found in that file, there are other errors.

Workaround

Since this is just demo data on a demo system, I figured it was OK to modify the offending Maximo objects, and the modifications worked to eliminate the error and allow me to go through all of the scenarios. You should be on a demo system, so you should be OK with that stipulation.

To workaround the problem, you need to make two different types of database modifications within Maximo.

First, turn on Admin mode following these instructions:

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/a9ba1efe-b731-4317-9724-a181d6155e3a/entry/how_to_turn_on_and_turn_off_maximo_admin_mode31?lang=en


Next, you need to mark that the following attributes are NOT required:

BMAPSDISTANCEMATRIX

BMAPSROUTE

BMAPSGEOCODE

GMAPSDISTANCEMATRIX

SPATIALDISTANCEMATRIX

Go To Applications->System Configuration->Platform Configuration->Database Configuration and search for the MAPMANAGER object:

Select the object found and look for the each one of the listed attributes Attribute. You'll need to go to the second page of attributes to find SPATIALDISTANCEMATRIX.

You can then de-select "Required?" flag which will make it a non-required attribute (which corresponds to a column in the database). Once you've done this for the four attributes, click the Save button.

Now open the ASSET object and you need to add an attribute named AMCREW. Go into the ASSET object and add a new row named AMCREW. All of the default values work fine. This attribute won't hold any data - it just needs to be there.

Then go back to "List View" and select "Apply Configuration Changes on the left under "More Actions":

Once the process completes, you should see dialogs similar to the following:

At this point you can successfully install the content pack.

IBM Performance Management 8.1.1 is GA!

IBM® Performance Management is a comprehensive solution that helps manage the performance and availability for complex applications that might be running in a data center, public cloud, or hybrid combination. This solution provides you with visibility of your applications, ensuring optimal performance and efficient use of resources.

The Performance Management solution collects data from both Performance Management agents and Tivoli® Monitoring agents. Data is displayed in the Application Performance Dashboard for both Performance Management agents and their hybridized Tivoli Monitoring counterparts.

The IBM Performance Management solution has four offerings:

• IBM Application Performance Management Advanced combines IBM Monitoring, IBM Application Performance Management, and IBM Application Diagnostics into one offering.
• IBM Application Performance Management for end user experience, transaction tracking, and resource monitoring of all your application components. Application Performance Management is useful for managing your critical applications in production.
• IBM Monitoring for resource monitoring of infrastructure, application components, and cloud workloads. Resource monitoring helps you identify and address slow transactions, capacity issues, and outages.
• IBM Application Diagnostics for code level visibility into your applications and the health of your application servers. Use the diagnostics dashboards to find performance bottlenecks in application code.

Details on the functions provided by each offering can be found here

A new piece of documentation included with this release is the Scenarios guide. There is currently only one scenario documented, but it is very detailed and represents the most common scenario by far.

Live Video Presentation: ITM Nugget: Overview of how to retrieve enterprise wide information in one simple output

IBM's Mark Leftwich has made a great video on how you can pull enterprise wide information in one simple step. These techniques and examples are great for audits, sanity checking monitoring and problem diagnosis work:

A great document from IBM on integrating SCCD processes with traditional Maximo asset management functions

IBM Control Desk (previously named SCCD - SmartCloud Control Desk) is Maximo, but because it provides several additional customizations to Maximo, many traditional Maximo developers are intimidated by it. But that shouldn't be the case. Like other Maximo additions (Maximo for Oil and Gas, etc.), ICD is mainly a collection of additional pages (officially named "applications") that access the same Maximo database that you know and love. It does deal with some different objects (tables) in the database, but it's all the exact same architecture. And while it does add new workflows and a few other things, these are all really just "normal" Maximo customizations. It just happens to be that ICD contains quite a few of these customizations, and that's why IBM packages it as its own product.

Have a look at this paper for more information on the use of automated vs manual processes when dealing with ICD and asset management:

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/groups/service/html/communityview?communityUuid=e25892f0-20f7-46ff-bbe9-c7c03fb3036f#fullpageWidgetId=Wb33da0c91d92_4cec_a8a7_57df877f617b&file=0a07c40d-bb04-4c6d-accc-6f23cb6505d9

IBM's TCR Community

Reporting is an indispensable part of your IT implementation. Check out IBM's Tivoli Common Reporting community for tips, tricks and updates on this tool that's included with nearly all IBM ITSM products:

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/groups/service/html/communitystart?communityUuid=9caf63c9-15a1-4a03-96b3-8fc700f3a364

DASH Customizations with data from ITNM and TBSM

Jason Shamroski is creating some custom dashboards for a customer this week using DASH, TBSM and a component developed by IV Blankenship for pulling ITNM topology data into DASH.