Visit us at booth 568 at IBM InterConnect March 19-23 in Las Vegas

Get out to IBM InterConnect 2017!

Stop by booth S568 in the Hybrid Cloud area to talk to us about:

- Our recent and historical successes helping customers like you deploy IBM products.

- IBM's comprehensive suite of ITSM tools, including Netcool, IBM Control Desk, IBM Performance Management, and TADDM.

- How you can effectively use an Agile methodology in your journey to realizing DevOps.

- Different strategies for effective deployments.

- Effectively consolidating and integrating your existing toolsets to your best advantage.

and many more topics!

How to start a Netcool OMNIbus implementation

Someone posed this question on IBM Developerworks today, and I wanted to share the answer I provided, since it contains quite a few useful links:

https://www.ibm.com/mysupport/s/question/0D50z00006LMPab/how-to-start-implementation-of-tivoli-omnibus?language=en_US

And here's my reply in case the above link goes away:

With such an open-ended question, I'm going to provide links that start at the very beginning - Event Management. IBM has a great Redbook on this topic. It's from 2004, but the foundational information is still completely valid:

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg246094.pdf

It's a REALLY good reference, particularly chapters 1 and 2. Once you understand Event Management concepts, reasons, challenges, needs and personas, I think you then need to move on to information about the OMNIbus components, architecture and capabilities, which you can find in the product documentation here:

https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSSHTQ_8.1.0/com.ibm.netcool_OMNIbus.doc_8.1.0/omnibus/wip/user/concept/omn_ovr_introtonetcoolomnibus.html

Then keep on reading through the rest of the product documentation so you understand how OMNIbus is basically configured.

The next topic you'll want to look at is probes. which will process data and send events to OMNIbus, and this information is also in the product documentation:

https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSSHTQ_8.1.0/com.ibm.netcool_OMNIbus.doc_8.1.0/omnibus/wip/probegtwy/concept/omn_prb_settingupprobes.html

Next you'll probably want to dive into ObjectServer SQL to find out how to manage the events that probes generate:

https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSSHTQ_8.1.0/com.ibm.netcool_OMNIbus.doc_8.1.0/omnibus/wip/admin/concept/omn_adm_sql_objservsql.html

You should probably also look at the links listed here:

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/wikis/home?lang=en

Somewhere in here, you'll also need to determine if you're going to use Netcool Impact (most new customers purchase both products in some combination). And if so, you start poking around the Impact Wiki:

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/wikis/home?lang=en

Automated testing for IBM Control Desk

Last year IBM made available the Selenium Automation Toolkit for Maximo, which includes IBM Control Desk. More information can be found here:

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/forums/html/topic?id=4d90a532-31a3-41bd-a128-2186fdae50b8

More information about Selenium itself can be found here:

http://www.seleniumhq.org/

IBM uses Selenium in several tools, including IBM Performance Manager and IBM Application Performance Manager. Essentially, it's used for recording and playing back web browser interactions.

Maximo: How to view data from an arbitrary table

I recently had a need to view data in a Maximo table, but didn't have direct access to the database. So I wanted to find a way to use the Maximo Application Developer to get me this data. As I thought, it's very straightforward. Basically, you just need to create, configure, authorize and launch a dialog that specifies the table (MBO) as its source.

Mainly, follow the thorough instructions found here:

http://maximobase.blogspot.com/2013/05/how-to-create-custom-dialog-box-in.html

The parts of interest are:

In the dialog element, specify the appropriate mboname:

<dialog id="Testing" mboname="WARRANTYVIEW" label="Contract financial info" >

In this example, the MBO is "WARRANTYVIEW".

Also, you need to specify your MBO's attributes in with the "dataatribute" attribute of each appropriate control:

<textbox id="finaninfo_grid_s1_1"dataattribute="totalcost" />

In this case, "totalcost" is the name of the attribute that will be displayed. Yours will be different.

And that's it for my usecase. The MBO used by the dialog doesn't have to have any relationship to the main MBO attached to the application.

An awesome video on IBM Network Performance Insights 1.2

If you're not a member of the IBM Middleware User Community, you'll need to sign up for free to access this video, but I think it's well worth it:

https://www.imwuc.org/p/do/sd/sid=3340&source=6

Here are a couple of screenshots to show you the kind of detail covered:

The speakers in the video are:

Krishna Kodali, Sr. Software Engineer, IBM - Krishna Kodali is a Senior Software Engineer at IBM, he provides support and consultation for Netcool Product Suite. He has been working with Netcool Product Suite since 2005 and is a worldwide Subject Matter Expert (SME) for IBM Tivoli Network Manager (ITNM). He offers guidance in design and implementation for any size of deployment. Krishna has a Bachelor’s degree in Engineering and is a Cisco Certified Network Professional (CCNP). He specializes in Network Technologies, System Management, IT Service Management, Virtualization, SNMP and Netcool.

John Parish, Technical Enablement Specialist, IBM - John Parish has been teaching IBM courses for the past 10 years.

PINK17 Feb 19-22, Las Vegas

I'm attending the Pink Elephant 2017 IT Service Management Conference and Exhibition Feb 19-22 in Las Vegas. To all of my associates and friends, please let me know if you're going so we can try to connect.

IBM's Cloud Business Partner Advisory Council in New Orleans was amazing

This was the first BPAC I've attended, and I hope to be invited to many more. We got to get to know our VP enablement team and have some great fellowship all around. I got to make new friends at Lighthouse, gen-E, Flagship, Perficient, ne Digital, Sirius, Avnet, Arrow and others. Thank you Dave Hock, Bob Miller, Joh Donaldson, Don Stough, Rene Ferguson, Melissa Hadley and all other IBMers involved for pulling off a great event.

If you're an IBM Business Partner, you need to make sure to keep in touch with the IBM BP team. There was great information presented and just an outstanding sharing of ideas to help everyone be successful.

We look forward to seeing everyone in March in Vegas at InterConnect if not before!