IBM Agile Service Manager application maintenance is very easy

The Agile Service Manager team has done an amazing job on installation and upgrade. If you've never managed an enterprise-scale application, the information in this post probably won't impress you much. But really, if you've never managed an enterprise-scale application, you probably quit reading our articles a long, long time ago.

So now that I've got a technical audience, here's the amazing thing:

I just received some updated ASM components from IBM. To install them took TWO COMMANDS:

yum install *.rpm

docker compose up -d

THAT'S IT, and the new components are up and running, with the new functionality. I didn't even have to manually stop or start any processes. It was literally THOSE TWO COMMANDS. This, to me, is absolutely stunning, and hopefully a sign of more good things to come.

Docker Agent for IBM Workload Scheduler

IBM Workload Scheduler has Docker agents!

Using IBM Agile Service Manager and BigFix to obtain and display application communication topology data

Background

We've been working with a client who owns BigFix and Netcool Operations Insight, and who recently purchased the optional Agile Service Manager component of NOI. Up until now, we've been helping this customer obtain communication data (network/port/process connection information) in their environment through BigFix. A valid question you may have is: Doesn't TADDM do that and more? And the answer is yes it does, but the customer has some fairly severe obstacles that prohibit a successful deployment of TADDM.

Why are we doing this?

Any Operations group needs as much contextual information as possible to allow them to do their job effectively. Some of the information that Operations teams need is:

- Which systems are communicating with (dependent upon) Server X?

- What processes and applications are running on Server X?

- What is the impact to other systems if we reboot Server X?

etc. There are many, many more questions that come up, and often the best way to answer those questions is with a topology view of the environment. TADDM gives you this topology information, but again, this client is not able to install TADDM, so wanted another way to get similar data.

How are we doing it?

The first challenge was getting the communication information via BigFix. With just a little searching, we realized that this was actually very easy. The 'netstat' command in both Windows and Linux will actually show you information about which ports are owned by/in use by which processes, and then it's just a matter of getting more details about each PID. Linux has the 'ps' command, and Windows PowerShell does too, though the output is different, of course. We also found that PowerShell has a few functions that will directly convert command output into XML. This is important because BigFix includes an XML inspector that lets you report on data that's in an XML file. On Linux, a little Perl scripting was used to accomplish the same goal.

So with the IP/port/process information in had, we then needed to display that data in the ASM Topology Viewer. To do that, we used the included File Observer. Specifically, we wrote a script to create the appropriate nodes and edges so that this information can be displayed by ASM.

What's it look like?

Here you can see that a java process on client.gulfsoft.com has opened TCP port 40474 to communicate with a DB2 process listening on port 50000 on db2srv.gulfsoft.com.

Conclusion

Topology data is absolutely crucial to a Operations team for numerous reasons. In this case, we were able to provide this visualization to our client in a very short amount of time (a week or so) while leveraging software they already owned. They now have better insight into their environment and are better prepared to address events in their environment.

A Windows command similar to awk

I'm always amazed at the capabilities available with built-in Windows command line tools. My latest find is the FOR /F command, documented here:

https://ss64.com/nt/for_cmd.html

My main use for the awk command in *NIX is to pull out some piece of a line of text. I know awk is MUCH more powerful and even has its own robust language, but I've always used it to pull pieces of text out of structured output. And that's what FOR /F does for you. The syntax is completely different, but the capability is there and it's quite powerful.

Now you can get started with Artificial Intelligence on a Raspberry Pi

Microsoft made its AI work on a $10 Raspberry Pi https://www.engadget.com/amp/2017/06/30/microsoft-made-its-ai-work-on-a-10-raspberry-pi/

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

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.