Compose IT is a niche company specializing in Service Assurance and IT Operations, and over a cumulative total of more than 600,000 hours, we have built extensive expertise in IBM Tivoli Netcool. Our clients span both the private and public sectors across the Nordic region.

Just like Compose IT, Netcool has been on the market for many years, and the rightful question is undeniably: Does the platform still hold up?

Several times, competitors have literally published articles attempting to dethrone the “King of the Hill,” with titles like “It’s Time for a Netcool Replacement: Why Netcool Isn’t Cool Anymore” or “Why IBM Tivoli Netcool Has Been Driven to Irrelevance.” And, of course, such attempts are understandable—there are many who aspire to claim the throne as the King of Manager of Managers.

AIOps and Machine Learning

AI, Machine Learning, Data Lakes, etc., are buzzwords that now appear in every product presentation and undoubtedly show up more often than the word “and” in any company’s PowerPoint deck. But do all of them deliver on what the PowerPoint promises?

We’ve seen many product vendors promising the moon and stars, claiming that the “latest” technology will solve all your problems automatically. We know there’s no magic box or pill that can automatically resolve every issue, but the numerous failed projects make it clear that this is, nonetheless, an effective sales strategy.

Absolutely, by collecting and analyzing data, one can, with the right conditions and good data quality, draw valuable insights, become proactive, and uncover patterns that would otherwise be nearly impossible to identify. And this has been possible for quite some time…

Netcool, AIOps and Machine Learning

The right enrichment and the ability to place an alarm in the correct context are prerequisites for AI and Machine Learning to do valuable work. When you have the right data, you can choose the appropriate algorithm to analyze it and make informed decisions or draw conclusions. This has been possible in the Netcool suite of software long before the terms AI and Machine Learning became popular.

One important point to note is that many systems heavily marketing their AI capabilities require you to choose the algorithm you want to use to analyze your data. In other words, you need to know in advance what kind of analysis you are looking for before the analysis is even conducted.

Thanks to IBM’s research in this field and its successes with Watson, this challenge has been addressed in solutions like Netcool Metric Manager.

There are also many new developments in the field of Event Management. Examples include Seasonal Event Analytics, Related Events Grouping, and Related Events Analytics. A deep dive into these areas will have to wait for another time.

So, is Netcool a magic box? No, it’s not… But is it valuable? Absolutely!

Netcool “Age before beauty”

But is there any truth to the claims that Netcool is outdated and obsolete?

If you worked with Netcool several years ago, you might associate its user interface with the old, reliable Motif GUI. Naturally, this could be one of the reasons why some consider the application outdated. Fortunately, that’s not the interface in use today.

A lot has changed over the years, and IBM continues to develop the various parts and components of the Netcool suite.

Netcool Omnibus

“It’s not easy to be humble when you’re flawless like me,” sang Mats Rådberg in 1984. It’s a bit like that with Netcool Omnibus. There simply aren’t any real competitors, and Omnibus remains the best platform on the market for Event Management.

There’s no reason to redesign a solution that is already the fastest and most flexible on the market. That said, new features are, of course, being introduced. Examples include the REST interface for Omnibus and the HTTP interface for the Probes.

Netcool Impact

At Compose IT, we often say, “If Omnibus is the heart, then Impact is the brain.” Netcool Impact is the toolbox that lets you build whatever you need.

Impact excels as an integration engine with your CMDB, Asset, and/or Inventory systems, enriching alerts with additional information and ensuring that the right alert reaches the right recipient at the right time. Additionally, Impact serves as an integration engine with your Incident Management system to automatically create incidents or requests. Impact Operator Views takes things a step further.

Out of the box, an Operator View might seem rather plain, but the possibilities are endless. It’s easy to integrate frameworks like Bootstrap, JQuery, or Angular JS into your Operator Views—and this is exactly what Compose IT has done in many of its solutions. Sleek and modern GUIs as the front end, combined with Impact’s powerful engine as the back end, result in intuitive interfaces and customizations that ensure you get the status information you need in a clear and user-friendly way.

One example of this is our solution, Dynamic Dashboard. With this tool, you can use various widgets to create your own dashboard via drag-and-drop functionality, visualizing your application, site, or customer in a modern and efficient way.

“There’s no point in displaying information that no one is expected to act on,” is another saying we live by—and we stand by it. There’s nothing worse than alarm lists that are constantly flashing red and being perceived as the normal state of affairs. An operator’s alarm list should be empty if everything is working as expected and there are no issues in the environment.

To ensure this, we’ve developed a solution called Dynamic Event Management (DEM) using Impact and Operator Views. With DEM, you can classify your alarms and maintain full control over how each type of alarm is handled in the system—who it’s displayed to, when it’s displayed, and so on.

IBM Tivoli Network Manager (ITNM)

ITNM is the flagship of the Netcool suite for network monitoring, discovery, and root cause analysis. How does it stack up against the competition today?

The powerful discovery engine is still a core feature and has been enhanced to support new technologies and protocols. The former Java applets used for topology visualization have been replaced with more modern, JavaScript-based versions.

Similarly, the robust topological Root Cause Analysis engine in ITNM remains a standout feature—there are few, if any, competitors that can match its capabilities.

The GUI component of ITNM is integrated into Omnibus WebGUI, allowing seamless navigation between the alarm list and the topology view, and vice versa.

Together with an automated provisioning feature in Impact, linking your CMDB/Inventory to ITNM, your network monitoring can function almost like a self-playing piano.

Summary

We can conclude that Netcool is very much alive and operational, retaining its title as the “King of Manager of Managers”—an Event Management platform that few can rival.

In addition to the modules mentioned above, the Netcool suite has been expanded with entirely new modules such as Agile Service Manager, Runbook Automation, and Log Analytics. We’ll explore these in more detail at a later time.

Would you like to know more? Contact us, and we’ll be happy to show you what we’ve achieved with the various parts of the Netcool suite, along with what we call the Compose Collection.

Compose IT has 25 Netcool consultants with extensive experience from numerous customer projects, enabling us to assist you no matter the challenge.