Services and applications are increasingly deployed in environments that benefit from distributed and often virtualized infrastructure.
In today’s dynamic environments, dynamic and agile software is required. Agile Service Manager (ASM) is included as part of Netcool Operations Insight (NOI) and is tasked with meeting this particular need.
With the help of Agile Service Manager, you can visualize your dynamic environments and at the same time make use of all the strength found in the various parts of the Netcool suite. ASM can visualize all types of topological information as long as the underlying data with associated relationships is structured.
Agile Service Manager stores the topological model over time. This means that you can go back in time and see what the topological model looked like when the error occurred.
Together with IBM Tivoli Netcool Omnibus’s traditional Event list, a picture of the dynamic topology is thus only a click away.
The picture below shows an example of an integration we have done with one of our customers. In this case, a topological visualization of a VMware environment.
The reason this integration was requested was that the customer wanted to visualize their entire virtualized VMware environment. Through this solution, the customer got a graphical overview of all or parts of the environment, while the impact of events or alarms becomes clear to an operator or user. The result was an easily accessible and understandable picture of the environment and its constituent relationships. Before the solution was in place, the customer spent significantly more time and resources identifying where in the environment the alarm originated.
To facilitate the integration work, there are ready-made so-called “Observers”. Observers are ready-made integration packages for the market’s best-known systems where topological visualization may be of interest.
Some examples of existing Observers are:
- AWS
- Azure
- Cisco ACI
- Docker
- Kubernetes
- ServiceNow
- VMware
- Zabbix
