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?

It’s not the first time that our colleagues in the industry have 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, the attempts make sense—there are plenty who aspire to claim the throne as the *”King of Manager of Managers.”*

AIOps and Machine Learning

AI, Machine Learning, Data Lakes etc. are today words that are found in every product presentation and that undoubtedly appear in more places than the word “and” in every company’s Power Point.
But do they deliver what the Power Point presentation promises?

We have seen many product suppliers who promise gold and green forests and who with the “latest technology” solve all your problems automatically.
We also know that there is no magic box that automatically solves all problems and many failed projects testify that it is a challenge for most people.

But by collecting data and analyzing this, with the right conditions and good data quality, you can draw valuable conclusions, become proactive and find connections that would otherwise have been next to impossible. It has been possible for a long time.

Netcool ”Age before beauty”

But is there any truth in all the claims that Netcool is old and outdated?
If you have worked with Netcool years ago, you might associate the user GUI with the good old Motif GUI. This could be one of several reasons why you think the application is outdated, but luckily it is not the GUI that you use today.

Lots of exciting things have happened with Netcool in recent years and IBM continues to develop the various parts and components of the Netcool suite at an unabated pace.

Netcool, AIOps and Machine Learning

The right enrichment and the ability to set an alarm in the right context is a prerequisite for AI and Machine Learning to create value. When you have the right data, you can choose the right algorithm to analyze your data and make the right decision or draw a conclusion. This has been possible in the various software of the Netcool suite long before the words AI and Machine Learning began to be used.

Something to keep in mind is that many systems that use AI require you to choose which algorithm you want to use to analyze your data. i.e. you must already know what you want for analysis before the analysis is done.

Thanks to IBM’s extensive research in the field followed by the success of Watson, Netcool Predictive Insight was presented a few years ago, which is an example of a tool that uses AI for real.

With “Watson AIOps”, IBM repackages the Netcool Operations Insight (NOI) software bundle and adds added value to included components.

Netcool in Watson AIOps

The traditional parts in the form of Omnibus and Impact are included in the bundle as “Event Manager”, Agile Service Manager (ASM) is included as “Topology” and IBM Tivoli Network Manager (ITNM) is included as an option under “Extensions”.

In addition to this, they add Predictive Insight (PI) as part of Watson AIOps under “Metric Manager” and top this with new functionality in “AI Manager”, more about this below.

Is Netcool or Watson AIOps a magic box? No, it isn’t. Does it create value? Yes, we firmly say that!

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. Omnibus remains the market’s leading platform for Event Management. Quite simply, there’s no reason to redesign a solution that is already the fastest and most flexible on the market. That said, new features are continuously being introduced. Examples include the REST interface for Omnibus and the HTTP interface for the Probes.

Netcool Impact

If Omnibus is the heart, then Impact is the brain, as we at Compose IT usually say. Netcool Impact is the mechanical box that offers fantastic possibilities for different solutions to meet all needs.

Impact is extremely good to use as an integration engine against your CMDB, Asset and/or Inventory system and enrich the alarms with additional information and ensure that the right alarm is visible to the right recipient at the right time. Impact is also used as an integration engine against your case management system to automatically create incidents or requests.

Impact Operator Views is something that takes you one step further. In the basic version, an Operator View can seem rather boring, but there are enormous possibilities. It is easy to integrate frameworks such as Bootstrap, JQuery or Angular JS in your Operator Views and this is precisely what Compose IT has done in many of our solutions. The sleek and modern GUI as the front-end and Impact’s powerful engine as the back-end create intuitive interfaces and customizations that ensure that you get the status information you need in an easy-to-understand and clear manner.

An example of this is our own module “Dynamic Dashboard” which is part of the Compose Collection. With it, you can use various widgets to build your own dashboard according to “drag-and-drop” and visualize your application, site or customer in a modern way.

“There’s no reason to show information that you don’t expect someone to do something about” is one of our fundamental theses. You may have experienced alarm lists that more or less constantly flash red and that this even perceived as a normal situation. An operator’s alarm list should be empty if everything works as expected and there are no problems in the environment.

To ensure this, with the help of Impact and Operator Views, we have built a solution that we call “Dynamic Event Management” (DEM), which is also part of the Compose Collection. With the help of DEM, you classify your alarms and have full control over how each alarm type is handled in the system, e.g. ex. who it is shown to and when.

IBM Tivoli Network Manager (ITNM)

ITNM is the flagship of the Netcool suite in network monitoring, discovery and root cause analyzing. How does it compare to other solutions on the market?

The powerful discovery engine is still there and has been developed to support new technologies and protocols. The former Java applets that existed to visualize topologies have been replaced by more modern versions based on JavaScript.Likewise, the powerful topological Root Cause engine in ITNM remains and this is the few, if any, that can measure up against it.

The GUI part of ITNM is integrated in the Omnibus WebGUI, which means that you can easily get from the alarm list to the topology and vice versa.

Together with an automatic provisioning function in Impact, between your CMDB/Inventory to ITNM, your network monitoring becomes almost like a self-playing piano.

AI Manager

With the help of AI Manager, you analyze historical data and draw valuable conclusions both reactively and proactively, while integrating with modern messaging services such as Teams, Pagerduty and Slack.Some examples of included analysis functions:

Incident Resolution

• Intelligent alerting & alert grouping​
• Triaging
• Incident similarity​
• Topology & blast status

Incident Analysis

• Anomaly detection​
• Root cause analysis​
• Next best action recommendations​

Incident avoidance

• Change & version management​
• Automated runbooks for next best action recommendations​
• Code vulnerability analysis
• Explanation fort trust​

Summation

The brand new updated version of Netcool, now part of Watson AIOps, is undoubtedly still the leading Event Management platform on the market. Feel free to challenge us on this claim!

Learn more about IBM Watson AIOps.