Chronicles of a Wandering Mind

Yesterday was a perfect day. When one of these days come around, it’s important to take notice.
Weather was great in Geneva. A sunny spring day, with blue skies, yet not hot. We’ve started the day with long due yard work, and by noon having made good progress we’ve decided to have a picnic by the lake. The village we live in, Mies, has a public park by the lake only minutes from our house. It’s a perfect spot for a picnic, and we had it practically for ourselves.

I watched my mom, aka “Babanne” (means Grandmother in Turkish), and my 3 year old daughter, Maya, throw rocks into the lake. The joy radiating from their faces alone was enough to make my day.
As I sat there, watching still snow covered Alps across Lake Geneva and chatting with my wife about life, I felt as happy as a man can be. We’ve realized that I was with three most important females of my life in a somewhat unique time frame in our lives. We are all healthy which is so crucial yet we often don’t realize its importance till we’re not.
My mom is aging but she is still very active. Full of energy, more so than I am. Looking at her, I sometimes wonder how is it possible for me to be so lazy Our relationship is as strong as ever.
My daughter is 3, she is as sweet and as cute as a child can be. She’s growing fast, incredibly fast, makes me look for pause button, but none is available. My wife and I contemplate whether we’ll miss these days as she hit teen years and start hating us as many of our friends warn us that it will come to be
And my wife sitting next to me, lovely as ever. As we push towards 40 (6 months away for me), it doesn’t escape from us that we’re no longer young, especially when we meet people who weren’t even born when we were in college. Yet we also know that we’re not “old” either. We’re healthy and nothing is holding us back.

So a perfect day it was. I’ve tried to hang on to it as much as I could, and pushed thoughts of what future may have in store for us as far as possible. Next sixth months will have a lot of turmoil for us, no sense in worrying about it all that in such a bright day ..

Interesting links for April 8th through April 14th:

• Exporting POJO via JMX and Groovy – good article on how to use groovy and jmxbuilder to expose objects for monitoring via JMX
• Practically Groovy: Reaching for each – great article on .each method provided in groovy and more!
• 4 Easy Ways to do Java Garbage Collection Tuning – The number of flags that someone can change on the Sun Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is astounding. Most of them are garbage collection (GC)-related and have many dependencies, not only on the system you are using but also to each other. Tuning GC flags seems like it should be difficult and error-prone, but following a few easy steps can help improve application performance in only a few minutes

Interesting links for April 3rd through April 7th:

• Xpenser – Mobile Expense Tracking and Management –
• Search At the Front and Center of IT Operations Management | iFountain.com – Google revolution is spreading, search is becoming the primary mechanism to interact with information replacing hierarchies.
  There is ever increasing amount of IT management data and that is locked inside various IT management tools. Users have to know where the data is and traverse through however the data is organized in the particular tool. Something better is needed and search paradigm seems to fit,.

  Search is at the heart of RapidInsight, our IT Operations Management solution. RapidInsight has a built-in modeling engine to model the IT environment (classes, properties, relations, operations, etc.) and a search engine (Compass/Lucene) as the data store. The combination of object based modeling and search engine provides a powerful platform for IT operations management solutions.

• The Forrester Blog For IT Infrastructure & Operations Professionals – *** ITIL v3 CMS has the right approach. No monolithic CMDB but a CMS (configuration management system) that incorporates many management data repositories (MDRs). This can be done right now without CMDBf support from vendors that may or may not arrive a year down the line. This is the exact philosophy driving RapidInsight project

Interesting links for March 25th through April 2nd:

• Secrets to Successful Service Level Management – Manually creating after-the-fact monthly reports is not performing Service Level Management (SLM). SLM must show both current and past status as well as predict future problems, and this requires automation and daily or even real-time analysis of data.
  Service Level Management must align with user needs. SLAs must include targets for capacity, availability, security, continuity, etc. Target attainment data will come from many sources, and you need to track the target at its source, as well as the entire SLA (end-to-end). SLM solutions must show both current and past status as well as predict future problems, and this requires automation and daily or even real-time analysis of data.
• Content Log: Building a stronger open source product – * the core system and interfaces will remain 100% open source.
  * We will provide service and customer support that provides insurance that systems will run as expected and correct problems according our promised Service Level Agreement
  * Enterprise customers will receive fixes as a priority, but that we will make these fixes available in the next labs release. Bugs fixed by the community are delivered to the community as a priority.
  * We will provide extensions and integrations to proprietary systems to which customers are charged. It is fair for us to charge and include this in an enterprise release as well.
  * Extensions and integrations to ubiquitous proprietary systems, such as Windows and Office, will be completely open source.
  * Extensions that are useful to monitor or run a system in a scaled or production environment, such as system monitoring, administration and high availability, are fair to put into an enterprise release.
• Use RESTClient to post and read XML RESTful webservice – Messages from mrhaki – The HTTPBuilder library also contains the RESTClient class. This class has a simple API to access RESTful webservices. For example if we want to POST an XML message to a RESTful webservice we can use the post() method. Because we set the request content type to XML we have a StreamingMarkupBuilder object we can use to build our XML.

  The response object is automatically read by the XmlSlurper class, so we have access to the resulting GPathResult object.

Interesting links for March 21st through March 24th:

• Unified Computing System: Plays Well With Others – we have a document—a 50 page instruction manual—on how to use the API. It covers how to authenticate against to the API, how to search for certain types of objects in the schema to get the server objects or the network objects and how to filter them—say only servers that have an associated service profile. We also have a bunch of XML examples in that document that were written by one of the technical marketing engineers. The other thing we talk to people about is that our GUI uses our own XML API and it’s a JAVA based GUI—it runs in a JVM—there is a logfile that contains all the XML that goes back and forth between the GUI and the heart of UCSM, the DME—the brain that sits inside the UCS fabric interconnect. That’s a great way to learn how to use the API—you can do things in the GUI then go back and look in the logfile to see what the XML commands are and which objects are being modified. It’s a good way to learn about the schema in an applied sense.
• The 4 Steps of BSM Success – How to Succeed at BSM

  There are four fundamental components of successful BSM initiatives:

  1.

  Defining services
  2.

  Assessing the business value of those services
  3.

  Measuring service quality and performance
  4.

  Selecting and justifying services or service improvement programs

• BSM Defined: What It Is and Should Never Be – BSM is the term used to describe the strategic direction required for ITSM to be successful. BSM, simply stated, aims to manage IT investments in ways that matter most to the success of the enterprise and its marketplace. BSM also means making decisions in IT based on what is best for the enterprise. It spans all technologies and all organizational boundaries. BSM, focusing on process integration and automation, leads ITSM and design. The primary emphasis of the IT organization is on addressing service issues faced by the business. The value of IT investments at this point becomes clear to the marketplace and is seen by the enterprise as competitive advantage.

Interesting links for March 14th through March 19th:

• ifountain Adobe ConnectNow – Online meeting service form Adobe.
• Tropo.com – Tropo is cloud-based telephony. Using our simple API you can quickly create and deploy powerful telephony applications in Groovy, JavaScript, PHP, Python, and Ruby. Tropo is powered by Voxeo – the largest and most reliable hosted telephony platform in the world.
• Andre’s Blog » Blog Archive » What is PhoneGap? The Movie – We’ve been fielding the question “What is PhoneGap?” more and more these past couple months. So we put together this short video to help explain it:)

Interesting links for March 2nd through March 11th:

• SubEthaSMTP Mail Server – SubEthaSMTP is a easy to understand Java library which provides a receptive SMTP server component. By plugging this component into your Java application, you can easily receive SMTP mail using a simple abstract Java interface.
• gparallelizer – Google Code – GParallelizer offers Groovy developers intuitive ways to handle tasks concurrently.

  The framework provides straightforward Groovy-based Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) to declare, which parts of the code should be performed in parallel. Objects are enhanced with asynchronous methods like eachAsync(), collectAsync() and others, to perform collection-based operations in parallel. Also, closures can be turned into their asynchronous variants, which when invoked schedule the original closure for processing in an executor service. The library also provides several helper methods for running a set of closures concurrently.

• So How Open is your Open Source Company Anyway? – * The Open Source product you provide to users must be great: the Open Core should stand on its own as something truly useful without any additional commercial add-ons. The software must perform well in a production environment.
  * The Open Source product you provide should go through an ungodly amount of testing and QA. Testing and QA on the Open Core are the cornerstone of quality and should not be reserved for commercial versions of your product.
  * The Open Source product you provide should be architected such that all commercial features are plug-ins to the Open Core.
  * The Open Source product you sell should have completely open pricing. If someone cannot clearly see what your pricing is and what the difference is between your open and commercial versions, you likely have a predatory and opportunistic pricing model.

Interesting links for February 22nd through February 27th:

• InfoQ: What's New in Groovy 1.6 – As we shall see in this article, the main highlights of this Groovy 1.6 release are:

  * Greater compile-time and runtime performance improvements
  * Multiple assignments
  * Optional return in if/else and try/catch blocks
  * Java 5 annotation definition
  * AST transformations and all the provided transformation annotations like @Singleton, @Lazy, @Immutable, @Delegate and friends
  * The Grape module and dependency system and its @Grab transformation
  * Various Swing builder improvements, thanks to the Swing / Griffon team, as well as several Swing console improvements
  * The integration of JMX builder
  * Various metaprogramming improvements, like the EMC DSL, per-instance metaclasses even for POJOs, and runtime mixins
  * JSR-223 scripting engine built-in
  * Out-of-the-box OSGi readiness

• AribaWeb – More App, Way Less Code! – AribaWeb is the Open Source component-based web application development framework for creating rich, AJAX-enabled applications with the
  absolute minimum of code (and no hand-coded Javascript).
• RapidInsight Primer for Netcool Users – RapidInsight – Confluence – RapidInsight is a complete integration, automation and presentation solution for IT operations management. The capabilities provided by RapidInsight span through number of different products in Netcool suite such as Netcool® ObjectServer, Gateways, Probes, Impact, Webtop, Reporter, Portal, and TBSM.
  This document is an attempt to describe the capabilities provided by RapidInsight in terms that are familiar the users of Netcool suite of applications.

  RapidInsight offers a risk free, flexible upgrade path for Netcool users. RapidInsight can be used to:

  * complement your existing solution by addressing the most common pain points
  * replace parts of the solution to reduce complexity and administrative overhead
  * replace the entire solution

Are Service Management and Cloud Computing mating? Indeed they are, and it should not be surprising. In the previous post, I had argued that, putting the latest industrial jargon aside, service management is the essential enabling paradigm in today’s IT organizations.

Each entity in the IT organization to define the services they deliver, measure availability, performance and quality of these services, and expose this information in both human and machine consumable forms.

How does cloud computing fit in to this? Cloud computing providers are also service providers, whether these services are infrastructure or applications or anything in between. Higher level business services consist of combination of services provided by external and internal service providers.

Cloud computing providers are typically external. The services they provide are more easily recognizable, and since they are external providers, the need to monitor and report on services they provide is more apparent and acceptable. As a result, adoption of cloud computing will enforce the need for service management and service management will smoothen the path to cloud computing in the enterprise.

In the last post I’d argued that the instead of wholesale approach, letting each entity to use whatever tools they want but expose the service management information through standard, agreed on interfaces is more likely to succeed in BSM projects. Cloud computing enforces this notion of Service Management and APIs.

A typical, relatively sophisticated business service has number of components managed by different IT groups. Even when all the components (infrastructure, apps, etc.) of the service are provided by entities internal to the organization, it’s proven to be quite difficult to implement a solution that can monitor all the components and assess the impact of problems on the business service.

What happens when some or most the components rely on services provided by external providers? It becomes even more unrealistic to presume that you can monitor them all. Instead, it is more feasible to require service monitoring information to be exposed via APIs so that they can be consumed by the BSM application.

Obviously this is not a new notion, it’s software development 101, but it applies to operations as well, and to move into service management paradigm where services can be black boxes, having access to information via established APIs become essential.

Monitoring the cloud must focus on enabling management of the services provided by the cloud as part of higher level services. Traditional monitoring methods will not work. Tell the customers how their services are performing, not just with pretty charts but also through APIs so that services from the cloud can be managed like services provided internally.

Interesting links for February 18th through February 22nd:

• FlowingData | Data Visualization and Statistics –
• Blackbaud Labs – Labs Article – So one day it dawned on me that Webkit (Safari's rendering engine) is VERY similar on Safari for Windows and the iPhone. Could I somehow embed just the rendering component into a native Windows application and give it enough polish to do a decent job of simulating the iPhone Web browsing experience? After a weekend of hacking the answer is YES. iBBDemo correctly renders Webkit targeted html including the custom -webkit CSS extenstions, effectively giving us a compelling demo/test platform for iPhone Web content from the comfort of a Windows desktop (Note, I have only tested on Vista).
• BSM customer evolution paths: Samples and observations – Making Business Service Management a Reality – I can group all the different evolution paths into five key types:
  1. ITSM incident, problem change & configuration: this evolution is driven out of the need for process-driven IT service management with the service desk as a key component
  2. Consolidated infrastructure event, performance and availability: this is driven by a recognition that having a whole ton of event management and performance monitoring systems is not an efficient way to run IT, so consolidate them into one console.
  3. Business service visibility & accountability: this is more of a top-down approach – start with monitoring the customer's quality of experience and then figure out what needs to happen underneath.
  4. Service discovery & model: this is where evolution towards integration is driven from the need for a central model (the CMDB).
  5. Business transaction management: today, this is the rarest starting point. It's driven by a need to monitor and diagnose complex composite transactions.