Blade Watch

I was asking Chris in sunny Canary Wharf how he’s getting on, and asking him that emotional question, do you use your hardware monitoring tools, your Insight Manager, his response is below, and I’ve summarized what his and others issues are, how we move forward, adding value and creating opportunitites.

“Last time I logged in there were 174 critical failures out of our 1100 servers, so I just left it. The problem is, we’ve got a MySQL database with server name, application and contact with a few other bits, that’s what the guys use to know what’s what. We have the time to update our MySQL inventory database as we use it daily, we haven’t necessarily got the time to continually update Insight Manager, so one guy erases everything, uses a batch script to get host name and ip address and then re-imports it all. We then log calls on the errors and it gets left for a while.  With server moves, decommissions and rebuilds, updating our database, the official inventory and the hardware monitoring tool, plus our own bank wide monitoring tools becomes too intensive for not enough value – no end user has ever, ever asked me is my server green in Insight Manger?”

There remains a barrier to entry in using the main vendors hardware monitoring tools from an operations standpoint. Don’t get me wrong, they perform the core objective that is communicating with the specified servers to get their hardware status, to give me an overview of the server estate, so I can see at any point that of the 1200 servers we have, Systems Insight Manager/Dell OpenManage or IBM’s Director can’t speak to 7, 13 have hard drives or non critical errors, 9 have critical errors, and 183 have drivers or firmware that are out of date.

There’s a barrier to succcess. You see, there’s no link between hardware and application.

In many respects from an operational viewpoint the hardware tool becomes irrelevant. There might be steps on the morning checks saying “Check IBM Director, or Check Systems Insight Manager”, but the other morning checks get in the way (check data replication, the clusters or DC replication), calls happen (the intranet is down), systems or application issues arise, and before you know it, it’s already 1am and the hardware monitoring tool is being checked once a week by whoever has or makes the time to check it. To log a call, a change request or request to adjust the drivers on the box, replace the failed component or power cycle it as needed.

As the team start to see the monitoring tool as another system to check, an overhead to take care of, it’s not typically then got the technical backing to integrate the hardware monitoring to our own CA, HP or other monitoring tools, thus the information gets out further of date. As Chris stated above, “we’ve got 274 criticals, he doesn’t want a flood of alerts by turning it on” .

Since these tools have been designed in a specific way, we can’t typically take my SQL database and create a data link, or I can’t simply say, there’s 900 servers in a text file, import them and do a dns lookup. Each one needs typically imported in a specific way in a specific format unless you do one server at a time.

What is it that we need?

• Easy import function and reporting – many have the report function already
• Ability – The ability to add fields – the typical fields that I actually need to support a server, I’ll supply them happily, but consider things like application, business line?
• Knowledge – The knowledge of how we can take the front screen results, the 7 servers we can’t speak to and dynamically present it in another web based application for target audiences/user groups.
• Sharing, how I can make the hardware inventory tool the data platform and have everything either linked into it, or taking feeds from it?
• I already pay for an inventory tool, but having one that I already have installed, that I have the firewall rules configured for would be advantageous.

The ability to link databases to share information for reports, for analysis – do you know how many man hours, man days are spent debating the number of Windows servers per business line, or how many Windows 2003 servers there are with our own inventory tools, the data cleansing, the verification, because each support team has their own inventory as does the application team, then there’s the hardware monitoring tool and the official inventory. All those hours spent “…but that’s not an FX server!” When if you think about it, on a bare minimum we have the core technical information in IBM Director, Dell OpenManage or Systems Insight Manager , we just need the extra support inventory data.

By locking the hardware monitoring tool, by making it propriertory, you limit the possibilities of it’s use and therefore what can be achieved using it. I’ll buy it, if you can allow me to have the secret document, or table layout so I can have my SQL database with hostnames, be the hostnames for Insight Manager, that it can then display my application information etc.

Of course the vendors need to maintain their free tool, they need to support it, but we could achieve so much more from it, add so much more value for the typical SMB or even enterprise by adding a little extra functionality. A list of applications table or an option to say Server9 is a IIS server owned by Front Office and Mike is the contact, with the option to adjust the views seen, an option to white label? http://serverinventory.london.bank:50000 username frontoffice sees only the front office status, even a web page just front office servers?

Again it’s not world ending, it’s not changing what the application is used for, but it’s giving it enough functionality to remove it from an IT no budget, no interest to a business specific tool where functionality matters, where ownership and reporting is key.

Why?

Inventory is king. Who owns what, which systems are owned by which business line, which application or even geographical location. The inventory is used for billing, for support and administration. Therefore whoever is in the inventory business is the king of that IT deployment.

It will be interesting to see if I get any comments about this, I’d love to hear what the vendors viewpoint is.

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