BMC Patrol Agent Configuration Automation using the (TrueSight) BPPM Central Monitoring Administration Console (CMA)

Have you ever been frustrated to discover that your monitoring failed because one of your Patrol agents isn’t configured correctly? After you investigated you were told that someone sent you an email or called and left a voice mail, telling you it some set of systems was ready for monitoring, and you didn’t get them. Everyone knows how adequate email and phone messages are right?

Communication breakdowns involving your Patrol Agent infrastructure are nothing new. They’ve been around for many many years. I know them very well. Everyone is very busy, and that only compounds the problem. There are so many things that can go wrong with keeping all your agents configurations in sync and up to date. Wouldn’t it be nice if this could all be automated somehow?

There is a new ability you need to be aware. The BPPM 9.5 Central Monitoring Administration (CMA) Console. The CMA was introduced with BPPM 9.0, but it wasn’t flexible enough to be useful in very many situations. One of the key features in this new release was the Policy Management interface. Although useful, its ability to truly manage your Patrol Agent infrastructure outside of Patrol Configuration Manager (PCM) was very limited. Well, that all changes with CMA 9.5.

With the release of the 9.5 BPPM CMA Console, and the greatly expanded Policy capabilities, you’ve never been so close to real-time Patrol Agent configuration automation. Say hello to your new little friend, the BPPM CMA Configuration Policy.

http://advantisms.wistia.com/medias/nvn9c6862k?emb...

BPPM Agent Configuration Policies – A Brief History of the BPPM 9.0 CMA Introduction

BPPM 9.0 introduced configuration policies for the first time with the CMA. A CMA Policy is suppose to replace the need for manually deploying configuration settings using Patrol Configuration Manager (PCM). Unfortunately, with the 9.0 policies you had little choice with respect to the policy “selector criteria”. The selector criterion is the mechanism that engages the CMA Policy.

You were able to specify the use of one item, the BPPM Tag, as the policy selector, which meant that you had to create a separate Policy and BPPM Tag for every possible scenario.

If you worked with the CMA in version 9.0, you know first hand how limited that was. Chances are you looked at it, scratching your head, and moved on.

The 9.0 CMA release allowed you to deploy a simple Policy with three configuration options: Monitor, Threshold and Server Policy Configurations. CMA 9.0 made these three administrative options available for the first time but the overall policy capabilities were limited and ultimately became more work to manage than continuing to use PCM. They’ve been greatly expanded with version 9.5.

The BPPM CMA 9.5 Brings Patrol Agent Configuration Automation 

With the release of the 9.5 BPPM CMA Console, the Policy capability features available grew from three in version 9.0, to a total of nine.

The additional features include seven total monitoring Configuration Policy options, one blackout option and one staging Policy option. Nine in all, compared to only three before. And the Policy “Selector Criteria” specifications, the item(s) which engages the Policy, has gone from one, the BPPM Tag, to eight. The new added diverse selector abilities allow for creating simple, or very complex activation condition now. With all of those new features, CMA 9.5 allows for dynamic automation of your Patrol Agent configurations like never before.

Here are the 7 New BPPM 9.5 CMA Policies and a description of they can be used.

Monitoring Configuration – You can use this feature for filtering or turning the monitoring configurations off or on, based on your selectors. In the associated webinar, I construct one of these policies as an example, showing how they can be used to disable a specific monitor, for a specific OS, running in a specific environment.

Filter Configuration – This is a helpful addition to CMA 9.5. Filter Configuration allows you to specify what monitoring data is not meant to go into the BPPM database. With this new feature, you can specify the attributes and parameters that you want to stream into the BPPM console and see, without storage in the database.

Agent Threshold– This policy allows for setting traditional monitoring thresholds at the Patrol Agent Level. It allows you to specify the alert threshold settings you use to set and deploy within PCM or from the Patrol Console, down the agents. These can now be set, and take effect as soon as the agent checks into the BPPM infrastructure.

Server Thresholds – These thresholds are set at the BPPM server level. You can set Absolute, Signature and Intelligent thresholds within a policy based on the same selectors as the lower agent level.

Agent Configuration – This new policy has several capabilities. It allows for setting up Agent specific settings like the Default Monitoring account. You can also use this feature to specify Polling Intervals for the Patrol Knowledge Module (KM) Collectors. The KM Collector gathers the information at polling intervals, and depending on how you construct the selectors, you can now change these intervals within the CMA console now, outside of PCM.

Server Configuration– This feature is ideal for the policy options in Groups within the BPPM Operations Console. For example, if you have servers associated with an application named, “NewApp,” you can use this policy to group all the servers in one location within the Operations Console. By deploying a tag, “NewApp” to all the involved systems, the Patrol Agents check into BPPM, see the policy and automatically add the servers to the group you specify. If the group doesn’t exist, it will create it and place all the NewApp systems within that group for viewing, automatically.

Configuration Variables – This last option allows for the manual creation of any agent configuration variable you want or need that can be used by the agent. But the key feature of this one is in the ability to import your existing PCM configurations.

This new CMA brings real automation into the daily maintenance associated with your Patrol Agent infrastructure. Quit playing phone and email tag with your system and application administrators and see how to put this to work right now.

To see this new CMA Policy in action, be sure to check out this hands-on video introduction.

http://advantisms.wistia.com/medias/nvn9c6862k?emb...

To read about and see the CMA put a Patrol Agent Blackout into action, check this out.

Putting the BMC Blackout Policy to Work

To read about and see the CMA handle the Patrol Agent event streams and give you a brand new, centrally focused Event Management mechanism, check this out.

Simplified Patrol Agent Event Management

New Update!!

How to automate New Patrol Agent Package Deployments with CMA Policies.  I'll show you step by step how to use a CMA Policy to automatically baseline your new Patrol Agents the moment they come up on the network, using your existing PCM configurations.

Automating The Configuration Deployment of Your New Patrol Agent Builds

To read more about (TrueSight) BPPM 9.5, be sure to check out the blog on the topic located here.

http://blog.advantisms.com

BPPM Implementation Considerations

Part 1: Meet your business requirements

Three years after BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management (BPPM) is released, now most BPPM customers reached a conclusion that BPPM implementation is more than just software installation. But what make a BPPM implementation a successful one? What do you need to consider before diving into installation details?

"BPPM Implementation Consideration" blog series will try to address several important considerations at requirement level and architecture level. Implementing BPPM is a lot like building a house. Many considerations at requirement level and architecture level are like the foundation of the house. They need to be determined at the very beginning.

The most important consideration in BPPM implementation is your business requirements. The management of your organization, your entire implementation team, and other stakeholders should have a clear understanding on a list of business requirements that your BPPM implementation is expected to meet. Then you will need to translate this list of business requirements into a list of technical requirements with a category assignment such as mandatory, strategic, cost-saver, and nice-to-have.

Only now you can map each technical requirement into a list of detailed BPPM features and prioritize the implementation of each feature. This will become your project scope. Based on your project scope, you can plan your project timeline and budget. If you outsource your BPPM implementation to a consulting company, it is critical that you do your homework on your business requirements and technical requirements first. Then work closely with the architect (not just the project manager) of the consulting company to determine the project scope.

However many new BPPM customers I have talked to seem to do it backwards. They came up with a budget first without knowing exactly what BPPM features to implement and how long the implementation will take. Then they picked up a list of BPPM features to implement from product datasheet without knowing how each feature relates to their business bottom line.

As an example, here is the process taken at one of my past clients. One of the top business requirements was to cut down the cost on Remedy Gateway licenses from multiple monitoring software vendors. This was translated into a technical requirement like this: Alerts from multiple monitoring software must be integrated into one alert management tool to communicate with Remedy for ticket creation. This requirement was categorized as cost-saver. This technical requirement was mapped into these BPPM features: Event to BPPM cell integration through API and SNMP traps, msend API installation, SNMP trap adapter high-availability implementation, custom BPPM cell MRL rules to process events from multiple vendors, IBRSD high-availability implementation, and event to ticket categorization in BPPM cell. The return was a 6-figure annual license saving year after year with an investment of 5-figure consulting fee. This ROI went straight to help business bottom line.

Part 2: Keep the total cost of ownership in mind

When you build a house for yourself, you don't just consider the cost of building, you also consider the cost of maintaining the house and utility bills when you live there. Similarly when you implement BPPM, in addition to implementation cost, you also need to keep the total cost of ownership in mind.

After talking to several BPPM customers, I noticed that they all have at least twice the size of the operations team comparing to the team at my clients just to keep BPPM operations going. What is worse is that their operations team also need to have the implementation skill set to constantly patch up the implementation.

Before you even start implementation, consider the following aspects:

1) Scalability: When your environment grows with more servers, more applications, or more integration, will your architecture still work? How easy would it be to split horizontally (based on processing steps) and vertically (based on incoming traffic)?

2) Upgrade: What can you do right now to make future upgrade easier? You may want to consider having a name convention, saving configuration in a separate repository, and documenting everything consistently.

3) High Availability: High availability not only helps with business continuity, it also helps your team from constantly fighting fire. You have several options in high availability: Application level failover, OS based failover, active/active load balance, or duplication. Which option would best fit your needs for each BPPM component and how much would it cost? For example, a native application level failover might be your best choice for BPPM cells if your business cannot afford to miss a server down alert. But a simple duplication of PATROL 7 console is probably sufficient for you comparing to OS based failover which would cost nearly twice as much.

4) Implementation Repeatability: Do you keep an accurate implementation document so that installation and configuration of each BPPM component is repeatable? You need to implement everything on a test system first and carefully document everything as you go. Production deployment should be a straightforward 'follow the doc' process. It also gives you a perfect opportunity to update the implementation document for anything you have missed.

A common mistake I have seen is to start the implementation directly on a production system. After several months of figuring things out, it finally went live with many junk files sitting under the implementation directory. Then you realized that you actually needed a test system because you won't be able to make and test changes otherwise. Now you don't know how to configure your test system to make it identical to your production system since you have lost track on what made the production system work and what did not.

5) Operations Standardization: Do you have a standard operations procedure document? For example, if a new server is added into your PeopleSoft Payroll application, do you have a document containing the steps for the operations team to add that server to PATROL, BPPM integration service, BPPM cell, BPPM server, BPPM GUI, and automated Remedy ticketing?

Part 3: Achieve the highest ROI through integration

In addition to monitoring solutions from BMC, most enterprises nowadays also use monitoring software from other vendors, open source, and even home-grown scripts scheduled by cron job. Having a group of NOC operators watching the GUIs of all monitoring software in a NASA-like environment is simply not efficient. What is worse is when you have to pay the license fee for each monitoring software to connect with the back-end ticketing system.

BPPM/BEM cell provides extremely flexible and robust API and adapters to integrate with just about any monitoring software out there. Whether you are running monitoring tools from other commercial vendors such as IBM and Microsoft, or you use open source tools like Nagios, it is fairly straight forward to integrate alerts from these tools into BPPM/BEM cell using either its OS API or SNMP adapter. If you use home-grown scripts, all you need to do is to add an API call at the end.

If your back-end ticketing system is Remedy, the out-of-box 2-way integration (IBRSD) between BPPM/BEM cell and Remedy is more efficient than Remedy gateways for other monitoring tools. It is fairly straight forward to configure two instances of IBRSD as active/active failover, so your chance of waking up at 3am to fight fire is very slim. Since the license of IBRSD is included in the price of BPPM/BEM, you instantly cut down the cost when you stop paying for the Remedy gateway license for other monitoring tools.

Other added benefits include reduced maintenance effort for other monitoring software, less customization in Remedy, consistent ticket information for all monitoring tools, and possible event correlation between events from different monitoring tools. You will also make your NOC team's job easier.

I understand that it is not always easy to convince people who work on other monitoring software to integrate into BPPM/BEM due to organizational silo and technical complexity. It is important to pick up the right candidate for the first BPPM/BEM integration. Once the ROI is obvious, people will become more supportive for BPPM/BEM integration. In addition, it is also important to set up a consistent framework for all integration since BMC does not provide a standard for integration. Once you have set up a consistent framework for one-way and two-way integration, your next integration will become much easier.

At one of my past clients, it took our BPPM/BEM team three months to work with the other team to finish our first integration because the integration project had the lowest priority with the other team. Once everyone saw how well the integration worked and how much license fee it saved, our second integration took only 4 weeks to finish. Subsequently our third integration took only three days to finish.

Part 4: Monitor the monitors

The purpose of BPPM is to monitor your IT infrastructure. It is important that the monitors themselves are up and running all the time.

A good BPPM implementation not just monitors your IT infrastructure, it also monitors each and every BPPM component including BPPM server, BPPM agent, BPPM cell, PATROL agent, PATROL adapter service/process, SNMP adapter service/process, IIWS service/process, IBRSD service/process, ..., etc. The self-monitoring metrics include component status and connection status.

The events alerting that a BPPM component down or a BPPM connection down are mostly sent to its connected BPPM cell automatically. Some of the self-monitoring events require quick activation. You need to identify those events as they have different event classes and message formats. And you need to notify the right people about those events.

Some components may have multiple ways to be monitored and you just need to pick up one way that works the best in your environment. For example, when a PATROL agent lost its connection with PATROL Integration Service, you can see an event directly sent from PATROL agent, another event from PATROL LOG KM if you configured it to monitor IS connection down log entry, and yet a third event from PATROL Integration Service if you activated it in BPPM GUI.

You may need to reword the message of a self-monitoring event for better readability as some messages are not clear at all. For example, by default, PATROL agent connection down event contains the following slots:

cell='PatrolAgent@server1@172.118.2.12:3181';
msg='Monitored Cell is no longer responding';

You may want to reword the message to look like this:

msg='PatrolAgent@server1@172.118.2.12:3181 is no longer responding';

because it is the PATROL agent that is no longer responding, not the cell.

For the notification method, the most reliable way is local email fired from the cell that receives the self-monitoring events. Since your path to the ticketing system may be down when your BPPM components are experiencing problems, your back-end ticking system should not be the only way to send notification for your self-monitoring alerts. It should be used in addition to your local email notification.

Part 5: Customize at the right place

Unless you are a very small business, you will need to customize BMC out-of-box solutions to address the particular issues in your IT environment. It is unrealistic to expect a one-size-fits-all solution from BMC. Fortunately BPPM was developed with customization in mind. It provides extensive tools to help you develop your own solutions that seamlessly extend BMC out-of-box solutions.

BPPM suite has three major components: BMC ProactiveNet, BPPM Cell (BEM), and PATROL. Both BPPM Cell and PATROL are more than 10 years old. One of the primary reasons that they are still going strong today is because they both allow you to add your own solutions to them seamlessly.

Before you start developing your own custom solutions, take a step back to think about what options you have and where you should place your customization. What would be the impact on accessibility and resource consumption on the underline servers? What would be the impact on deployment of your custom solutions? What would be the impact on future maintenance and upgrade?

In PATROL, you can develop custom knowledge modules and you can also plug in your own PSL code as a recovery action into a parameter. In BPPM Cell, you can develop your own event classes, MRL code, dynamic tables, and action scripts to extend the out-of-box knowledge base.

In general, if you have a choice between customizing PATROL and customizing BPPM Cell to manage events, customizing BPPM Cell would require less effort and result in less impact to the servers that are being monitored. Here are a few reasons:

1) PATROL is running on the servers you don't own, have limited access, and may not be familiar with. For example, I was recently helping a client debug a custom KM running on AS400. I had to get help from AS400 sysadmin just to add one line in its PSL code.

2) PATROL is often sharing the server with mission critical applications. Poorly written PSL code could potentially impact the mission critical applications negatively.

3) The same custom knowledge module may need to be running on more than one server, thus requiring more time to deploy and upgrade.

4) BPPM Cell is running on your own infrastructure server. It is infinitely scalable as a peer-to-peer architecture. If resource has ever become an issue, you can add more cells either on the same server or on a different server (even with different operating system). you can split a cell horizontally by processing phases, or you can split a cell vertically by event sources.

BMC BPPM Architecture v9.5 – Lean, Mean, Analytics-Crunching Machine

BMC released the latest update to its ProactiveNet Performance Management (BPPM) suite in January of this year. The BPPM 9.5 Sizing and Scalability upgrade represents a tremendous increase in capacity without associated new hardware cost.

If you’re introducing BPPM for the first time, you will, of course, have to buy hardware, but if you’re upgrading from a prior version to 9.5, you can receive 9.5’s many benefits and enhancements without paying for any new hardware. In fact, you may actually be able to reduce your hardware footprint. You’ll be able to gain the new abilities and new capacity now by deploying 9.5.

Check out for our “Size, Scale and Hardware” presentation, where we will show you some enterprise examples of exactly how this release can dramatically reduce your hardware footprint, saving you thousands of dollars in system costs, and hundreds of man hours in administrative costs.

See how 9.5 compares to versions 8.6 and 9.0 with regards to sizing and capacity.

http://advantisms.wistia.com/medias/ua5li1146g?emb...

This new release makes it a great time to upgrade or add BPPM to your enterprise monitoring software options. The new features in 9.5 make it more useful than ever, and the capacity increases are incredible.

To demonstrate the vast improvements in size and scale in BPPM 9.5, here’s an apples-to-apples comparison of the last three versions of BPPM. Specifically, we’re looking at the benchmarks associated with a Large Hybrid BPPM infrastructure: Data, Event, and Service Impacts. These are the maximum benchmark counts, based on the current best practices deployment approach. As you can see, these numbers are huge.

• 1,700,000 Total Attributes/Parameters. Attribute/parameters are monitored items, such as the CPU % Utilization rate. This is more than triple 8.6 which had a maximum of 500,000, and demonstrates a 1:1 capability with the BPPM Integration Service Server in 9.5. BPPM 9.0 had a maximum 1,200,000 attributes. That means 9.5 allows 500,000 more attributes than 9.0 did.
• 250,000 instances per server, which includes your database instances, log files, processes, and service, which is an increase from the 65,000 on 8.6, and almost four times the number of instances. It doubles the number of instances allowed on 9.0 of between 120,000 and 150,000 instances.
• 20,000 enterprise devices, which are your systems and network components across your enterprise. This is double the 10,000 capability of 8.6, and equal to the 20K allowed on 9.0. This maximum supports the demands of most large enterprises.
• Up to 100 simultaneous end users, increased from 30 on 8.6 and 50 on 9.0. The number of supported users has doubled between 9.0 and 9.5.
• 40,000 intelligent events per day, up from the 2,000 per day on 8.6. This increase is off the charts.
• 350,000 external events, compared to 200,000 on both 8.6 and 9.0.

The most impressive part of the capacity and capability increases from 8.6 to 9.5 is that they come with no increased hardware requirements, as you might expect. This is virtually unheard of in the tech industry, in which new capabilities and capacities almost always require increased hardware capacity to go with it.

Think about one of the old household devices you have sitting around – perhaps an old iPhone or a computer that’s a few years old. Chances are, you’ve run across a piece of software or an app you’ve tried to install, only to find that your old hardware isn’t capable of running the new enhanced software. If you want to run the app, you’ll have to get a new iPhone. BMC, on the other hand, has managed to create a new version that works with your old hardware, so your enterprise won’t have to foot the bill for hardware upgrades just to run this software.

Let’s take a more specific look at the hardware needs for the BPPM versions. All require 64-bit architecture. Additionally, the requirements across all three versions are pretty similar, hence not needing to upgrade hardware:

• Windows 2008 R2
• Intel Core i7
• 2×4 Core, or 8 core total
• 3.067 GHz on 8.6 and 9.0; 2.2 GHz on 9.6. That’s right – it actually went down on 9.6 despite the capacity increases.
• A recommended 32 GB of memory for Data, Event, and Service Impacts.

If you have a deployment of 8.6 or 9.0 and are running close to the maximum number of monitored instances, now would be a good time to start designing your migration path to a 9.5 architecture. In summary, this upgrade can gain you tremendous technical capacity and capability, without incurring the cost of new hardware.

If you would like to see more BPPM 9.5 Content for other new BPPM 9.5 features, hands on presentations, and a series on "Understanding BPPM Analytics", be sure to checkout the blog I write for here.

http://blog.advantisms.com

I hope you find this information useful!  If it is well received I'll be sure to have follow up posts.

Have a  GREAT day!

Start using BPPM Analytics and become a monitoring genius!

Performance Management of your business services requires an ability to understand past behavior of all your key monitoring components. Do you know if your current alert thresholds are the result of a persons’ quick guess or assumption? Does your monitoring repeatedly generate large amounts of false alerts, and you find yourself struggling to find a solution?

Once you understand how BMC’s BPPM Analytics works, using Signature Thresholds andIntelligent Thresholds, you’ll have just what you need to look like a monitoring genius.

Doing what you’ve done before, will not work for you, going forward

It was not long ago, when everyone had to rely on guesses or assumptions, for specifying alert thresholds. When enterprises consisted of very few devices, you could rely on an individual’s expert knowledge to guide you. In most cases you might actually get most of the alert settings correct. The likelihood of having incorrect settings however was still likely, but with fewer devices to alert on it wasn’t a chronic problem. That simply is not the case any longer. Using the same approach today or tomorrow will quickly put you in the hot seat, and your monitoring reputation in jeopardy.

If your engine light comes while you’re driving over and over again without any issue found with your car, will you continue to trust it? Of course not – why would you? The same is true with your businesses performance management monitoring. If you continuously alert incorrectly, causing your support teams to be notified falsely over and over again, the impression will be the same as a bogus check engine light. In a very short time everyone will lose faith in your monitoring.

Using BPPM Analytics to manage your Big Data

With enterprises today consisting of many thousands of devices, we are truly in the age of overwhelming Big Data. Managing that Big Data takes intelligence in an automated manner, working at the machine level. This is why you hear “Analytics” mentioned just as often as “Big Data”.

Luckily you don’t have to be an expert in the past behavior of the monitoring. Using BPPM, it is done for you automatically. BPPM’s Analytics capabilities, tied to Signature and Intelligent Thresholds have an out of the box (OOTB) capability to notify you about performance abnormalities that are associated with key monitoring components.

Start Using Signature Thresholds and Intelligent Thresholds

BPPM Analytics takes the raw monitoring data and uses it to form historical averages that are then used to establish a normal “Baseline” of operations. These baselines are then used with two types of new thresholds. The two new types are Signature Thresholds and Intelligent Thresholds. These words are thrown around allot, but if asked, could you explain what they are, or ask your team to implement them specifically?

If you said no, you aren’t alone. Advantis is here to help. We’ve found this to be very common in fact, and it’s why we are taking these steps. The good news is, since you’re here reading this, you are only a few minutes away from gaining an informed understanding of these items. We help managers, directors and executives understand these principles to allow them to make informed decisions around their monitoring. Time is precious, and this knowledge is even more valuable.

We recently put together a video demonstration to help you take the first steps to understand these new abilities. No sales pitch or confusing jargon. It’s all spelled out plainly and simply. After watching this presentation, if you still have questions, you’re one click away from answers.

So take a moment to watch, and let us help you, look like a monitoring genius!

Our Video demonstration of BPPM Analytics and what you need to know in order to use it.

Video Presentation of Understanding BMC BPPM Analytics

What are the 5 user specific types of dynamic BMC BPPM Baselines available for you to use with Signature Thresholds? What makes them different and how would you use them? We cover that here.

http://www.advantisms.com/bmc-bppm-baselines-part-2/

And what if you want to keep some of your absolute thresholds, but make them more intelligent and dynamic? We show you how to upgrade your static thresholds and make them BPPM Intelligent Thresholds with this post.

http://www.advantisms.com/how-to-setup-a-bppm-intelligent-threshold/

To find out more about the BMC BPPM product, be sure to check out our online blog located here.

http://www.advantisms.com/advantis-blog/

If you would like to get your BPPM design, implementation or upgrade started, simply click on the link below.

Contact Advantis

If you’ve been reading this blog, you probably know that BMC ProactiveNet Performance Manager (BPPM) is a centralized event management system that acts as a single-pane-of-glass for many IT Operations teams as well as other functional groups within IT organizations. BPPM attempts to bring together as much information as possible about the health of an IT organization from external tools to get an overall view of the environment.

One good way to measure the overall health of a complex system with many moving parts is by injecting synthetic transactions and measuring their response time. BMC Transaction Management Application Response Time (TM ART) is a tool that does just that. It runs scheduled synthetic transactions from remote locations against business applications and tracks the availability, accuracy and response time of those transactions.

Wouldn’t it be nice to see TM ART measurements in BPPM?

Fortunately, the TM ART integration to BPPM is native to both products – no customization needed. The integration works by way of a data adapter that connects from a BPPM Agent to the TM ART Central Server using HTTP(S). Data is retrieved on a scheduled basis for all of the TM ART projects that are configured and accessible in TM ART. The data is stored in BPPM, so Intelligent thresholds can be defined to trigger events against it, just like any other data source.

Analysis with TrueLog

Besides sending data to BPPM, the TM ART application also runs diagnostics during failures (availability and accuracy only) and captures those as TrueLogs in TM ART. Reviewing the TrueLog can go a long way toward identifying the cause of an event that was generated in BPPM. Typically, events have an associated TrueLog that demonstrates the transaction output errors or discrepancies. Since the TrueLog is such a powerful tool for analyzing transactions, here is how you can incorporate them into your events.

First, you need to take advantage of TM ART’s ability to execute actions in response to errors to generate a TrueLog of the transaction. This action is optional and must be enabled when creating or configuring the monitor. There are three options, as you can see below.

Once the Generate TrueLog option is enabled in TM ART, you can take advantage of the built-in context Diagnostic in BPPM for all TMART Intelligent Events, shown below:

Notice the name of the action called ‘Run Now + TrueLog’; it does exactly what it states. It makes a connection to TMART, Logs into the UI and generates a brand new True Log for the monitor in question. Since this is a manual action, the end user could be creating a new TrueLog at a different time than the event, which may or may not be very helpful. To get a more timely TrueLog from the Diagnostic, you may want to convert it into an Event Rule to run automatically whenever an event arrives from TM ART. From our testing, the automated diagnostic seems to run between 6-12 seconds after the original event in TMART.

Cross Launching TrueLog

If you follow the steps above, in the resulting TMART Execution Log area, you would see two TrueLogs – the one created by TMART and the one created by the BPPM Event Rule a number of seconds later. You may wonder if this duplication is necessary. So did we.

Although it might seem intuitive to turn off the TrueLog creation in TM ART and just enable the manual diagnostic or the Event Rule in BPPM, this will fail because the BPPM actions rely on the Generate TrueLog option. Therefore, the ‘Generate TrueLog’ flag can’t be set to ‘Never’.

A more effective approach is to add a context-sensitive link from the event in BPPM directly to the existing TrueLog in TM ART. This allows you to cross-launch from the event in BPPM to a very specific page in the Projects Execution Logs:

Example: https://< TMART Server >:< port >/bmc/DEF/Monitoring/Monitoring?pId=8&mainTab=4

The key variable in the above URL is the pID number (8 in the example), which you can usually parse from the mc_smc_alias slot using an MRL rule in BPPM. Once that value is known, the whole URL can be placed in the mc_object_uri slot and will automatically become an active hyperlink in any event with that value. The end result is a quick way to launch TM ART from an Event in BPPM and get to the TrueLog for analysis.

Your monitoring tools need to work properly, and to accomplish that, they must be upgraded periodically.

With your mountain of issues, horse-choking responsibilities, and meetings out the wazoo, it’s easy to miss upgrade deadlines. But, you still need to know that the right information about the status of your environment is reaching the right person at the right time, every time. Those upgrades keep your service performance consistent and operating smoothly.

BPPM Upgrades

If you’re using BMC’s ProactiveNet Performance Management (BPPM) software, you know that regular upgrades are necessary to keep this flagship product working effectively. Each version since 7.7 in 2005 has needed a significant upgrade to reach the latest generally available (GA) version which is currently 9.0.

One thing you may not know is that any version before 8.5 can’t be upgraded directly to 9.0. An enterprise using an earlier version must first upgrade to the 8.5 version, and only from that point can it be upgraded to 9.0. Also, the support BMC provides for BPPM is rapidly limited, then expired; staying up to date is the only way to have access to support.

Not even your mom will support you forever…

At this writing, version 8.5 will be unsupported after October 31, 2013. Those organizations still using version 8.5 need to arrange for upgrades before that time.

Moreover, version 8.6 can be upgraded to 9.0, but 8.6 will be changed to limited support this summer on July 31, 2013 … and will be completely unsupported after July 31, 2014.

So what are the options for an enterprise using a version nearing the end of its support?

Basically, there are two.

The first, and less expensive, is to initiate an “over the top” upgrade to 8.5, then another to 9.0. The down side of this approach is the monitoring time lost during the upgrade. Since monitoring is usually needed 24/7, it can be detrimental to go offline for the time needed to do the upgrade.

Each upgrade will result in lapsed monitoring time, for a number of hours.

Because of unknown factors such as the size of the database, the number of devices, rules and reports, as well as the number of thresholds that will be used, it’s difficult to predict the length of time monitoring will be disabled during an upgrade.

More Challenges

There are more issues, too. For instance, upgrading a BPPM Agent/ Integration Service (IS) before the server is upgraded makes the connection between the two obsolete. BPPM components aren’t backward compatible. By the same token, once the server is upgraded, BPPM Agents also have to be upgraded before the system will work. In a large environment, bringing all these components up to speed is even more difficult as well as time consuming.

Then add this to the mix: the extent of customizations can have a huge impact on the upgrading process. Some of the customized files will likely be lost and have to be restored. Best practices may require updates to other related native files, too. Customizations to the knowledge base must be accompanied by careful review and documentation prior to an upgrade.

All of these issues are about updates of BPPM alone. However, in most environments, BPPM is integrated with multiple other applications, such as Patrol, Transaction Management Application Response Time (TM ART), Configuration Management Database (CMDB), Blade, and Remedy. All of the tools in the given environment must operate smoothly together. There are strict version dependencies between each of these products that must align. In some cases, customers may be prevented from upgrading BPPM until CMDB and ITSM have been upgraded to a supported version.

So … the big question: What is the alternative? If upgrading leads to all these complications, how is the enterprise to avoid them?

The answer? A calculated migration.

The Benefits of Migration

A migration includes new hardware, installing the latest BPPM version, testing, then integrating, then slowly migrating system functionality to the new system.

1.) A significant benefit in this approach is the new hardware. The use of new hardware and possibly a new operating system or enhanced gold images create a far better platform for BPPM in the longterm.

There have been a number of enhancements added to BPPM between 8.5 and 8.6, not the least of which was the support for an external Oracle database. Changing from the native Sybase database is not possible during an upgrade, and once the upgrade is complete it isn’t an option to upgrade to Oracle later.

The only way to move to Oracle, if that’s a good decision for your organization, is to perform a complete install on BPPM.

2.) The other benefit of a migration over an upgrade is the monitoring outage discussed before. Monitoring outage with an upgrade can be several hours or more, but with the migration, the outage is usually not more than a few minutes.

During those few minutes it is true that it’s necessary to manage both systems at once, but that’s usually over a short time and your new system is up and running smoothly.

So here’s a list of the pros and cons of each approach:

Upgrade BPPM

Pros:

• No new hardware required (therefore less expensive)

Cons:

• No database changes allowed
• May require multiple upgrades to reach the final version that supports direct upgrade to 9.0 ( each upgrade is costly and time consuming)
• Unknown monitoring outage window
• Customizations can be lost
• Incapability of integrations

Migrate BPPM

Pros:

• Controlled upgrade strategy / timeline
• New fresh hardware / operating system
• Database changes allowed

Cons:

• Users / operators will have to watch two consoles until full migration is complete
• Incompatibility of integrations

You can see that the list of pros in the migration strategy outweighs the list in the upgrade approach. However, no two environments are identical so decisions need to be made based on the best approach for you, in your environment.

What is our primary use case?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and support?

How would you rate customer service and support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

What other advice do I have?

What is our primary use case?

What is most valuable?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What about the implementation team?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

What other advice do I have?

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?