Chronicles of a Wandering Mind - Latest Comments

Re: Getting Groovy Processing XML, sending SNMP traps and RapidInsight

TwitterWP — Sun, 10 May 2009 20:08:18 -0000

This is very useful.

I have a client working with a "developer" who was saying how hard this was to do.

While not a developer myself i know the principles thanks for laying them out here.

Now I just need to find the time to write a spec to get this working so i can automate capture of Twitter WordPress related plugins etc.

Thanks for taking the time.

Re: Getting Groovy Processing XML, sending SNMP traps and RapidInsight

berkay — Tue, 05 May 2009 09:54:58 -0000

I fully agree that presentation layer is critical.

It sounds like you're looking for new UI components/paradigms. I think you're better of looking at a live system rather than screenshots. You can use the live demo on our website.
http://www.ifountain.com/rapidinsight/demo

In RI, we mostly use typical components, grids, maps, pie charts, etc. key being presentation layer showing all the relevant information from disparate systems seamlessly. Another key point is the interaction between the components in a view. Components are dynamic, interaction in one component reflects on others,etc.

We found these are key enabler techniques to make presentation layer effective.

There are also some examples of different UI components. you can try
- service view tab, click on a menu in service view and select Get Event History (uses timeline to show events)
- select get Device locations to see google maps type integration.
- data is brought from the server as user moves around in the list views (live grid concept) which is key for the UI to scale to large systems.
- in search tabs, refinement of the search query as the user click on the results

Re: Getting Groovy Processing XML, sending SNMP traps and RapidInsight

J3ffG1ll — Tue, 05 May 2009 09:14:57 -0000

I found a few good screen captures on the ifountain link you provided, do you have more? imo the presentation layer is critical - i'm curious how rapidinsight has solved the problem beyond the typical gauge/pie chart/list solution.

Jeff

Re: Getting Groovy Processing XML, sending SNMP traps and RapidInsight

berkay — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 04:36:37 -0000

Hi Jeff, thanks for the comment, glad to hear you've found it useful.

It makes a lot of sense, events and performance are intertwined, and ops need to be able to correlate them at least visually hence the need to align the events and performance data as you've described.

In monitoring systems, performance exceptions are typically sent as events via snmp traps etc to the event management systems, bringing events from any source into the mgmt systems is essential but not always sufficient.
In addition to the consolidation of events, in RapidInsight, we've taken an approach that we describe as "integration in the presentation layer" http://www.ifountain.com/blog/RapidInsight:+wha...
where we combine all types of information (events, graphs, etc.) from multiple systems using a common model and user interface. This allows users to access performance reports/graphs in context of the events and vice versa.

Re: Getting Groovy Processing XML, sending SNMP traps and RapidInsight

J3ffG1ll — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 03:15:50 -0000

Berkay

Thanks for taking the time to blog this one... pushing external content into event stream data is getting hot! I've been working with an ISP who's attempting to align external-corp contextual event data with performance data to feed a performance database.

J3ffG1ll
J3ffG1ll.typepad.com

Re: Getting Groovy Processing XML, sending SNMP traps and RapidInsight

berkay — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 14:31:30 -0000

Hi Doug :)

What did you end up doing about this anyway?

Just to be sure, in the approach above, the only prerequisite that needs to be installed on the server is Java VM. The rest are just jar files (for groovy and snmp) and scripts that can be unzipped to any directory and executed. I understand that RapidInsight would be an overkill just for something like this, but even RI is works by simply unzipping it to a directory.
XMLSlurper is part of groovy so it's already there, SNMP part above uses some utility classes in RI so they would need to be extracted from there to be used standalone but it's doable.

Re: Getting Groovy Processing XML, sending SNMP traps and RapidInsight

Doug McClure — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 13:48:49 -0000

Funny!

Now the cool thing would be to get this as self contained as possible so it's something very easy to install and use! Tracking down libraries, RPMs, packages, etc. is a pain for some folks these days, especially for non *nix environments.

Doug
BSM/ITSM Blog: http://dougmcclure.net

Re: Bookmarks for February 18th through February 22nd

berkay — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 10:59:26 -0000

Hi Bryan,

I see what you mean. Though I had not thought the emphasize was on "all" anyway. "Five most common evolution paths" is more accurate as you state.
Personally, I mostly work on #2, see #1 and hear about #3 :)

Re: Bookmarks for February 18th through February 22nd

Bryan Dean — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 10:48:57 -0000

The line, "I can group all the different evolution paths into five key types", didn't quite come out right in the interview. These five types are a subset of all potential BSM paths, but are the most common I have seen as people are building a BSM foundation.

Bryan

Re: Service Management BSM and APIs

berkay — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 10:56:48 -0000

@Robin,

Thanks for the comment! Looking forward to read more about your thoughts as well. Last discussion in Doug's blog has really helped clearing my thoughts.

Re: Service Management BSM and APIs

Robin — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 15:50:04 -0000

@ Berkay, I completely agree with your final thought statement "Change cannot be a pre requisite...."
Expectations of solution engineering teams need to be managed (and you have hit the nail on the head) in this aspect so that every initiative an organization takes is not targeted to change very structure of the org.

Re: Integrating IT management products, proprietary vs open source and APIs

berkay — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 11:33:45 -0000

Hi Jeff,

REST API sounds great! I remember reading about the plans in DevJam posts but didn't realize that there was already progress there. As I mentioned, we aimed to come up with the first version of the integration as a tool to investigate what can be done, what makes sense, what doesn't etc. and get some feedback. Once we learn more about what (and if) people want from an integration, it certainly makes sense to use the API instead as much as possible. Thanks!

Re: Integrating IT management products, proprietary vs open source and APIs

Jeff Gehlbach — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 11:14:26 -0000

Glad to see that you were able to accomplish the OpenNMS integration with ease. If you grab one of our nightly trunk snapshots, you'll find there's a RESTful API (not yet complete but still quite useful) that allows you to get stuff without going to our database or having a presence inside the VM where we're running. There's some developer-level documentation on the API, which will be in the 1.8 release, on our wiki.

Re: Open source business models and the allure of the open core

berkay — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 17:36:36 -0000

Tarus I think we're in agreement, so may be it is I who could not convey the thoughts. I used the term "communal cookout" to describe open source projects. communal potluck sounds better. I think this conveys the difference between open source and proprietary approaches. In proprietary (restaurant) approach, you go, sit, they serve you the food they prepared, your participation is limited to eating it. You are a consumer. In an open source project, you're (or can be) part of the cooking process.

I understand that you're trying to educate market (not sure it is possible, but hope so). I am just hypothesizing that open core companies offer the comfort of a known paradigm (restaurant) with some of the benefits -albeit not all - of the open source potluck paradigm, therefore gain traction in the market.

Re: Open source business models and the allure of the open core

Tarus — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 17:10:10 -0000

I guess I didn't manage to convey my thoughts very well in my post. To me open source software is an entirely different way to approach problem solving from traditional software. More like a communal potluck versus a restaurant. To put it in the context of Predictably Irrational, it is governed by social norms and not market norms.

As you state "The difference between the open core and open source models may be vast if you’re inside the open source world, but it’s not significant if you’re outside it." That's the problem. Instead of being able to position open source as a totally new way of doing things, it keeps being brought back into the framework of commercial software. Thus open source solutions get judged in terms of the old software paradigm, and in many cases can be found lacking as it is very difficult to convey the benefits of open source software along the lines of features and licensing costs.

My hope is that the market can be educated as to the difference, which will be the first step in driving a greater understanding and adoption of free and open software.

Re: living three waves at once: reaching from agricultural age to information age

eve isk — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 02:21:03 -0000

I think this towns is growing up day by day.
I want to visit Turkey ...

Re: Announcing RapidInsight as an open source project and getting slammed for it

Leslie — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 10:26:07 -0000

I too agree with Berkay words

Re: Announcing RapidInsight as an open source project and getting slammed for it

NetcoolUser — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 10:23:11 -0000

I agree with Berkay words.....

Re: living three waves at once: reaching from agricultural age to information age

berkay — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 16:31:12 -0000

Hi Tarus,
I've been following your down under adventure via the blog posts. Hope it's going well. We should find you a customer in Turkey so that you can visit here at some point :)

Re: living three waves at once: reaching from agricultural age to information age

Tarus — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 16:23:20 -0000

I have yet to visit Turkey. The closest I've come is Damascus, but we had an OpenNMS community member send us some postcards from Turkey and it looks beautiful. I'm writing this from a hotel room in Australia, and you are usually in Switzerland, yet through technology we can still have this conversation.

I think that's downright cool.

Re: Can Tasktop bring order to chaos?

beatmik — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 19:22:24 -0000

Users access our forums via Tasktop, which requires an account to connect to Bugzilla. We find the integrated task editor a very effective mechanism for community communication and don't use the Web UI at all. Also, we make all bugs visible to registered users, and would need to make it very clear that what users submit would be visible to the world (common in open source, not common in product land). However, it does get annoying when we're trying to communicate something to someone who is no signed up for the user community, as is the case when linking to bugs on blogs. We'll discuss this and re-consider the policy for the Tasktop Summer release.

Re: Can Tasktop bring order to chaos?

berkay — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 12:25:18 -0000

Mik,

Thanks for the information, much appreciated! Firefox plans are music to my ears, looking forward to it.!

Curious: why do you keep your forums under lock and key? Wouldn't it be better if people can see (not post) what's going on without a user account, search traffic etc. seems odd.
waiting for my password reminder ..

Re: Can Tasktop bring order to chaos?

beatmik — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 12:04:55 -0000

I found myself going back to Firefox repeatedly and having to do some manual work with Tasktop which is not the idea. It looks like Tasktop bets the product on the assumption that people will not mind switching their browsers and will use the embedded browser. They may be right. I’m guessing that they target the corporate world which overwhelmingly uses IE and don’t think IE users have a particular loyalty to their browser and may welcome the embedded tasktop browser. This is not the case for me.

Great points. This is precisely the reason why we don't provide a standalone release of Tasktop for the Mac yet. The problem is that the Safari/WebKit integration with Eclipse is not sufficient to provide a seamlessly integrated browsing experience. In contrast, Internet Explorer does a great job supporting embedding, which allows us to have a full-featured browsing experience within Tasktop on Windows.

We're doing two things about this. First, we are working on improving the Eclipse and Mac browser embedding, and you'll see some those improvements surface in the Tasktop Summer release, scheduled for mid-July. In addition, we have had a lot of user feedback about browser integration and realize that some will want to use Tasktop alongside their regular browser as you allude to. While this does compromise the user experience some (more switching between windows) we think we can streamline it enough to still give you the majority of the benefits of the task-focused interface. The first browser we plan to do this for is Firefox, due to its extensibility. We should be starting on that work later this summer, and it would be great to hear your and other interested users' feedback.

128: support monitoring of browsing activity within Firefox
https://tasktop.com/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=128

General Mac discussion is on:

2: provide a Tasktop distribution for Mac OS X
https://tasktop.com/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=2

(If you're using Tasktop those links will open up with its rich editor without requiring sign-in, just one of the ways we leverage being the default browser :)

--
Mik Kersten
President & CTO, http://tasktop.com
Project Lead, http://eclipse.org/mylyn

Re: Can Tasktop bring order to chaos?

berkay — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 09:19:52 -0000

Hi Tim,
Definitely sounds interesting. I've added your feed. looking forward to it.

Re: Can Tasktop bring order to chaos?

timbauer — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 09:14:38 -0000

I am running a similar team using Mylyn. The business side of the house has had some success w/ it + JIRA to do task tracking (similar to TaskTop it sounds) coupled with the beauty of context ala Mylyn but on non-code artifacts (docs, pdfs, etc). I am going to write up our experiences on my blog @ some point. If you are curious here is the link:

http://timbauer.bauerfive.com