Chronicles of a Wandering Mind - Latest Comments

Re: Vmware Springsource and Hyperic: Brave new world and a lot of questions

berkay — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 04:25:38 -0000

Agreed.
VMWare may be able to do more than bare metal jvm OS with Springsource, They can go further app the stack and create something like Google App Engine for the enterprise, without the limitations of GAE.

Re: Vmware Springsource and Hyperic: Brave new world and a lot of questions

Bill — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 17:53:27 -0000

Spring is running on the JVM, just like JBoss etc. VMWare do not have to buy a Java framework to do JVM stuff.

VMWare could do a "bare metal" jvm os, and you could run Java app on top of that. You dont need Spring to do that.

Re: Vmware Springsource and Hyperic: Brave new world and a lot of questions

williamlouth — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 04:27:09 -0000

Actually most of the other vendors such as Tivoli, HP and BMC do provide agents for the Java runtime though in most accounts they are disabled because of the large overhead they generally incur and the poor value delivered by what is collected. Tivoli has probably one of the worst track records in this regard followed by HP. Most customers buying into such products are also buying into the complete ITIL product management suite including help desks, cmdbs, slm, bsm,... which is completely out of the range & possibilities of Hyperic and its team.

You are probably right that Hyperic will target specifically Java now considering that SpringSource had indicated that they were going to do a complete rewrite which follows on from two other complete rewrites by JBoss and Hyperic itself. If a complete rewrite is underway then management would probably look to minimize risk and reduce the scope. That said I would not be surprised if Hyperic is not put to rest as VMware has already invested in tooling around its management console(s).

I still think we are a very long way away from are sort of automated dynamic provisioning until we can accurate collect and model the underlying software and system execution models.

Re: Vmware Springsource and Hyperic: Brave new world and a lot of questions

berkay — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 04:04:25 -0000

William,

Thanks for the comment.Hyperic is typically compared to more generic monitoring tools like the ones I've mentioned above which typically don't have an agent on the box and rely on SNMP or WMI. SIGAR alone is a differentiator for Hyperic.

I understand your argument that deeper and more efficient insight into applications is needed to resolve scalability and performance problems (like provided by Jinspire)

By assigning CPU and memory, I was referring to elasticity rather than scalability/performance problem originating from the application. In a VMWare box with 32 CPUs and 128GB memory hosting multiple JVMs, VMWare can potentially change allocation of CPUs and memory to applications based on the load for each app, making better use of the available resources.

Re: Vmware Springsource and Hyperic: Brave new world and a lot of questions

williamlouth — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 02:45:53 -0000

"Hyperic is different than other solutions in the market it’s competing."

What exactly are you referring too? Hyperic is complete void of application interactions and largely relies on process level metrics (no context, no interaction, no activity chain, no correlation) published as MBeans and instrumented by developers of applications and technologies within the stack.

Assigning more cpu does not at all solve a scalability or performance problem in the cloud unless your are aware of the nature & profile of the activities (io bound, cpu bound, mixed) queued and how they interact (bottlenecks) with each other in competing for resources.

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.