Ops Manager Interop Connectors

So here I am in the Murano 3201B room waiting for the session to start.. Admiring the nice carpets.. Well after all... It is the Venetian in Las Vegas

Kevin Muldoon from the acquisition of Engyro started the session talking about Interop which is simply the ability for System Center to communicate to other systems so that IT operations issues can be viewed as a whole.

The reality of the industry is most companies are heterogenous. So the first step of Interop for System Center addresses the forwarding of alerting data into any other Operations Workflow as well.

The next area that you would see Interop is to be able to receive event data and discover relationships from other systems into Operations Manager. Even to the extend of generating service manager tickets from other systems.

The core architecture that Interop uses is WS-Man to securely send data across to other systems. On the other side, WS-MAN receives it then passes it to CIMOM (Open Pegasus) which will then kick off a provider with Native APIs to talk to systems like Tivoli, Openview and Remedy. There is also a Universal Connector that can be customized

The connector also syncs between both systems 2-way. In Ops Manager, it is done via the same Ops Manger console and a single Management Pack for monitoring the connector.

In the first Demo, Kevin stopped the WWW service. The IIS Management Pack is installed in Ops Manager and monitoring the IIS environment. The Tivoli Enterprise Console connector is also installed and configured to automatically forward to the TEC console. These configurations can be done through a UI provided through the Management Pack.

The Ops Manager receiver the alert and began forwarding it to TEC. When TEC received the alert, it replied with a Ticket ID. Ops Manager console showed the ticket ID and a message that stated the successful forwarding

When you close the alert in TEC, it also automatically closes the alert in Ops Manager. It also works the other way round.

Based on the demo, it really seemed that everything was simple and was well architected under the covers.

Kevin also mentioned that connectors for NetCool and Omnibus was in the works.

If you're familiar with Engyro connectors, the Interop took the functionality but re-architected it using Microsoft technologies rather then the JAVA based Engyro design.

The current BETA is not cluster aware but this is part of the plan. Part of this plan is also to have some form of processing before the alerts are forwarded.

The second demo was on HP OVO. The same scenario was performed and the alert was acknowledged (closed) in HP OVO. The alerts in Ops Manager closed as well.. Like clockwork. When the IIS was started again, it automatically resolved in Ops Manager and so in HP OVO.

Pricing? How about FREE with the product :)

The connector to BMC Remedy has roughly about the same features like HA and multiple Management Groups. The demo showed a manual forwarding from Ops Manager. On the Remedy there is a custom form which injects a workflow which takes the data and then puts it into the Incident Management System.

When a ticket is closed, the alert in Ops Manager automatically disappears. Magic.

Then the IIS service was restarted, Ops Manager automatically resolved the alerts and as usual disappears from the screen. In Remedy, the status chages to Resolved but will not automatically close it because it is not typically fashionable to close a ticket as you would want to track the incidents that happens.

There is currently no support for alert correlation or latency configuration before an alert is forwarded.

The Universal Connector is a way to take alert data from Ops Manager and pass it to any remote systems out there. The data will be presented in the system as XML or Unix property files.

Timeframe of RTM?.. Ops Manager Service Pack 2.