Links List 5.23.08

May 23rd, 2008 by Julia Lim

Royal Pingdom has a fun gallery of different NOCs across the country. From simple to complex, they are displayed here in all their glory.

Network World recently spoke to Doug McClure on BSM Lite. He suggests that BSM Lite needs to be supported by a subset of just four product capabilities: resource monitoring, event collection, event management, and presentation. We love the idea of BSM Lite and his “service manager” role that acts as a single point of contact for end-to-end service. And of course, we’re all for simplifying IT.

FreeForm Dynamics provided some opinions about systems monitoring tools finally graduating to “management”. Their dividing line seems to be automation and some level of auto-remediation. Certainly tools are maturing and just in time because virtualization, as they point out, pushes “the need for tools that really help with the automatic management and administration of systems” particular at scale.

More on Microsoft and systems management from SearchWinIT. Can Microsoft SCOM really play in a cross-platform, heterogeneous management environment? This article brings up some nice points about where Microsoft says it’s heading and the trend to push more of the collection functionality down to the operating system level with the platform – hardware, software and middleware – becoming increasingly commoditized. But without “service desk, service requests, management processes and workflows” built into their solutions, Microsoft systems management remains “primitive.”

Judith Hurwitz takes an in-depth look at the new Tivoli, reporting from IBMs Pulse conference. What a non-surprise that Tivoli is “reinventing itself”, or finally trying to rationalize all those point solution vendors it bought, by focusing on service management in the broader corporate perspective, i.e., paving the way for more services revenue.

Tech’s Bottom Line blog on Infoworld had a great post on Open Source and why it needs an attitude adjustment. We followed the brouhaha over MySQL’s decision to make a set of features available to paying customers only with great interest. To us it makes sense – less about free versus paid and more about the value you get for what you pay.

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May 23rd, 2008