Posts filed under 'Change Control'
from moneyball …
” Lately in a wreck of a Californian ship, one of the passengers fastened a belt about him with two hundred pounds of gold in it, with which he was dound afterwards at the bottom. Now as he was sinking — had he got the gold or the gold him?
– John Ruskin, Unto his Last
VP of IT Operations at a Fortune 1000 company mentioned that the way he figures out whether there is going to be downtime after a change window is to look at the pattern of change events during a change window (using Solidcore). He says good change windows have the pattern of a lot of change in the begining and then nothing. Bad change windows have two peaks: a lot of change in the begining, then a lot of change in the end. I know at that point Has he the change? Or the change him?
January 12th, 2007
I was recently driving down a deserted highway in Texas when something on the dashboard of my car began blinking red. I called the service center and the technician (quoting as much as I can remember) said, “ Pull over, turn off the car, and start it again. If that doesn’t work, there is a service station about 10 miles away that can download the latest software. This is a known problem.”
Read the article at the data center journal.
January 12th, 2007
Rob: did you hear?
Tony: hear what?
Rob: The NFL decided they wanted the equivalent of the yellow line to help the referee’s determine whether the team got the first down or not. They announced a contest: million dollar prize to the winner.
Tony: Its about time they fixed all those mistakes.
Rob: should we try?
Tony: yup … million dollars buys a lot of beers dude!
Rob: any requirements?
Tony: the solution is expected to: (1) tell us in real-time that the line had been crossed; (2) also it should only get tripped when the person carrying the ball crossed it and in the right direction; (3) not effect the normal play.
Rob: any ideas?
Tony: not really … but I remember hearing that our IT uses a product called Tripwire. Let me go ask them what it does … seems like something we could use
Rob: wow man … we could ski al year long
[ … next day …]
Rob: whazz up man … did they let you in?
Tony: yes man … but I got very confused there. They use this thing called tripwire … but it doesn’t trip. Someone could cross it a million times but it trip’s only when the manager decides to go run it.
Rob: that wouldn’t work.
Tony: nope. It will be like having chains … you got to go check each time.
Rob: I can’t imagine using chains on all the machines they have, no wonder they look beat like our referee’s with everyone shouting at them
Tony: It gets worse. This Tripwire they use doesn’t even tell you who crossed it. Or it kind of does, it tells you the last person who crossed it.
Rob: but we would want the first person wouldn’t we?
Tony: yes we would and also not just one person … but every person who crossed the line with the ball.
Rob: so this Tripwire stuff can’t tell you who or when they crossed … what do they use it for?
Tony: I don’t know man …
Rob: maybe your guys are not upto snuff on this stuff … I have a friend who works at this big company and he does something to do with SOX. I remember he was up one night and mentioned tripwire … maybe they already have something like that in baseball … I will check him out.
Tony: later dude
Rob: cya
…to be continued …
December 19th, 2006
I was at an ITSMF meeting recently and the speaker did a show of hands:
- How many people had deployed a CMDB? One hand went up.
- How many folks had actually seen a live CMDB? Only one hand went up.
- How many folks had projects to evaluate a CMDB? Entire room put up their hand.
- How many folks think that these projects would lead to implementaion? About 4 hands went up.
One of the things which came out of the meeting was people were struggling with what to put in a CMDB. Most people felt that ITIL was synonymous in most organizations with either service desk, incident management or change management. But how that translated into a CMDB was not clear.
December 15th, 2006
I was talking to a guru in the change management space and sharing with him all these companies that came up in the search and asked for his opinion on this concept of the application view and he had a really great insight …
Software which starts with the applications, like Asset Management (for example, Mercury Asset Management…) and Relicore (Symantec), Collation (IBM), nLayers (EMC), Cendura (CA), Appilog (Mercury) all have one common characteristic … the need a white list.
Niether this guy nor I have used all these software, but a cursory look at their description seems correct … they all need a pre-configured list of things which they should track. If you think from an application point of view this makes a lot of sense … once you know it is Hyperion, you can enumarate all the files and configuration settings for example with Hyperion and track changes to that.
This clearly has several advantages and dis-advantages. First advantage, since most of the above software (except Relicore/Symantec) scan the system, this reduces the time and resources required for the scan. It also presents change data in an applicaiton context which is more useful for the end-user. The
The dis-advantages are same like with other white-list approaches, they need to be constantly updated, also may not be available for older/newer versions of the software. What do you do for custom software … user has to input all this stuff etc.
November 28th, 2006
HP, Mercury (now HP), BMC, CA, EMC, IBM, have been on an acquisition binge over the past few years to put together thier porfolio for ITIL/ITSM. Here are some of the recent acquisitions … are there others that you think are also related to ITIL?
| |
Dev.
Process |
Application Dependency
Map |
Service
Desk |
Provisioning
System |
Other |
HP
|
|
|
Peregrine (2005) |
Novadigm(2004), Consera(2004) |
Baltimore Tech. (IM) |
IBM
|
Rational(2003) |
Collation |
MRO (2006) |
|
|
Mercury
|
Kintana (2003) |
Appilog (2004) |
Vertical Solutions (2005) |
|
Systinet (SOA) |
CA
|
|
Cendura |
|
|
Netegrity (IM)
Wily (SOA) |
Synmantec
|
|
Relicore |
|
|
|
BMC
|
|
|
Remedy (2002), Magic (2004) |
Marimba (2004) |
Identify(IM)
Calendra(IM)
OpenNetwork(IM) |
EMC
|
|
nLayers |
|
|
|
November 17th, 2006
Yesterday I heard Cal coach Jeff Tedford on the radio talking about preparation for this week’s big game. Tedford said he would not prepare any differently this week than any other week in the season because 1-if he knew a better way to prepare he would use it every week and 2-if he changed something and something unplanned happenned in the game he would not know if the new practice plan was the cause or whether it was something else. It struck me that what Tedford was saying is that controlling and managing change is a key part of his plan-thus the tie back to key ITIL principles.
Go Bears!
November 15th, 2006
There are so many help desk tools out there, most of which now call themselves service desk — that I find it very confusing to understand all the nuances. I found this forrester report really useful (and it is avaliable for free, from the altiris web site).
It compares Altiris, Axios Systems, BMC Remedy, BMC Magic, CA, Front Range Heat, HP Peregrine, HP Openview Service Desk, Numara, Touchpaper and Unipress.
Here is an excerpt from the begining which I thought was simple and insightful …
“The organization formerly known as the help desk is growing up. Under the moniker of “service desk,” it is expanding its footprint and adding such functions as problem, change, and configuration management to its previous incident-focused role. The classic help desk was somewhat limited
in its scope and parochial in its focus: Users would call with a problem, and technicians would endeavor to fix it as quickly as possible. Help desk software would track incidents and open tickets as responsibility passed from one person to another. Once solved, reports would point out potential hot spots for further study and possible proactive action. Only rarely would the help desk have incidents opened directly from systems management utilities or be tied into any formal change management process.
As processes and procedures for ensuring the continuing health of the IT infrastructure developed, more complex workflows and organizational handoffs were required. Enterprise-class tools to support this service management followed. Common structures and practices added a framework for further refinements. Today, there is widespread acceptance among larger and more complex organizations of a structure following the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) model for service management, and tool vendors have followed with products that assist in ITIL implementations.
Smaller organizations and those not ready to make wholesale change to structures and processes nevertheless want tools that are robust, simple to install and configure, and easy for technicians to use. For these organizations, incident and problem resolution remains a key focus, often with an additional emphasis on desktop life-cycle management, with (but not at the expense of) workflow, tracking, and reporting tools.“
November 15th, 2006
I was with the VP of Operations of a Global Fortune 500 company which had just deployed Opsware on thousands of end-points. Opsware is a provisioning system which can be used to push patches, updates etc. Like most other provisioning systems, such as BladeLogic, Radia (HP), it also keeps track of “known” good state and reports when deviations happen from it.
The company liked opsware as a deployment engine. It had simplified thier life considerably. But it had complicated thier life considerably when it came to reconciling change with the change tickets.
The VP mentioned that there was no easy way to integrate the two systems. Also the volume of change which was bieng reported by Opsware was so large that it made their earlier procedures which were manual just infeasible.
Opsware had taken them almost a year to rollout and they wanted to quick fix to this problem. Has anyone else seen this problem? Have any suggested solutions?
November 15th, 2006
One of the most puzzling aspects of the set of companies we found in Part II: IBM Rational, Sunview Software, Seapine, BMC, Pega, Solidcore, Opsware, MetricsStream, is several companies with development tools. Infact if you dig a bit deeper other companies who sold tools in the developer market — most notably Mercury Interactive (now HP) also seem to offer change management.
One explanation which comes to mind seems to be, that for a long time software developers have used source code management systems, which had versioning tools like CVS or SVN would naturally extend their value proposition to change management.
If you look at the vendors out there, it seems that there are two different directions people are coming after change management … one is starting at the Application layer and the other is starting at the system layer. The following picture from Mercury Interactiv
e’s web site provides a similar layering.
If you approach this from the application side, then the change cycle starts with a developer making some changes in response to a request by the busines unit. These changes are tested in staging and then put together in a release which is put into production. All of which fits neatly into ITIL Change Management/Release Management world. Mercury fits this point of view very well.
The next set of tools which view change management from the perspective of the application are the “application dependency mapping” folks. I guess they originated from the problem that companies face when putting things in production … changes interact with each other. Especially if you are in the Java world, there are a lot of files, classes, settings etc, which depend on each other. So knowing the dependency between one application and another and also having a preview as to what are all the things one change can effect seems valuable. Most of the major players in this space have been gobbled up by larger companies: Relicore (Symantec), Collation (IBM), nLayers (EMC), Cendura (CA), Appilog (Mercury).
It seems like most of the above companies discover the applications by doing a scan and then figure out the dependencies between them also. The scanning gives people the ability to determine what has changed.
I guess the application view has its benefits in the sense that it sits closer to the business user and the business use. The other companies which came up on google for change management start more at the systems layer … next next next.
November 14th, 2006
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