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Challenges

IBM Tivoli Monitoring version 6.1 has been with us now for over a year. Many new and old Tivoli customers have taken the plunge to transfer to the new technology and try to make the promises of simplified monitoring a reality.

 

There have been a number of teething problems with the migration and upscaling from the Omegamon product to the ITM offering. We have seen 3 fix packs so far, and these have included a mix of bug fixes, limitation improvements and a number of new features making their way into the product. Some have been under demand from customers whilst others are welcome enhancements to address usability.

So how do you make ITM 6 work for you? This article looks at how the latest release of Odyssey 3.1 provides a number of features to deliver the best from any ITM 6 implementation.

Scalable Deployment

Our experiences with ITM 6.1 deployments, particularly in large-scale environments have shown time and again the value of an underlying management infrastructure.

For many of our customers, who have a history with IBM Tivoli products, this means leveraging the existing Tivoli Framework implementation to manage each phase of the ITM 6.1 solution delivery. This includes scoping, pre-requisite checking, preparation, roll out, and configuration during the implementation. It also includes managing the ongoing maintenance, improvement and extension of the service.

To successfully scale your ITM 6.1 deployment requires that each of the implementation phases is well defined, consistent and repeatable. To successfully deliver the service requires clean interfaces, a robust infrastructure and clear integration with other systems management services.

Integrated Environments

Odyssey 3.1 already harnesses the Tivoli infrastructure to provide clean, usable and scalable interfaces to support and deliver Tivoli services to Operators. Odyssey builds on this strength by providing a unifying link between ITM 6.1 Agents and their Tivoli Endpoints. This immediately provides a consolidated view of the new availability world alongside other Tivoli services, and an outstanding level of reach for ITM 6.1 agent management and configuration

 

Agent Management

Using the power of the Odyssey Wizard processing engine and with actions and status checks bundled out of the box, taking control of your ITM 6 estate has never been easier.

The ITM 6 Agent Wizard allows management of ITM 6 Agent resources. Odyssey is able to interact with the agents and their host system in a number of ways. It can query their status, perform configuration operations, execute commands against the underlying system, retrieve monitoring metrics that have been collected by the agent and publish reports of the monitored data.

Using Odyssey it is possible to perform actions like :

• Agent status healthcheck
• Agent configuration
• Monitored data snapshot and analysis
• Automated ITM 6 reporting
• Agent audit
• Agent roll-out

Remote Access

Odyssey already provides one click launch of remote command windows on your Tivoli Endpoints. This has been extended to include ITM 6 Agent systems. This vastly simplifies the troubleshooting and analysis process and greatly reduces the administrative overhead for operators. Right click on an Agent or ITM 6 System and you also have direct access to log and configuration files.

Scheduled Publishing of ITM 6 Reports

Odyssey is able to present your ITM 6 data alongside other information from your Tivoli environment. Side by side views of monitoring metrics, inventory data, TEC events, software distributions and more. You can even display live logfiles from the agent system, and open a remote command window automatically when you browse to the workspace.

Any views that you create within the Odyssey ITM 6 Operations Console can be published as HTML reports available through Odyssey's built in web portal.
Reporting is scheduled and controlled through the Odyssey ITM 6 Wizard, providing great flexibility on how and when data is published.