Administering Multi-component Solution on a Distributed Environment: OSLC and Service Management overlap

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Large organizations are typically dependent on various software applications to carry out their business activities smoothly. Enterprises often have to spend millions of dollars to integrate heterogeneous systems within their respective organizations. Supply chain and customer relationship management as well as business intelligence applications all help organizations derive meaningful and actionable insights. In order to leverage the data stored in all of these applications to the fullest, it is necessary that they all communicate with each other. However, these applications very often do not talk and, as a result, data has to be tediously ported over amongst applications. However, EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) bridges the gap between different applications and allows the data to flow from one application to another. 

During project management assignments, many applications are required for Information Management, Process Management and Application Integration making data integration a challenge. In addition, the integration of these applications is complicated. To alleviate the issues, specific bridges are created between different integration applications and unique tool-to-tool API is also added. When one application needs to access another application’s data, the required bridge is activated through a vendor-specified API often tied to a specific platform or language. However, when an application needs to record additional information, a separate bridge is required.  Furthermore, every application tends to have its own vocabularies, providing alternate names and descriptions for comparable concepts.

Consequently, managing a multi-component solution is a very difficult process and encounters 2 major problems:

1. System administrators have to manually log in to individual nodes to monitor and control the applications hosted thereon.

2. Unavailability of a service is not noticed soon enough until it has affected the whole system adversely.

Jazz for Service Management helps overcome the problems mentioned above.  Jazz for Service Management can monitor and control OSLC-capable applications easily. Administration Services of Jazz for Service Management facilitate easy integration of OSLC-capable applications. The whitepaper “Simplified Administration of Open NMS” explains how Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) can solve data integration challenges. In addition, the paper explores how IBM’s Jazz for Service Management platform can be used to achieve open integration using Registry service as well as automation of some of the service management aspects involved in maintaining large scale deployments.

Case Study Summary: The use of Jazz for Service Management resulted in reduced Total Cost of Ownership since a lot of time spent by an administrator in maintaining complex enterprise deployments was saved.

The solution featured in the paper saved over 80% on configuration activities of the environment and over 90% in health management of the management stack. The OSLC enablement and the use of Jazz for Service Management Resource Registry resulted in the successful integration of a tool with other OSLC enabled tools in a truly open manner using some of the widely used protocols and technologies.

For details read the following Whitepapers in Integration and Service Management section on our website: http://www.persistentsys.com/Insights/Whitepapers.aspx

Simplified Administration of OpenNMS - Part 1: Using Jazz for Service Management Administration Services

Simplified Administration of OpenNMS - Part 2: Reference to OSLC Specification, Linked Data and Jazz for Service Management