Creating a Structure Model for the "BSM Dashboard" using the Business Service Composer (BSC) Part 1 - BSM Solution Development Series and Demo Development

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In my last post we identified some of the key elements needed for enabling a navigation model for our “BSM Dashboard”. We identified a basic structure model as part of that activity to enable us to display key content and have logical components to click on for navigation. This basic structure model resembles what would be instantiated within TBSM’s service model. The actual navigation actions will require us to think about our template model which I’ll touch on in an upcoming post.

The Business Service Composer (BSC) is a new capability of the previously released component registry viewer tool also known as the “crviewer”. It’s part of the IBM Solution for BSM as well as fix pack 1 for TBSM v6.1. We’ll be walking through the practical use of the BSC in this blog posting. For more information on the BSC, please see the documentation here. For information on the crviewer tool, please see documentation here.

To start, the BSC only works upon data that’s been loaded into the SCR. It doesn’t work on anything you’ve manually built via the GUI or RADSHELL APIs or used an automated method for service model instantiations such as an ESDA or AutoPop type rule. There is a configuration option that will enable an AutoPop rule to send instance information to the SCR database, but this is off by default. The typical ways to get content into the SCR database prior to TBSM v6.1 was via an IDML book (aka DLA book) or via TADDM. In TBSM v6.1 a new capability within Netcool/Impact v6.1 is the “SCR API” which provides a pathway for Netcool/Impact to collect information and send it into the SCR database.

For our demo, I’ve hacked up a DLA that was exported from an ITM Monitoring environment. It contains the Tivoli Common Data Model (CDM) descriptions for six Linux systems. I’ve given these systems a simple node name label that represents their functional role within our online sales application technology infrastructure.  Having a basic understanding of the Tivoli CDM or the custom namespaces used in your DLA books will be important as you use the BSC. I’ll touch more on this in our next posting when we create the policies for automatic instance placement against our static structure model. The demo DLA is available here.

 

 After successfully connecting to the SCR DB, the crviewer tool will update with a live view of the SCR’s contents. For our demo, the SCR contains only the demo DLA we previously loaded.