Serviceability is the ability to service something, for the purposes of this blog, it is the ability to service IBM Rational solutions deployed in your organization.

Each client is unique therefore each client deployment is unique. How do you, as the solution owner, and IBM, as the solution provider work together to keep your solution up and running as required to meet your business needs? How do we service your solution? This is a question that IBM Rational has been focused on for the past 12 months as part of our Platinum Initiative. Serviceability is one of our five focus areas along with deployment, integrations. performance, and user knowledge and documentation.

Serviceability can be broken down into 3 necessary categories which must work together, to service your solution:

• First, product diagnostics, the information that a product or solution provides to give us insight into what is happening during operations: log files, traces, error messages.
• Second, tooling, tools within and surrounding solutions that facilitate troubleshooting. Examples include firebug, jazzmon, ISALite
• Third, skills, the appropriate technical and business knowledge to translate product diagnostics and effectively use tooling.

We have worked to improve all of these areas in the last 12 months and are committed to continuously delivering improvement in all 3 categories, initially, for a select subset of our portfolio: Jazz Application Foundation, Rational Team Concert, Rational Quality Manager, Rational Requirements Composer, DOORS, Rational Developer for z, You will find mention of some of our achievements here at Innovate and will also find new features on jazz.net and in our product offerings.

For product diagnostics:

• Improved error messaging in the following products: Rational Quality Manager, Rational Developer for z.
• Interactive Information Center (IC) for Rational Team Concert error messages located on jazz.net.
• Logging improvements specifically in Rational Reporting for Development Intelligence and Rational Developer for z designed to improve error handling and log analysis.

For tooling:

• Introduction of Smarter Server for our Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) solution. Smarter Server, currently under development, is a tool that will be embedded in our jazz product portfolio giving clients vastly improved insight into real time operation of your CLM deployment. Please check out this session at Innovate.
  
  Smart Server Session for Innovate:
  RDA-2326 Smarter Server: Performance Monitoring for CLM
  Boris Kuschel and David Schlegel
  Wed 06/05/2013 11:15 AM - 12:45 PM
  Swan 9 --- Swan
   
• Automated data collects are incorporated in our solutions so that interaction with IBM Rational is streamlined. In our CLM 4.x releases there is a tool called ISALite that automatically collects the information we need , we are soon releasing a data collector for RDz in version 9.0, also in CLM Lifecycle Integrated Adaptor, Rational Rhapsody.

For skills:

• IBM Rational is committed to enhancing our own skills to support our clients solutions, but we are very excited  to share this knowledge with our clients. On May 9 we released a new Deployment Wiki on jazz.net that shares the knowledge of our leading support, development, and services problem solvers.
• Specific, detailed, MustGathers have been documented for both our support engineers and client's use. This information will reduce time to relief and focus efforts of you the client and the support engineer.
• Forum support for Collaborative Lifecycle Management has increased significantly this year. A more casual, transparent exchange with Rational support and development for answering questions. Check out the Jazz.Net forum now!

Please join me at Innovate on Monday, June 3, 12:15 to 1:15 in Oceanic 7 to learn more about our activities and to share with us your opinions on serviceability.

Gerald Mitchell from the Global Response Team is also available by request at the Support Cafe when he is not otherwise presenting in sessions and is happy to engage in discussions around Smarter Server and Serviceability.

Millard Ellingsworth our Collaborative Lifecycle Management Answer Lead for forum support can also be located at the Support Cafe and at the developerWorks Live Zone.

Author: Sharon Tavilla
CLM Segment Leader, Serviceability Evangelist
sharon_tavilla@us.ibm.com