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DB2 meets CMDB and RSS: an interesting future
I have known BMC's Fred Johannessen for quite a few years now and always enjoyed working with him. I am enjoying his blog and I figured he has some ideas worth considering and analysing. I wish BMC would just hand him the money and say: "go build this" because the idea is really interesting.
The idea in question? CMDB meets RSS. (Configuration Management Database meets Really Simple Syndication).
Why not use RSS as a mechanism to announce changes to the CMDB? Interested parties (business user, network ops, development, or DBAs say, could subscribe to a particular system relationship, and if it changed, they could be automatically notifed of the change.
Fred makes the great point that most organisations don't have mature change management processes in place. The niceness of RSS in this context, is that its very good for the kind of lightweight workflows where the process is not that well-defined.
Fred's key insight - Change management above all requires effective communication, and RSS is an effective and lightweight communications and notification.
So what vendor will be the first to market with an RSS or ATOM-based change management notification client?
| by James Governor | December 12, 2005 in Future Permalink |
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Comments
Governor - the pointer to Fred's idea is intriguing! Emphasis on communication of changes, exactly. And transmitted information is only helpful if it can be received and understood. Using a widely popular standard like RSS hits home.
Couple of thoughts and questions.
Information that is received is only useful if it can be understood. When I subscribe to a RSS feed on "Endurance Sports" I kind of know what to expect. But how about changes to CMDB, what would be the topics to subscribe to? It also seems that a digest of updates could help with the amount of updates for fine granular topics. Any ideas what a taxonomy of topics would be that people would like to subscribe to?
How does a mainframe crowd feel about a communication method like RSS when they compare it to communication methods that guarantee transactional integrity. RSS is like shouting out into the woods. Whoever listens will learn more. But there is no way for the sender to ensure that the receiver got the data.
To push it further, the RSS feed would inform the subscriber that someone has updated the CMDB database. Would it not be more interesting to get updates of the resource itself? Why not have each resource publish a RSS feed on state changes. CMDB would then be a subscriber to that feed and update the database.
Posted by: Boas Betzler | Dec 13, 2005 11:50:55 AM
James,
This will make me sound like an anorak, but the clients already exist! There are many...
The question is rather, which vendor will rss-enable the change management software.
@boas: I think that vendors have already chosen how their different software will (or in the case of BMC: already) inter-operate. The idea of a CMDB subscribing to change management software is probably a neat technical idea, but is this really necessary?
BMC seems to have chosen for 'web services' which is based upon xml, so rss doesn't seem very far of, does it ? At least from a technical perspective...
The question of what message for which user: as everything in the CMDB is related (this is not a CMDB, not an asset database!), people should be able to subscribe to every CI. The application would subscribe to the application (as CI), the system administrator to the components of the application for which he is responsible.
One thought though: Who wants to see notification of changes? The end-user. Do we therefore need to install rss-readers with all end users?
Posted by: Mike | Dec 13, 2005 4:42:38 PM
James/Fred etc - got me thinking about who needs notifying. As we move into the brave new world of Sarbox / Basel II etc. we need a mechanism for notifying auditors and others of what has been changed in the infrastructure and by whom as an example. Perhaps the CMDB should have a compliance bit on a CI, which triggers stuff when it gets changed?
I can see RSS playing a role here, but have the feeling that a rigidly controlled change management procedure (like we have had in mainframe for years as Fred points out) is going to become an essential. Then we move beyond notification to authorisation, workflow etc.
As a final aside, does the CMDB remind anyone of IMS BOMP databases from 30 years ago? Or am I the only old one round here?
Posted by: Peter Armstrong | Dec 14, 2005 11:52:08 AM
Mike, I think the point is to use Web Services rather than RSS and to have applications subscribe to events and have the result of those event types published through web services.
See todays announcement of WSDM support, and the RDS function in VE R2 that Boas and the team have been working towards an example of how this might be used. There should be a new white paper on VE R2 available Thursday 15th that has some detail on the Friday 16th GA VE R2 and the upcoming RDS functions and mid-term strategy for things like live partition migration. If I can get a url I'll post here.
Posted by: Mark Cathcart | Dec 14, 2005 5:58:59 PM
