ADDM User Group

September 2013

Introduction

S The user group was held at Barclays Bank, London on 5th

September 2013.
S Presentations were provide by:
S Barclays Bank S Citi S Tekwurx S BMC Software

Barclays Bank:
Presenter:
Mark Thornton Title: Zero approach to application modeling

Not enough resource for traditional modeling approach. Important for the Unsupported Risk Program that all products / platforms were supported by Vendor. Barclays have concept of Book (what they think they have) and Floor (what they actually have).

ADDM only gets infrastructure view without any model maps being written. Therefore Barclays wrote an integration into Service Now to pull out the Book information which then feeds a comparison job in ADDM to show differences between Book & Floor.
Challenge has always been dependencies what talks to what and why?

Been using ADDM to validate inventory of Software identification of version & instance. Have moved on to using for reconciliation of what is mapped to service / application in the book. This has enabled them to answer such questions such as:
Do you have cross environment dependencies? (Items in Prod talking to items in Dev) Do you have hosts linked to an application which are not in fact communicating with any other hosts in the application? To achieve the above with ADDM has required Taxonomy, TPL and Integration customizations. Future:
Add non-discoverable data into ADDM Drift management within the estate Integrate updates from ADDM back into SalesForce

Citi Group:
Presenter:
Andy Peck Title: Data Quality and the CMDB

Not enough resource for traditional modeling approach. Found limited benefits with Problem, Change and Impact management with the current system due to Data Quality issues. These challenges came from multiple data sets in multiple CMDBs and use if home grown management tool for applications and product catalogue. Therefore set about looking for an enterprise class product capable of addressing these. Purchased BMC Atrium are currently integrating with Service Now. Currently have IBM TADDM performing basic infrastructure discovery but have only completed 21% of the estate due to issues and bugs with the roll-out. Atrium will be a single repository for infrastructure and applications and will support ability for staff to review and reconcile data for their specific area of interest. This will provide consolidation and de-duplication of the current multiple data sources and thereby improve the quality and trust in data.

In order to reduce the complexity and cost in application modeling through IBM TADDM they have used the approach of application signature files. A mandatory part of change control process is that a signature file is updated each time an application released TADDM retrieves the file associates the host to the application compares to the hosts associated to the application within CMDD and highlights any discrepancies which are sent to the service manager to resolve.

TekWurx:
Presenter:
Nik Dimmock Title: Taking charge of BMC ADDM

Understanding the challenges in the Discovery and Configuration Management space especially around the complexities and costs normally associated with Application modeling and management of tools such as BMC ADDM Tekwurx have been investigating how to enable an end user of ADDM to self deliver.

The question asked was Could an end user undertake application modeling, management and support of ADDM themselves in a quicker, easier and simpler manor than currently possible thus reducing costs typically associated with these?
Looking at alternate tools in the market place and feedback from end-users, Tekwurx developed uControl a product suite designed to enable end users to do just that. uMap enables an application owner to create an application model without any coding or even having to learn how to use ADDM. The application owners access a simple to use UI and follow the process of answering 6 questions based upon data gathered from various sources including ADDM. Once complete the TPL patterns are automatically generated and deployed to ADDM. uChange provides drift capability, comparing the gold build of an application against the current structure scanned by ADDM. An application owner can be proactively notified that drift is occurring and can use uMap & uChange to manage and resolve that drift. uManage provides the ability to undertake typical ADDM admin tasks from a single pain of glass (TKU release, reporting, health checks, scan management) thus reducing the time required on a daily basis to do so.

BMC Software:
Presenter:
Andy McCall Title: ADDM Version 10

BMC ADDM development have been looking at feedback from users on many areas and version 10 addresses 2 key areas:
Performance of discovery in large estates Simplifying management of ADDM

Version 10 will offer the ability to group appliances together to act as 1 large appliance enabling an exponential increase in discovery and reasoning performance.
The appliances are recommended to be positioned locally to one another to reduce network latency between the instances as each instance shares the same datastore under the covers. In this group configuration you nominate 1 appliances as the master and use this master to make configuration and customization changes / updates. As the instances share the same underlying datastore these changes and configuration updates are therefore effectively applied to all other ADDM instances within the group. Version 10 also offers a significant change to the management and loading of TKU / TPL patterns and reduces the overheads of managing these (and more importantly the time taken to load and initialize a TKU) on a single appliance. ADDM Version 10 is currently scheduled for release in Q1 2014.