IT Management 2.0

Mashup - Not Smashups!

Last time, I posted about how sharing data between management applications was finally going to be possible through the use of web services.  I have talked to several people about that post since early March and the implications of this aren’t fully known yet.  But I thought I would take a look in my crystal ball and give you an idea of what I think might be possible once we can easily share and combine data between management applications.

 The concept is called mashups in the Web 2.0 world (although don’t get me started on the hype curve on those terms.)  Simply put, it is the combination of information from two applications sources that are combined into a 3rd use case that neither provide on their own.

First, merging data from multiple sources can most easily be understood if we think of a report.  Often times I hear from customers who would like to take the data ControlCenter provides through Storage Scope and combine that with data of their own.  For example, I have a major customer whose internal IT acts as a service provider to internal business units.  They combine storage capacity data with specific business unit data to provide each business with a report that shows how much storage they have allocated to them and how well they are utilizing this storage.  It includes information that is useful to that business unit in the terms they understand (the names of the systems, the people who own the applications, etc.) 

But of course this isn’t a mashup yet because it doesn’t utilize web services. But when we have this capability on top of all the products, this task will become simple.  Imagine being able to source data through a URL such as //storagescope/array12/lun401/ and get back allocated and used capability in an XML file?  Looks pretty easy to combine with other data at that point.

But more interesting than just combining data for a report is combining it to create a new application.  Think for a moment about the ControlCenter topology map.  Imagine if we could decorate it with data from Performance Manager!  Now we’d have a physical topology with color coding or flyover details describing the IO rates and response times.  That’s the kind of application we’re looking to build internally using these new web services.

Let’s look to something even more ambitious.  Let’s assume I can get data from the IT ticketing system showing the amount of man hours it took to resolve a problem (many IT shops do this today as part of their move to ITIL.)  What if I could combine that with information from my resource management tools that knows about the vendor of the physical hardware and its location?

I could then see data on which vendors products are most reliable, which ones take the least time to fix when there is a problem, even which of my data centers has the most issues.  Which applications are the most error prone, and which ones take the most time to fix?  These types of questions - and more - can be answered by combining the data from multiple sources.  And that can only be done if we use the new lingua fracta for data, web services.

But that’s enough from me.  I’m more interested in what kinds of things you’d like to do.  If you have ideas on things you’d like to combine and mashup, put them in the comments below.

Scott Shaffer

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Scott Shaffer Service Management EMC, ITIL, Mashups