Integrating Fault and Inventory Management Systems - A Case Study

When a large Enterprise customer wanted to build a fault management system for enterprise management and a robust yet easily manageable asset management system, it turned to Sentini Technologies, since it also it wanted give each system complete visibility into the other's resources. After creatively solving the problem of creating a comprehensive asset management system for the customer's heterogeneous inventory that was intimately aware of the fault management system, Sentini Technologies brought these two seamlessly integrated systems online in a short time thereby providing the customer with a quick ROI.

The Customer's Needs
A large enterprise customer in the Northeast possessed thousands of machines, devices and systems. These were split into different groups based on function and location. Different management systems (that did not talk to each other) were responsible for the management of these disparate systems, devices and machines.

Also, given the scope and breadth of the infrastructure, often, existing monitoring and management tools did not have adequate visibility into all the resources that were part of the infrastructure. Worse still, resources newly added to the infrastructure did not come under the purview of the management tools and applications without extensive manual intervention, in most cases.

Finally, customer-affecting resource problems were not flagged with the requisite importance resulting in key customer-associated resource problems not being expeditiously addressed.

What did Sentini Technologies do?
Using its standard best-of-breed Enterprise Management practices and methodologies, Sentini Technologies first started to build the Enterprise Management System for the customer. This involved starting off with developing an understanding for the business processes of the customer, the different types of systems, devices and resources that composed the customer's infrastructures, the flow of data from a resource up through the OSS staff and right to the technical resource who would be ultimately responsible for helping support and maintain the system's functional integrity.

Following Sentini Technologies's typical EMS rollout procedures, the next step in this phase of the project involved the detailed design of the Enterprise Management System using off-the-shelf components (based on the IBM Netcool suite of products), as also the tailoring of the EMS to the customer's unique requirements.

The second phase consisted of the design of the asset management system and its subsequent integration with the fault management system - no mean task given the constantly evolving nature as also the scope and breadth of the customer's infrastructure. In order to keep the underlying technologies as open as possible and to minimize the costs associated in the asset management system's rollout, Sentini Technologies decided to use the proven and tested mySQL database in conjunction with Netcool/Precision - a powerful infrastructure discovery and mapping solution with root-cause analysis capabilities and multiple connectivity-APIs that is also capable of exporting its collected data into the mySQL database.

Since Sentini Technologies had already classified the customer's infrastructure in terms of the "manageability" of each component or component-class of the infrastructure, Sentini Technologies decided to use Precision to first discover all SNMP manageable devices and machines. To keep track of non-SNMP devices such as unix and windows servers and printers, Sentini Technologies decided to leverage the customer's existing DNS naming convention where each such machine's name indicated the physical location, the group and assigned asset tracking number. Therefore, by using Precision-enabled SNMP discovery and the DNS naming convention, the infrastructure asset information was populated in the mySQL database.

Following this, Sentini Technologies moved on to how this collected information was going to be managed, since an efficient way of managing this information would ensure that it was never out of date and always relevant and accurate. Since some of this management would be automated and some of it, manual, Sentini Technologies decided to use Precision, since its powerful discovery mechanism would ensure that as and when new SNMP-capable devices were added to the infrastructure, they would be automatically discovered and added to the mySQL database and thereby provide for automated AMS management. Additionally, in order to add more details pertaining to a particular device class, Precision allows users to simply change a single configuration file that then populates the extra details for all devices that fall into that device-class. And for the Windows and Unix servers and printers part of the infrastructure, updating information on these would be a manual process wherein the administrator(s) of the system would login to the Asset Management System's Administration (web-based) Portal and make changes to the associated details. Of course, since the AMS' administration portal was web-based, the customer was able to easily provide access to this portal to people from different groups within the organization thereby granting them control over their resources' data - a capability especially useful when the AMS' resource attribute data must be manually changed or corrected.

Integrating the Fault and Asset Management Systems
The integration between the Fault and Asset Management Systems was designed to exist on multiple levels.

On the first level, as soon as an event/alarm or fault data is received by the EMS, the resource in question is looked up in the Asset Management System and the resource's details are populated in the EMS. This enables the customer's OSS staff to be armed with as much data at their disposal as possible when starting the troubleshooting process. Furthermore, to help facilitate the AMS' management, for resources that do not have all of their attributes populated, an email is sent out to the relevant administrators so that they can focus their attention on 'holes' such as these in the AMS immediately.

On the next level, not only is fault data streaming into the EMS used to query the AMS for further details on individual resources, but also, additional databases are examined for other useful information. Chief among these databases is the one that contains information about which resources are 'customer-facing' and which customers could potentially be affected by an outage on each of these 'customer-facing' resources. By tying these databases with the EMS, the customer's OSS staff is also made aware of the customers that could potentially be affected by each piece of fault data coming into the EMS - a highly useful capability of the EMS given its ability to flag events that affect key customers and thereby also affect crucial relationships with these customers.

Ultimately, information gathered from intelligently enriched fault and alarm data within the EMS is channeled to the customer's Remedy ARS help desk system via automatic and manual trouble-ticket creation mechanisms. At the end of the day, by...

• integrating data from multiple disparate systems and devices across the customer's infrastructure,
   
• enriching collected data by tying the EMS and the AMS,
   
• enabling the automatic and manual administration of the AMS (in addition to the standard EMS administration capabilities provided as part of every single Sentini Technologies EMS rollout) and finally,
   
• pushing the end results of these processes to the help-desk system where they would promptly be assigned to the appropriate technical resources for troubleshooting and resolution.

Sentini Technologies was able to greatly increase visibility into the infrastructure of the customer, automate the managing of the customer's vast inventory and drastically cut down on the amount of manual efforts needed to identify issues with the infrastructure before they escalated into major problems affecting internal services as well as external customers.

Why Was Sentini Technologies Chosen?
As a leading provider of Enterprise Management solutions targeted at companies in the Enterprise, Telecommunications, ISP, Financial and Utility sectors, Sentini Technologies's engineers have, between them, built around 70 Network and Enterprise Operational Centers.

With our vast experience in managing customers' service offerings and business services, some of the features of our solutions that make us stand out in the Enterprise Management space are:

• Independent of restrictive Frameworks - Our Solutions are made up of individual "best-in-class" products. We thereby avoid having to fit our solutions into restrictive Framework product suites, allowing Sentini Technologies to propose the best solutions for our Clients' needs.
   
• Fixed Cost Approach - Since our projects are fixed-cost projects, there are no budget overruns since the deliverables [and Customer expectations] are set clearly at the time the SOW is signed.
   
• Round the clock development and support - There are no interruptions in the development cycle since the Indian team picks up the US team's developmental efforts at the end of each (US) day. This also helps us provide our customers with 24/7 post-implementation support and maintenance.