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I am pleased to announce that the Operations Center 4.7 Patch Bundle 5 is now available. This patch bundle is a roll up of individual customer fixes into a single patch bundle.

Several Management tools have an ability for the end user to suppress an alarm or a device but not every management tool provides this feature.

From time to time when creating custom right-clicks for the Operations Center console, you might require a dialog that comes up with a navigatable element tree to allow the end user to select one or more elements. Suppose you needed to create a more advanced right-click that allowed the user to select an element, and then the script does some additional processing, for instance, selecting an element, then gather alarm details and opening a Help Desk ticket. This script is the fragment you need to bring up a element navigation dialog without having to write it from scratch.

I couldn't resist this opportunity to discuss high availability, speed to root cause, speed to restoration, security and mission critical services. We sit on the eve of the largest single sporting event that comes around only every 4 years and the recent headlines are, "Twitter Down 2012:  Service Out for Users Throughout the World". I scratched my head wondering how this would look on the London skyline, literally as the London Eye conveys the Sentiment with Twitter as the gauge of status with color and intensity for all to see?

Just back from the Gartner IOM conference and recharged with all the IT Transformation talk that is underfoot and success our NetIQ customers experience with our solutions every day.

I live in the Washington, DC metro area, specifically the 51st state – Northern VA or better known as NoVA. Fortunately, I was not affected by the storms and power outages of a couple weeks ago. However, Amazon and their Ashburn data center once again. Once again, many of us social media users found the pain of the outage.

How many outages will occur before plans are put together for better monitoring and DR? One way to look at it is this is their business and livelihood, so DR should be relevant. Another is that many of us use these sites during times of destruction to communicate with the rest of the world, not just for fun or business.

As a marketer and business person, I find it interesting none of these folks have found it a competitive advantage to have the best plan and be alive when their competition is down. However, many are blaming Amazon and leaving for another provider, another provider does not solve the challenge.

We've discussed service management and the transformation that IT is undergoing with the catalysts being the cloud, service providers, SaaS, social media, collaboration, mobility, BYOD, etc. The root catalyst is choice and options in the market and the competition speaks in terms of service value and service performance. I posted a question in LinkedIn regarding how much of your services are in the cloud today and expected to be next year? Join the discussion. The first answer was as I expected, a law firm that isn't in the cloud and isn't going there because of security concerns. I responded as I bet they use services that are internet based, research likely, and thus they are in the cloud. Just like a recent customer discussed having hundreds of apps in the cloud that now need to be reconciled, rationalized and managed for cost. How did they get this point? Easy, credit card subscriptions - cheap and easy to do business with.

I'm back from a couple of weeks of travel and most notably, the annual  Gartner Infrastructure and Operations Management Summit (IOM) the first week of June.  There were more than just a handful of aha moments, much churn in what has been a mature market and many great conversations on the solution showcase floor and hallways.  Let's start with the opening keynotes on the first day:

Have you ever wished you could highlight a few alarms in the NetIQ Operations Center console, copy them to the clipboard and then paste them into an email, or a help desk ticket or somewhere else? Guess what - you can.