IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps (CP4AIOps) – Network Extensions
What are all the components available with-in CP4AIOps to fulfill ‘Network Fault’, ‘Network Configuration’ & ‘Network Performance Management’ portfolio requirements?
The blog is intended for Enterprise clients only and is true as of Q4-2022, will be adding another blog at later time for Telco exclusive.
The products from Netcool including Netcool Network Mgmt. (NNM) era, evolved into Netcool Operations Insight (NOI), to deliver richer functionality and simpler licensing, where clients can be entitled Fault & Configuration components i.e., IBM Tivoli Network Manager (ITNM) and IBM Tivoli Netcool Configuration Manager (ITNCM). For completeness, there was also add-on component to cover Network Performance portion by IBM Network Performance Insight (NPI) which has reached EoS in June-2022. In Q2-2021, the acquisition of Turbonomic added SevOne to the portfolio which substituted NPI.
At a brief, we have three components in-play to cover Network Management (with the assumption clients have entitled for CP4AIOps-Event P&A):
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- Network Fault/Availability Management (via ITNM)
- Network Configuration Management (via ITNCM) and
- Network Performance Management (via SevOne).
Along with above, we have newer component, IBM Agile Service Manager (ASM), which is treated as Manager of Managers for the Topology (many still refer this component as Topology-manager) as it is designed to conceive data beyond just the network elements.
In recent years, along with NOI, we’ve new offering i.e., CP4AIOps, which also addresses network management portfolio via network-extensions.
IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps evolution as of Q4-2022:
* P&A => Processing & Analytics
The CP4AIOps comprises of several modules, AI-P&A, Event-P&A, Metric-P&A, Infrastructure Automation (IA) and Monitoring along with optional Network Extensions (ITNM, ITNCM & SevOne product) where one could procure one or more network-extension components per need basis.
When it comes to ASM, this component is bundled in both AI-P&A as well as Event-P&A and one could procure as an add-on license for NOI. ASM comes with many observers to conceive data from various data sources, but there are two exclusive Observers that are part of Advanced Agile Discovery Component that would require additional licenses even if you’ve entitlement for CP4AIOps. The two observers are – Application Discovery Observer (AppDisco) and Network Discovery Observer (NetDisco), and they are subset of Tivoli Application Dependency Discovery Manager (TADDM) , IBM Tivoli Network Manager (ITNM) respectively but only contains discovery portion of these two components but containerized to run on both OCP and on-prem platforms.
Below is the summary of overall Offerings for Network Extensions: