The IBM Netcool Operations Insight (NOI) tool is something that a business would use get an overview of its health and investigate and analyze events that have occurred that affect various parts of the business. We have put together five things to know about to help accelerates the operations management lifecycle from problem detection to fix and with the NOI tool:

1. What events and alarms are important for a particular operation/application? This question is important because all parts in use at any business will generate events and alarms.  The NOI tool can be helpful in understanding what events and alarms are important because it integrates in the event management tool Netcool Omnibus and into the event analytics tool Netcool Impact.  It uses real-time alarm and alert analytics which are combined with broader historical data analytics.
    
2. Who are the consumers of the NOI data?  This question is important because different persona types consume data in different ways.  There are three persona types who would consume NOI data.  The first type first type is a "Service Consumer".  These are the users of operational support services or business support services.  Some examples include business managers, business analysts, subject matter experts (SME), customer support personnel, and security personnel.  The second type is a "Service Provider".  These are the users or groups who provide and maintain operational support services or business support services.  Examples of these personas include operations managers, line-of-business (LOB) managers, and service providers.  The third persona type is "Service Creator".  These are the folks who design and create the user interface services for consumers and providers.  They are the ones who are responsible for creating, maintaining and administrating user interface data sources.  One of the components of NOI is DASH which is a user interface tool that can be used to create the necessary user interfaces for each of the different persona types.  More information about DASH can be found here.
    
3. Does each persona require his own dashboard/User Interface?  This would be a whiteboard session with each of the persona groups.  The idea is to get an idea of what each persona type needs/wants to see and what they want to be able to drill into.  The NOI tool can be a tool that LOB personas and SME personas might use as part of their information gathering.
    
4. What event management tools are used? As previously stated, the NOI tool integrates with Netcool Omnibus.  It can also integrate with the IBM Operations Analytics Log Analysis tool.  What about an event generation tool like IBM Application Performance Management (APM)?  APM has an Event Integration Facility probe that sends event data to Omnibus.  The NOI tool could then be used to investigate those events along with other events and data generated at the same time.
    
5. Who gets notified when a business application requires attention?  This question is important so that implementing the NOI solution can be done correctly.  One of the key features is "Event Seasonality" analysis.  An example of event seasonality would be the following.  Suppose there is an automatic data backup done every weekend at 13:00 GMT on Saturday.  This backup consumes a lot of CPU cycles and a lot of network bandwidth.  This may also slow down the business application called "Predict the Weather in Texas" that customers like to use on Saturdays. 
   The Netcool Omnibus tool will get a lot of events for high CPU usage and high network bandwidth usage starting at 13:00 GMT on Saturday.  Because this regularly occurs, this is an "event seasonality".  If this event seasonality wasn't initially known, there would be a lot of questions asked about why there are a lot of complaints about the "Predict the Weather in Texas" application.  The NOI tool can perform the event seasonality analysis and create a seasonal event rule.  This is important to who gets notified so that they will be able to perform this analysis.