Tango/04 Distills IBM i Operations Knowledge into New Module

September 11, 2012 Alex Woodie

It’s been a while since we’ve heard from Tango/04 Computing Group, the IBM i systems management software developer. While the Spanish company hasn’t been super active in the PR department the last couple of years, it has continued the hard work of product development, and the fruits of those labors are being rolled out with the introduction of a new IBM i monitoring solution, called the Operations Knowledge Module for IBM i, and a slick new user interface that runs on tablets.

The new Operations Knowledge Module for IBM i is a collection of software that aims to speed and simplify the roll-out of a sophisticated IBM i monitoring solution. The new suite is based on Tango/04’s flagship VISUAL Message Center, an established product that has provided Tango/04 customers with detailed visibility and automated responses to system and application messages, queues, and logs generated on the IBM i server, in addition to other supported platforms.

On top of the VMC base and its agent-less collection mechanisms, the Operations Knowledge Module implements Tango/04 “best practice” configurations, including installation wizards, reports, filters, dashboards, and a new Service Model that orchestrates everything. All of these items are aimed at distilling Tango/04’s knowledge of IBM i system monitoring into a pre-configured solution that is fast and easy to deploy, says Tango/04 CEO Raul Cristian Aguirre.

“The idea is that in a few hours, by filling in some information, all the monitors are created automatically, the relevant event and performance data is collected, and the event console and its dashboards are ready to be used,” Aguirre says via email. “With minimal additional configuration based on drag and drop on a GUI or a Web interface, custom IBM i applications can be rapidly added to the mix. And rounding everything over, we provide our leading, exclusive, agile processes (ITIL V3 compatible) to manage incidents and to perform continual service improvement.”

The new Service Model is the master program that coordinates the collection of data and automated responses. As Aguirre explains, the Service Model implements a “tree containing dependencies and features the correlation logic to make sense out of millions of events coming from hundreds of partitions.”

The Service Model, which implements Tango/04’s vision of a real time service model (RTSM), provides everything that’s necessary to help manage events, incidents, and performance. The RTSM is part and parcel of Tango/04’s ideas pertaining to continual service improvement, and modeling the monitoring and management of common business processes like call center operations, logistics, insurance, payments, and order processing.

“The RTSM is a practical, agile way to model applications, services, and underlying infrastructure, which may work in conjunction with a CMDB, or even better, completely standalone,” says Aguirre, who dished some dirt on CMBDs in a blog post last year. “The Service Model is extensible and customizable by nature, but one of the good things about the Operations Knowledge Module for IBM i is that we removed all the guessing to create a good, efficient one, as it is included right from the start.”

Also included in the new Operations KM package is a new version of the SmartConsole, the main interface for managing the software. SmartConsole version 8 was developed with the latest Web 2.0 technologies (AJAX and HTML 5), which allows it to run on tablets.

SmartConsole version 8 hasn’t been officially released yet, but early adopters are giving it two thumbs up, Aguirre says. “Customers can see, manage, reply to events from their iPads, and even configure alarms, automation, change the Service Model from the tablet,” he says. “Early adopters are simply amazed. It is awesome.”

For more information on Operations Knowledge Module for IBM i, see the vendor’s website at www.tango04.com.

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