One of my old BMC buddies sent over a few followup questions about my MMS 2006 comments. Rather than lock them up in email, I thought I’d respond here:
Any further thoughts about WS Management?
I really need to look at it from a technical angle. As we were talking about awhile ago, I’m highly skeptical of most WS-* specs. On the other hand, if WS-Management is ubiquitous enough, my personal tastes for WS-* won’t matter 😉
That said, there’s still a huge window open until Vista ships, it’s widely deployed, and Microsoft back-ports WS-Management to older Windows versions. That is, it’ll be quite sometime before WS-Management is everywhere. In the meantime, a quick and simple REST approach could take hold. The advantage of simple is that it tends to spread fast, multiplying first-mover advantage.
…more than likely, though, SNMP, WMI, perfmon, screen scraping with SSH, and all the 1-off methods of gathering data will continue to hold their dominance as the preferred systems management protocols. They certainly won’t go away anytime soon.
What do you think of MONAD?
From what I saw of PowerShell, I was impressed. The ability to do batch operations from the command line and pipe the output of each to other processes in great. My gut tells me that sysadmins are going to find PowerShell indispensible.
I pinged someone about it who expressed concern that it didn’t work remotely. I haven’t check on this, but if that’s the case, PowerShell won’t be quite as handy for systems management platforms as I’d hoped. My thinking was that PowerShell would provide another way to remotely gather low level monitoring data and, more importantly, execute management tasks in Windows land. But, if you’re limited to doing it all in locally, it won’t be quite as nice.
I downloaded PowerShell RC1 documentation pack, so hopefully I can find sometime to read up more on the topic. It would, of course, be great to get a followup briefing to sort all this out ;>
What do you think of WorkFlows?
This is an area I haven’t looked in at all. Several System Center offerings (like Service Desk) are relying on Workflow heavily to implement a lot of the process and ITIL/MOF features.
This is all wild speculation, but if the artifacts of those Workflows can be imported into other systems, then other systems management vendors might want to keep on eye on the how the format’s used. As always, a systems management platform is strongest when it can accept input from as many “3rd party” applications and silos as possible, and Microsoft looks to be providing a whole new passel of inputs over the next few years.
Disclaimer: Microsoft is a client, as is BMC.
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