Ashish Patel

On November 29, 2007, I got an e-mail from my peers in the IBM Redbook publishing house letting me know that the book I co-authored last year as finally reached draft status! In 2006, various members in the product development team for IBM Rational Performance Tester got together and started putting “ink to paper”. About a year later, we produced 14 chapters that outline architecture, use cases, operating environment, and configuration details that users normally wouldn’t find in the product documentation. In addition, each of these areas are explained in technical detail for our users to understand.

My contribution was Chapters 8 and 9 in the book. These are primarily based on the component “formerly known as” IBM Performance Optimization Toolkit and its integration into the IBM Rational Performance Tester product.

The draft version is available in PDF (about 8MB) and for more information please visit the IBM Redbook website.  The final publication is slated for printing on January 31, 2008.

Full page advertisement in InformationWeek!

Some interesting news that came across the office a few weeks ago was that our product, the IBM Performance Optimization Toolkit (IPOT), got a full page advertisment in the November issue of Information Week!

The advertisement follows IBM’s marketing concept of having “boxers” faced with challenging “oppontents” (ie problems) in a boxing match.

You can check out the ad on the InformationWeek website. Click on the November 28th issue and navigate to Page 2. On the IBM Websphere advertisement, there is a triangle in the right bottom, click on it and then you will see the “IBM Rational and Tivoli” advertisement. IPOT is mentioned as a special guest as “Rational Performance Tester and Tivoli Monitoring for Transaction Performance”. IPOT is the “gluecode” between these two IBM heavy weights.

After a long several months, we just released our latest update to the IBM Performance Optimization Toolkit (IPOT). I have blogged about this toolkit before and you can read that article here.

You may be amused by the name IPOT, however, I think its a cool name! I found it even funnier that one of my development machines was named “smokey” at one point.

Anyways, to the point. IPOT 6.1.2 now tightly integrates with Rational Performance Tester (RPT) 6.1.2 to allow customers to leverage the performance and resource monitoring data collected by the following Tivoli products:

• IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Transaction Performance (TMTP)
• IBM Tivoli Composite Application Management for WebSphere (ITCAM WebSphere)
• IBM Tivoli Composite Application Management for Response Time Tracking (ITCAM RTT)
• IBM Tivoli Monitoring (ITM) server

In addition, we support the following platforms:

• Windows
• AIX
• Linux
• HP/UX
• Solaris

This new release really brings new meaning to the integration of data between the Rational and Tivoli brands as we are bringing resource monitoring (or statistical) data into the testing workbench. Using this information provides cohesive methods of determining and isolating problems in a large enterprise environment, and can truely save people time and money at the end of the day.

Something new for this release is a forum on the developerWorks website to let customers post questions and comments about IPOT. This mechanism will really help us make IPOT even better in the future. I like to call it the IPOT Online Product Team !

It’s been a month since the webcast on IBM Problem Resolution Toolkit and IBM Performance Optimization Toolkit, which were both announced at the Rational Conference in Las Vegas in June 2005.I figured it was time to see what Google indexed on these two toolkits as I put in countless hours into their conception during an Extreme Blue Internship and commercialization while working for IBM last year. So lets see what Google found:

Results 1 - 10 of about 181 for “IBM Problem Resolution Toolkit”. (0.86 seconds)

Results 1 - 10 of about 186 for “IBM Performance Optimization Toolkit”. (0.29 seconds)

The searches pull up several important things.

• Links to IBM’s DeveloperWorks website from which you can download the toolkits (but you got to have IBM Rational Application Developer or IBM Performance Tester products). I have added the links to these websites below (just click the “Read More” link).
• News Articles.
  • IBM.com: New IBM Technology Speeds, Simplifies Discovery and Repair of Business Application Problems
  • Redmond Magazine: Sharing Data Between Operations and Development Goal of New IBM Tools
    
  • WebSphere Focus: Rationalizing WebSphere tools strategy
  • Computer World: IBM Unveils Tools to Link Rational, Tivoli Software
    
  • Systems Managemnet Pipline: IBM Promotes Rational/Tivoli Bridge To Link App Dev, Operations, Business
  • AND THE LIST GOES ON….

I found the article at Computer World: IBM Unveils Tools to Link Rational, Tivoli Software to be the most interesting in terms of who and where the software is being used. Here is an excerpt:

Joshua Barnes, a consultant at Ajilon Consulting, is working with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida in Jacksonville on a three-year project to roll out Rational’s testing and requirements management tools to the health care organization’s 1,500-member IT shop.

The Problem Resolution Toolkit will help Blue Cross address problems with transactions more quickly, he said.

“You will be able to go from weeks to re-create a development environment for a transaction that has a problem to hours,” he said. “If it was processing a claim, there are so many variables … to try to re-create and find a bottleneck would be a very lengthy process.”

Melissa Webster, an analyst at IDC, said that it makes sense for IBM to build off the existing investments its customers have made in Tivoli products and tie those directly into the development environment.

“Helping performance teams come together, collaborate and share information can really dramatically shorten the time to problem resolution and time to a fix,” she said.

People have been asking what Microsoft is doing that is similar to this. I’d like to say nothing, but thats not true. Other than Mercury Interactive (which the news articles about tout), Microsoft will probably be a player in this space. The Systems Management Pipline website points out:

Richard Warren, enterprise solutions architect for MicroLink, LLC, a Vienna, Va.-based solution provider in the Microsoft camp said IBM has much work to do in this effort.

What IBM is doing “is piecemeal compared to the Microsoft approach, ” Warren maintained. “Visual Studio 2005 will put the testing and even the performance and operations management pieces into a separate, but integrated component of the yet-to-be-released IDE. The Visual Studio 2005 Team Tester Edition is a full citizen in the development and project management Team Suite while the approach taken by IBM is decidedly add-on in both architecture and strategy,” he noted.

He said IBM’s move is valid for large, multi-platform, global enterprises but Microsoft’s plan is “more cost effective, efficient, comprehensive, and integrated by design. Absolutely, and for most enterprises, more than enough going forward–and at a faster pace than IBM with or without Rational.”

A lot of people have been asking me how much these toolkits cost. As sad as it is for me, they are currently free if you purchased the required products.

IBM Rational Application Developer costs $4,000 per user, while IBM Rational Performance Tester costs $1,500 per user. The two toolkits are free to customers who have a current maintenance agreement. — Redmond News

Well as many of you know, last year I was in Toronto working on an IBM Extreme Blue project where we did SOMETHING BIG!

Many have asked me to read or hear of something official when our product starts hitting the market. To fulfill this, I’ve been tracking all sorts of news releases. The easiest to understand (and in my opinion the best one) news thread is over at C|NET.com (this is a link to the most recent news release, but be sure to look at the related links at the bottom of the page). I will post these news articles on this blog in a few minutes.

For those technical junkies, the official names of our product are “IBM Problem Resolution Toolkit” for Rational Application Developer and “IBM Performance Optimization Toolkit” for Rational Performance Tester. It was my impression that all of our work was to be released under a single brand name, however, it looks like the split it up under two (for obvious reasons).

A story published on April 28, 2005, By Martin LaMonica (Staff Writer, CNET News.com) talks a bit more about IBM’s plans regarding the product that resulted from my IBM Extreme Blue term in 2004. Our Extreme Blue team did 12 weeks of work and came up with the inital prototype and business concept. I was lucky to have a 4 month workterm after the EB term, during which I helped bring the prototype to commercial product. So obviously there was more work done after the EB term.

To me it looks like IBM Problem Resolution Toolkit for Rational Application Developer and IBM Performance Optimization Toolkit for Rational Performance Tester is what IBM is calling the products that were given birth from our Extreme Blue 2004 term. Its very interesting to see how much impact we’ve had and will have! There is a full C|NET story called IBM tools look to fill development cracks. In brief here are some major points:

• IBM’s Rational tools division has detailed early products to come out of an initiative to improve communication among people involved in corporate software development. At the Rational customer conference in Las Vegas, company executives on Monday displayed tools that will let companies more quickly pinpoint the source of application errors.
• IBM debuted two new offerings designed to foster communication among software programmers, application testers and systems administrators who maintain applications in operation.
• With the tools, called IBM Problem Resolution Toolkit for Rational Application Developer and IBM Performance Optimization Toolkit for Rational Performance Tester, a software programmer or application tester is supposed to be able to more quickly locate–and correct–glitches in code that cause application failure, according to IBM. A Tivoli program helps isolate problems and then reports that information in the same data format, directly into Rational tools.

You can read a full article on the general thought of IBM’s Tivoli and Rational here. Generally speaking, here are 5 points from the article.

• The initiative aims to smooth out the process of making changes, such as updates or security patches, to applications.
• The intent behind the forthcoming product announcement is to provide tools that allow programmers to add useful management information to business applications during the development process, he said. For example, a developer could set an application’s desired performance thresholds and security policies in application code.
• The added information makes it easier for system operators, who run and maintain applications, to fix problems and make changes, particularly when companies roll out business applications for their networks, said Zollar (Tivoli GM).
• “Right now, management is an afterthought,” he said. “I think this is bringing the notion of operational science into the world of managing IT.”
• IT systems will be simpler to operate if they have better up-front design, much in the way automakers consider the manufacturing process when designing cars, he said.
• “One of the problems with IT (shipments) now is that everything is solved on an ad hoc basis–all of the processes for doing things like adding a user or resolving a problem,” Ptak said. “(IBM) is trying to make it easier, so you don’t have to have years of experience to be effective.”

For those interested in learning more about the products check this webcast out:

Dates: 21 Jun 2005 Location: Online

Description: Learn how the IBM Problem Resolution Toolkit (IPRT) for Rational Application Developer (RAD) enable development teams to import production diagnostic data directly into IBM Rational Application Developer. As a developer, have you ever had to debug a production problem but couldn’t replicate it in your test/development environment? As an operations support engineer, did you ever need to get performance data from production in a compatible format to your developers when the system slows down or fails? Wish you could bridge this gap between development and operations teams? Overview on:Toolkit integrations with Tivoli TMTP, Log file correlation, Transaction trace file analysis, Method level analysis.