This is a preparation blog post before I travel to Boston for Tech Field Day 11. You can find more information about Tech Field Day, the other presenters, and the other delegates here on the TFD web site.
Disclosure: TFD are paying my airfare and accommodation to attend TFD11 and I’m sure there will be gifts and catering from the presenters and TFD while we’re there. Everything I write about what I learn at TFD will be my opinion and will not be reviewed by TFD or the presenters. There is also no obligation or expectation that I will write about any or all of the presenters.
I heard about Comtrade fairly recently as a provider of platform management plugins for Microsoft SCOM. They are a new presenter at TFD and I have not had any reason to look into their products. The premise with system management products like SCOM is that a Single Pain Of Glass (SPOG) can show you intelligence about your whole environment. Naturally we know that there is never just one pane of glass, but in fact multiple glasses of pain. To minimize the pain we want our SPOGs to be multitalented. We want one SPOG to manage multiple elements of our platform. SCOM is Microsoft’s SPOG and has good support for Microsoft products. To improve its value Comtrade have plugins that extend SCOM management to more platforms.
What I want to see is how well these management platforms integrate into SCOM and how much additional customization is required to get value out of the packs. SCOM, like every management platform, is notorious for being a framework from which you build your own management platform. There is a huge amount of organization specific tuning required and a lot of additional value that is only unlocked with custom scripting. How much of this is required with Comtrade plugins? How much of this is possible? Even if most customers won’t need further customization, it must be possible form some customers.
© 2016, Alastair. All rights reserved.
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