I am looking for some software to manage configuration data within an organisation.
The end result is to be able to answer the question "what breaks when I remove xyz component?"
We could write this ourselves but I am sure someone has done it already.
The software should answer questions such as:
- What software / systems access this data?
- Which server does this system reside on?
- What external data does this system require?
This is related to development in that to replace an existing system we must understand the interdependences and ensure that the solution does not unintentionally break other systems.
Is there a tool that shows a hierarchical tree of dependencies for a single piece of software or data repository and allows drill down?
There are a number of tools that seem to focus on hardware / OS / infrastructure configuration management using automated sniffing.
- CFEngine
- easycmdb
Any suggested CMS / CMDB?
Thank you
Yes, if you have the money, HP uCMDB is for you.
It allows you to discover hardware and processes on your infrastructure as well as the relationships between those based on TCP traffic. UNIX, Linux, Windows, z/OS, NonStop, Oracle, WebSphere, it gathers everything.
Based on the CI's collected it's possible (in uCMDB) to make models showing you those CI's you want to show plus related objects.
Also it's possible to federate/replicate external data, completing the CMS with non-discoverable items.
Afterwards it becomes possible to connect with Service Manager and roll up CMS objects into business services and processes.
Related
We are setting up a GIS server based on qgis / postgresql-postgis and geoserver.
We are missing an important tool, the cataloging and metadata system.
Postgresql and geoserver are on a windows server 2019 virtual server.
We are GIS & geomatics people but not computer scientists. We are therefore looking for an opensource solution that is relatively easy to install and configure, which does not require extensive computer skills.
What solutions do you think would be suitable? We have identified :
Geonetwork,
Georchestra https://www.georchestra.org/software.html
Geonode
Are there others?
Among these 3 solutions, would there be one easier to set and use, which would be functional on both linux and windows?
Are there other criteria to take into account in our selection of technology?
Thank you very much for your help, recommendation and / or feedback.
GeoNetwork might be the silver bullet (though it tends to do more than the job, since it also features an integrated geodata viewer).
geOrchestra provides both GeoServer and GeoNetwork, and a Single Sign On feature. It also provides additional modules like a user management console, a data upload tool ("datafeeder"), analytics, mapstore and so on. It's very modular and leaves plenty of room for integration.
GeoNode provides a fully integrated environment. It's like a social network dedicated to data. It's also based on GeoServer and has a SSO.
None of the above are easy to setup & maintain if you do not have basic computer skills. With a docker composition, you may have one of them running pretty quickly though.
You may try to use Cartoview which is an extension of GeoNode, visualizing the layers and maps in geospatial apps. It can be used in different environments (Linux, Windows, macOS).
You can download the windows installer from the link above and give it a try!
At our company, we are looking at replacing a number of legacy systems that handle information from our customers into our company. Typical systems allow the user to drop an ftp file somewhere. This file will then be transformed by a number of programs and eventually end up in some kind of database. In total we have +30 different "systems" or applications that does this. And, it is more or less a mess.
We believe we lack a common system to manage these flows: triggered by upload or possible another event, register the data, create some sort of "job" (or process) from it, pass it through the variuos services/transformation programs it needs to go through, provide feedback to the customer, provide information about progress, etc to us, handle failures and so on. Sort of like Jenkins (/Hudson/CruiseControl/similar) but for information transformation jobs, rather than build jobs, and with a job beeing more of a "process instance" of a job, then the job itself (e.g. different data should trigger the job several times, running concurrently).
We are cabable of writing such software ourselves, but surely software as this exists(?) I have been googling around, and found that what we need ma possibly be "job scheduling" software or "business process management" software. However, these are all new domains for us, and I am quite uncertain to as what kind of software would fit our needs. It appears one could invest quite a deal of ressources into this type of software before
So, what I am looking for is pointers to what kind of software or systems that could solve the kind of needs we have. Preferably Open Source, Java based, running in a Java EE container or similar, but really, at this point, almost any pointer/hint will be welcomed :-)
Thanks in advance
P.S. I realise I may be out of scope for Stackexchange, but I have been unable to locate another forum where this kind of question might be answered, so I hope it is OK.
I know of the following products:
Redwood Cronacle (I worked with it 1994-1997 and it still runs). Purchase product. Oracle and C based. Strong in multiple server platforms. Embeddable.
Oracle E-business suite core. Purchase product. Oracle based. Strong for integration with the same ERP system. Weak for multiple server platforms.
Invantive Vision (I developed it :-). Purchase product. Oracle and Java based. Strong in integration with ETL (Pentaho open source). Weak for multiple server platforms. Embeddable.
Quartz Scheduler. Apache license. Java based. Worked with in 2004 or so. Strong focus on embedding.
Hi I don’t know if you will find that solution in open source or Java. It sounds like bespoke or custom software to me. I would advise you to search for a project management software developer with high level of IT and Data warehousing. Ask for bespoke and customized installations with a real time database. I think you will solve your problem with this.
We're an SME with SAP implemented. We're trying to use the transactional data in SAP to build another system in PHP for our trucking division for graphical reports, etc. This is because we don't have in-house expertise ABAP development and any SAP modifications are expensive.
Presently, I've managed to achieve our objectives with read-only access to our Quality DB2 server and any writes go to another DB2 server. We've found the CPU usage on the SELECT statements to be acceptable and the user is granted access only to specific tables/views.
SAP's Quality DB2 -> PHP -> Different DB2 client
Would like your opinion on whether it is safe to read from production the same way? Implementing all of this again via the RFC connector seems very painful. Master-Slave config is an option for us but again will involve external consultancy.
EDIT
Forgot to mention that our SAP guys don't want to build even reports for another 6-months - they want to leave the system intact. Which is why we're building this in PHP on the top.
If you don't have ABAP expertise, get it - it's not that hard, and you'll get a lot of stuff "for granted" (as in "provided by the platform") that you'll have to implement manually otherwise - like user authentication and authority management and software logistics (moving stuff from the development to the production repository). See these articles for a short (although biased) introduction. If you still need an external PHP application, fine - but you really should give ABAP a try first. For web applications, you might want to look into Web Dynpro ABAP. Using the IGS built'in chart engine with the BusinessGraphics element, you'll get a ton of the most custom chart types for free. You can also integrate PDF forms created with Adobe Livecycle Designer.
Second, while "any SAP modifications are expensive" might be a good approach, what you're suggesting isn't a modification. That's add-on development, and it's neither expensive nor more complex than any other programming language and/or environment out there. If you can't or don't want to implement your own application entirely using the existing infrastructure, at least use a decent interface - web services, RFC, whatever. From an ABAP point of view, RFC is always the easiest option, but you can use SOAP or REST as well, although you'll have to implement the latter manually. It's not that hard either.
NEVER EVER access the SAP database directly. Just don't. You'll have to implement all the constraints like client dependency or checks for validity dates and cancellation flags for yourself - that's hardly less complex than writing a decent interface, and it's prone to break every time the structure is changed. And if at some point you need to read some of the more complex contents like long texts, you're screwed - period. Not to mention that most internal or external auditors (if that happens to be an issue with your company and/or legal requirements) don't like direct database access to a system as critical as this one, which again can cause lots of trouble from people you really don't want to mess with. It's just not worth it.
Can anyone explain in simple terms what the difference is between configuration management and version control? From the descriptions I've been able to find on various websites, it seems like configuration management is just a fancy term for putting your config files in a source control repository. But others lead me to believe there is a more involved explanation.
Version control is necessary but not sufficient for configuration management. Version control happens in some central or distributed repository, but says nothing about where any particular version is deployed or used.
Configuration management worries about how to take what is in version control and deploy that consistently to the appropriate places, primarily QA and production, but in a large enough development operation developers as well.
For example, you may keep all of your SQL queries in version control, including your table modification scripts, but that doesn't control when those scripts are deployed to the appropriate database server and kept in sync with the deployment of any other code that relies on that database structure.
Configuration management includes, but is not limited to, version control.
Configuration management is everything that you need to manage in terms of a project. This includes software, hardware, tests, documentation, release management, and more. It identifies every end-user component and tracks every proposed and approved change to it from Day 1 of the project to the day the project ends.
Version control is specifically applied to computer files. This includes documents, spreadsheets, emails, source code, and more.
Version control is saving files and keeping different versions of them, so you can see the change over time.
Configuration management is generally referred to as an overall process of which keeps track of what version of the code is on what server, how the servers are setup (and the install scripts to do so at many places). It is how process of what happens after the code goes into source control and how gets to deployed to the servers/desktops etc.
Configuration management is an ambigute term.
In software, it tends to be a superset of version control with emphasis on the entire process to produce a result in a repeatable and predictible manner.
In computing maintenance, it is related to the maintenance of the configuration settings and hardware/firmware/software versions of entire networks and set of attached computing machines (including servers, clients, routers...).
In hardware manufacturing, it represents even a superset of the two above, including the hardware pieces and software modules needed to obtain a product, with the description of the process to manufacture them, and even sometime the entire schemas and configurations of the production lines themselves.
In addition to everything said above I'd like to recommend Bob Aiello's book named "Configuration Management Best Practices" - http://www.amazon.com/dp/0321685865 .
It covers all aspects of Software Configuration Management including version control.
Version control is the control of deliverables whereas configuration management is managing the entire process leading to produce the deliverables. Configuration management involves change management, project management, etc., which generally are not managed by simple version control.
Roughly speaking, version control means you can check out the source for any particular version. Configuration management means you can build and deploy and probably test any particular version.
This can be helpful.
Versions and configurations
Versions:
Ability to maintain several versions of an object.
Commonly found in many software engineering and concurrent engineering environments.
Merging and reconciliation of various versions is left to the application program
Some systems maintain a version graph
Configuration:
A configuration is a collection compatible versions of modules of a software system (a version per module)
Version control is one of the features of a SCM system.
From the subversion user guide:
http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.7/svn-book.html
"Some version control systems are also software configuration management (SCM) systems. These systems are specifically tailored to manage trees of source code and have many features that are specific to software development—such as natively understanding programming languages, or supplying tools for building software. Subversion, however, is not one of these systems. It is a general system that can be used to manage any collection of files. For you, those files might be source code—for others, anything from grocery shopping lists to digital video mixdowns and beyond."
I'm looking for a way to give out preview or demo versions of our software to our customers as easy as possible.
The software we are currently developing is a pretty big project. It consists of a client environment, an application server, various databases, web services host etc.
The project is developed incrementally and we want to ship the bits in intervals of one to two months. The first deliveries will not be used in production. They have the puropse of a demo to encourage the customers to give feedback.
We don't want to put burden on the customers to install and configure the system. All in all we are looking for a way to ease the deployment, installation and configuration pain.
What I thought of was to use a virtualizing technique to preinstall and preconfigure a virtual machine with all components that are neccessary. Our customers just have to mount the virtual image and run the application.
I would like to hear from folks who use this technique. I suppose there are some difficulties as well. Especially, what about licensing issues with the installed OS?
Perhaps it is possible to have the virtual machine expire after a certain period of time.
Any experiences out there?
Since you're looking at an entire application stack, you'll need to virtualize the entire server to provide your customers with a realistic demo experience. Thinstall is great for single apps, but not an entire stack....
Microsoft have licensing schemes for this type of situation, since it's only been used for demonstration purposes and not production use a TechNet subscription might just cover you. Give your local Microsoft licensing centre a call to discuss, unlike the offshore support teams they're really helpful and friendly.
For running the 'stack' with the least overhead for your clients, I suggest using VMware. The customers can download the free VMware player, load up the machines (or multiple machines) and get a feel for the system... Microsoft Virtual PC or Virtual Server is going to be a bit more intrusive and not quite the "plug n play" solution that you're looking for.
If you're only looking to ship the application, consider either thinstall or providing Citrix / Terminal services access - customers can remotely login to your own (test) machines and run what they need.
Personally if it's doable, a standalone system would be best - tell your customers install vmware player, then run this app... which launches the various parts of your application stack (maybe off of a DVD) and you've got a fully self contained demo for the marketing guys to pimp out :)
You should take a look at thinstall(It has been bought by vmware and is called thinapp now), its an application virtualizer.
It seems that you're trying to accomplish several competing goals:
"Give" the customer something.
Simplify and ease the customer experience.
Ensure the various components coexist and interact happily.
Accommodate licensing restrictions, both yours and the OS vendor's.
Allow incremental and piecewise upgrades.
Can you achieve all of these by hosting the back end (database, web server, etc.) and providing your customers with a CD (or download) that contains the client? This will give them the "download/upgrade experience" that goes along with client software, without dealing with the complexity of administering the back end.
For a near plug-and-play experience, you might consider placing your demo on a live linux or Windows CD. Note: you need a licensed copy of Windows for the latter.
Perhaps your "serious" customers might be able to request their own demo copies of the back end as well; they'd be more amenable to the additional work on their part.
As far as OS licenses, if your vendor(s) of choice aren't helpful, you might consider free or open-source alternatives such as FreeDOS or linux.
Depending on if you can fit all the needed services into a single OS instance or not...
Vmware Ace or whatever they're calling it nowadays will let you deliver single virtual machines under strict control, with forced updates, expiration and whatnot. But it sounds easier to just set up a demo environment and allow remote access to it.
The issue here I guess is getting several virtual machines to communicate under unknown circumstances - if one is not enough?
An idea then is to ship a physical server preconfigured with virtualisation and whatever amount of virtual servers needed to demonstrate the system.
Using trial versions of the operating system might be good enough for the licensing dilemma - atleast Windows Server is testable for 60 days, extendable to 240 when registering.
Thinstall is great for single apps, but not an entire stack....
I didn't try it yet, but with the new version of thinstall you are able to let different thinstalled application communicate.
But I guess you're right a vm-ware image would be easier