Several months ago, I happened to share a nice conversation about the potential of PowerShell as part of the IT/Enterprise Architecture. Then I discovered that the benefits of architecting IT-aware Applications are still widely unknown or misunderstood. That’s the reason I would like to share my thoughts on this subject pointing out the special role that PowerShell can play in this field.
IT-aware Services and Applications
IT-aware Services and Applications incorporate the necessary instrumentation so that IT and Operations Teams can control, monitor, diagnose and operate them using the same semantics that the business uses in addition to the classic IT constructs and abstractions.
These utilities allow IT and Operations to be aligned more efficiently with the business because the own business concepts are completely integrated with the environment and the tools that both IT and Operations use to do their work.
This Instrumentation Stack can be break down into different components or services that need to be implemented inside the applications:
- Activity Tracking and Performance Monitoring. In the Microsoft world, this is usually implemented as Logging Facilities (Log4net, Enterprise Library Logging Application Block, etc.), Performance Counters and ETW Providers.
- Command and Control: PowerShell in the Microsoft ecosystem.
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I still can’t believe it… I will end my holidays with major milestones complete!
Of course, to ship is to choose, and there are details on this beta release that need further testing and may need to be fixed. This is specially true when we talk about NMTools, the newest piece on this little puzzle.
OpenSLIM is an MS Access application and I’ve been running its previous versions for the last 6 months. Currently, I am handling more than 1000 Nodes on more than 80 Services with it and, in my opinion, behaves fairly well. On future versions, I will also ship a version with a SQL Server backend and I am also thinking on supporting partially connected scenarios.
On the other hand, the NMTools are completely new and will obviously need some time to mature. It has taken me some time to define the internal architecture, build some prototypes and get to the final shape ot the solution, but, fortunately the design seems to be finished.
It has been known for some time that PowerShell honours its name. But, in my particular experience, building and designing NMTools has showed me the great potential and the great <a title=“Metcalfe’s Law” href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe” onclick=“javascript:_gaq.push([’_trackEvent’,‘outbound-article’,‘http://en.wikipedia.org’]);“s_law”>economic value raised when you can easily connect traditionally more isolated domains: systems, networks, databases, applications, data, etc.
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