Ecora's potential for ITSM integration

Have you heard of Ecora? This New Hampshire based company creates software that's analogous to SMS or some of the BMC products, and their Auditor suite is used by a variety of companies, including my current one. They have two main products, Patch Manager and Auditor, which comes in several varieties.

Ecora Patch Manager can patch any Windows application, from Microsoft to Adobe. It can assess whether a system needs a patch. In these times of constant Windows vulnerabilities and subsequent fixes, system administrators really need this sort of tool. But Patch Manager, as I see it, isn't really ripe for Remedy integration, unless you imagine that perhaps you could integrate it with Change Management and push out patches that way.

Their other product is Auditor, which comes in Lite (free), Basic, and Professional flavors. It is simultaneously a CI (configuration item) discovery tool and a Configuration Management tool. You can direct it to detect changes to your identified CIs. It is all stored in the Auditor CMDB, which they indicate is compatible with the BMC Atrium CMDB. It also has a number of handy reports.

Anyone can give their Auditor software a try. They offer Auditor Lite free on their website. I tried it out, creating a report on my own system, and it was amazing the sort of data it could retrieve, including driver versions, Internet Explorer versions, network connections and more. It formatted it all into a choice of Word or HTML reports. The HTML reports used a Java applet and were a little slow on my system, but the Word document was beautiful.

Soon, the company will offer a Remedy integration, but some people have already created integrations using Remedy's EIE product. Auditor is yet another way to pull useful data into the CMDB, where it can then be used by people through all the strata of the IT organization.

I'm really looking forward to learning more about Ecora and how it can work symbiotically with the Remedy ITSM suite.

Some Tips for Configuring ARDBC LDAP

Remedy/BMC Action Request System provides a built-in integration to LDAP sources, such as Active Directory. The ARDBC LDAP integration allows Remedy to view data within an LDAP source. This integration is often used to populate People or User forms.

So you probably know that you can use 3rd party software like Softerra's LDAP Browser to view LDAP objects. This is a great way to get that LDAP URL that the integration requires. If not, check out the link above for some great LDAP browsing software. It's also useful for looking at the attributes within LDAP, to determine whether or not you want to use them or not.

In LDAP Browser 2.6, choose the "OU" that contains the data you want. Right-click and get Properties. You'll see a URL on the Entry Properties. Copy that and change the word "base" to "sub". If you don't make this change, you may see any entries at all. "Sub" indicates that you want to search this part of the tree and all branches below it.

So in this example, we have an Active Directory site for the invented site acme.com...see where you see the word "sub"? If I just copied & pasted that out of LDAP Browser, that would say "base".
ldap://acme.com:389/OU=Users,OU=Accounts,DC=acme,DC=com??sub?(objectClass=person)

Next tip...
When you create a Vendor Form in order to access the LDAP source, you'll select "ARSYS.ARDBC.LDAP" under Available Vendor Names and then you'll use the menu to select the appropriate ldap URL under Available Vendor Tables on the right. Right? Wrong. At least half of the time the LDAP URL that you identified above is NOT in the list. Here's your workaround.

1. Choose the closest possible URL. For example, a URL that appears as if it looks at the same types of objects. I know - it's not the right one - just pick one and save.
2. Close the form and re-open it. Open Form Properties and go to the Vendor tab. Change the Table Name to the right one - the one you figured out by using LDAP Browser. Save the form and close it.
3. Re-open the form again. Open the Field Properties for the Request ID field. On the Database tab under Vendor Information, set the Name to be an attribute that you know to be unique and between 5-15 characters long. Any record with a Request ID over 15 characters long will not appear in the Vendor form. If you chose a non-unique field, searches on the Vendor form will not work.
4. Right-click and start adding fields from the vendor table at your leisure.