Chapter 1. Introduction to business systems management 7
? Reduce personnel costs
? Improve your return on IT investments
IBM Tivoli Business Systems Manager is a focal-point monitoring solution that
provides you with a business view of your IT environment. In the next section we
cover how it achieves these goals.
Discussion in this redbook focuses on IBM Tivoli Business Systems Manager
and its integration interface to other IBM performance and availability products.
1.3 IBM Tivoli Business Systems Manager
IBM Tivoli Business Systems Manager is an enterprise management product
that monitors the data processing resources that are critical to a business
application. (We sometimes will refer to it as TBSM, mainly in captions and
figures.) It enables end-to-end monitoring of systems, subsystems, applications,
and other resources in your enterprise, from OS/390 and z/OS systems to
distributed systems. IBM Tivoli Business Systems Manager provides your
operations with a view of the system components as they relate to your overall
business.
We use IBM Tivoli Business Systems Manager to:
? Construct monitoring views that reflect the enterprise’s current applications
and business systems, which can contain a complex mixture of system
resources across the entire enterprise.
? Enable real-time monitoring.
? Support existing Tivoli Global Enterprise Manager instrumentation, Tivoli
Distributed Monitoring, IBM Tivoli Monitoring, and IBM Tivoli Enterprise
Console®.
? Provide an open archtecture to enable third-party product integration.
? Manage business system components on a variety of platforms.
? Provide trend-analysis data for Tivoli Enterprise Data Warehouse.
? Enable effective operation of your entire enterprise.
After resources are defined to or discovered by IBM Tivoli Business Systems
Manager, they are registered with IBM Tivoli Business Systems Manager, and
the information is stored in an SQL database. You can access the database
using a GUI-based console. IBM Tivoli Business Systems Manager monitors for
state changes that occur in the various resources within your enterprise. An
event management facility helps you determine and troubleshoot system
problems that can affect the availability of applications and systems. By applying
8 Tivoli Business Systems Manager Version 2.1: End-to-End Business Impact Management
rules to events and data collected from various sources, even when business
systems span several platforms, IBM Tivoli Business Systems Manager enables
you to graphically monitor and control the interconnected business components
and operating system resources.
Some new concepts are pertinent to understanding the operation of IBM Tivoli
Business Systems Manager:
? Business system
? Discovery Processing
? Event Processing
? Views
1.3.1 Business system
A business system is a group of diverse but interdependent applications and
other system resources that interact to accomplish specific business functions. A
business system can contain applications or other resources that run on a variety
of platforms, including host, distributed, and network environments. For example,
a banking business system designed to support transactions over the Web
typically includes a Web server running outside the company’s intranet that is
connected directly to the Internet and a firewall that provides secure connectivity
to a machine running a custom business component, such as loan processing.
The loan processing business component usually runs on a distributed platform
and interfaces to business components running on a host computer. The host
handles all bank transactions. This business system presents challenges to a
system manager because it crosses the typically isolated environments of host
and distributed systems.
Another example of a business system is an e-mail system. E-mail business
systems include all instances of e-mail business components that are being used
in your network. You might have a mix of Lotus® Notes®
®
servers and clients,
POP mail or Microsoft
®
Exchange servers and clients, and other e-mail business
components.
An e-mail business system includes definitions that tell whether each of its
entities is a server, a client, or both. It also includes definitions of the monitors
that collect status information for each component in the business system, as
well as definitions of the relationships between the components in the business
system.
IBM Tivoli Business Systems Manager enables you to use an automated
approach for creating business systems. Using commands provided in IBM Tivoli
Business Systems Manager results in faster implementation and completeness
Chapter 1. Introduction to business systems management 9
of the business views. When the configuration is completed, the automatically
created Business System View continues to monitor the system for the creation
of new resources and automatically adds them to the view. In Chapter 12,
“Automatic Business System View creation” on page 395, we will cover the
creation.
1.3.2 Discovery processing
IBM Tivoli Business Systems Manager monitors resources for state changes and
performance characteristics that indicate availability. However, before you can
monitor resources in your enterprise, the resources must be discovered and
registered in the IBM Tivoli Business Systems Manager database, a process that
varies depending on the data source.
The process for resources monitored by OS/390 involves running batch jobs that
detect the configuration of your resources and update the database. Resources
discovered through the Tivoli Enterprise Console require that the classes first be
defined in the IBM Tivoli Business Systems Manager database. The resources
are then created dynamically as events are received from the Tivoli Enterprise
Console. Resources discovered through the common listener interface are
dynamically populated through bulk and delta discovery transactions.
IBM Tivoli Business Systems Manager has three discovery processes for z/OS
objects:
? Pre-discovery: Batch jobs are run initially when, or before, IBM Tivoli
Business Systems Manager is installed and configured.
? Rediscovery: Batch jobs can be customized and run on a scheduled basis to
gather updated information about resources in your enterprise.
? Auto-discovery: Programs automatically detect updates, resulting in updates
to the database.
The identification or discovery process uses various data sources to initially
populate resources in the IBM Tivoli Business Systems Manager database. The
z/OS process involves a series of batch functions that create a sequential file,
which is then forwarded to the IBM Tivoli Business Systems Manager servers.
The data is then processed and stored in the IBM Tivoli Business Systems
Manager database. The discovered resources are imported into IBM Tivoli
Business Systems Manager in a process called resource registration.
Note: In previous versions of IBM Tivoli Business Systems Manager this was
known as a line of business (LOB) view.
10 Tivoli Business Systems Manager Version 2.1: End-to-End Business Impact Management
IBM Tivoli Business Systems Manager has two methods for discovering
distributed resources. Rules can be added to the IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console
to forward events to IBM Tivoli Business Systems Manager database using the
agent listener. The first event from a resource triggers the creation of the
resource in the IBM Tivoli Business Systems Manager database. The common
listener provides bulk and delta transactions. Bulk transactions are a snapshot of
the instrumented environment. Bulk transactions identify which resources exist,
resources that have changed since the last bulk transaction, the associations
between resources, and resources that no longer exist since the last bulk
transaction. The IBM Tivoli Business Systems Manager database is populated
with the information in the bulk transaction. The delta transaction updates the
IBM Tivoli Business Systems Manager database as new resources are
discovered. We will see various examples of the usage of the discovery process
for different products throughout the book.
1.3.3 Event processing
IBM Tivoli Business Systems Manager consolidates events from a wide range of
IBM and independent system vendor products. Event processing involves
capturing specific events and routing them to the IBM Tivoli Business Systems
Manager server. The events result in updates to the IBM Tivoli Business Systems
Manager database, which are then displayed on the IBM Tivoli Business
Systems Manager console. Events also can trigger the discovery of resources.
IBM Tivoli Business Systems Manager has two event types: messages and
exceptions.
A fundamental principle of an effective centralized command center is to make
alerts meaningful. The lights that indicate problems of greater or lesser severity
must reflect the context in which they appear. IBM Tivoli Business Systems
Manager introduces two concepts in managing this problem: correlated priorities
and alert ownership.
Correlated priorities is a mechanism in selecting an object priority such that it will
affect the alert status of a resource that is on a higher hierarchy. Taking
ownership of an alert changes the tagged object icon from alert to Ownership
status. Taking ownership also acts as a contract of problem acceptance. The
username is automatically recorded in a note, which allows narrative action
information to be recorded, viewed, and played back for reviews. Because all
clients are updated instantly when ownership is taken, other members of the
command center team and department users with special Business System
Views (BSVs) can see that someone is responding to an alert. Integration with
the Tivoli Framework products enable the state changes in products such as TEC
to reflect a coherent view of the enterprise.
Chapter 1. Introduction to business systems management 11
Filtering is a powerful feature for building a BSV by providing ad-hoc selection
criteria, such as object type, name, and alert state. This enables the command
center staff to quickly create a custom view to closely monitor a collection of
objects showing recent trouble conditions. Filtering also allows representations of
the same object contained in different BSVs to filter events differently, therefore
allowing you to be notified only on events that pertain to you.
IBM Tivoli Business Systems Manager monitors resources for state changes and
the performance characteristics that reflect their availability. These resources are
represented by IBM Tivoli Business Systems Manager objects in the SQL
database. Actions on an object, such as an alert notification and the propagation
of that alert up and down a view, result from events. Events may be exceptions
associated with an object or a state change of that object. Exceptions occur
when the counters that measure performance thresholds are exceeded. An
example of an exception could be unacceptable response time associated with a
CICS transaction. Another example of an event could be the receipt of a console
message that a batch job terminated abnormally. This would cause a state
change to occur and would result in an event. As events occur within the
monitored environment, they are collected and recorded by IBM Tivoli Business
Systems Manager, and are displayed by tagging an alert icon on the offending
object’s icon.
Propagation leverages the object-orientated implementation inherent within the
IBM Tivoli Business Systems Manager environment and continuously
disseminates events throughout the object hierarchy. Propagation escalates
alerts up the hierarchy based on the severity of events and the volume and rate
at which they occur. Exceptions, console messages, and other events are
assigned priorities for each object. When an object receives an event, the events
priority is examined and compared against tolerance rates set for that object. If a
threshold is exceeded, an alert occurs on that object and sends an event to its
parent object on the hierarchy. This, in turn, can cause another event to occur
and another alert to be sent further up the hierarchy. In addition to controls that
adjust rates for incoming performance exceptions, each object on the hierarchy
includes controls for events arriving from the child objects below it.
Figure 1-3 on page 12 shows an alert occurring on the DB2 subsystem D7Q2
object under the SC69 system. The event is propagated up the hierarchy to the
Enterprise level. The propagation also takes place on the Business System View
of the object that affects the ITSO RESOURCES object.
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