Context

Tool mentors explain how a tool can perform tasks, which are part of ITUP processes and activities. The tasks are listed as Related Elements in the Relationships section.

You can see the details of how processes and activities are supported by this tool mentor, by clicking the links next to the icons:

•   Incident Management
  •   Investigate and Diagnose Incident

Details

The IBM® Tivoli® Enterprise Portal component of IBM Tivoli Monitoring uses an enterprise console for all events (Situations). Situations are represented by certain fields, such as event status (Open, Closed, Acknowledged or Re-Opened), situation name, time stamp, event source and so on. This console provides the working queue of known problems that are reported by the Tivoli Monitoring agents to their portal (which might or might not be forwarded on to the IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console®).

The Event Console is used to process and acknowledge situations (independent of Tivoli Enterprise Console). It provides the user with a status of the realm of known, agent-reported situations.

In order to demonstrate how to use the IBM Tivoli Enterprise Portal to investigate and diagnose an Incident, the section that follows presents an example that involves Common Storage Area (CSA). The example includes the steps necessary and shows the screens involving just how this works in the IBM Tivoli Enterprise Portal. In this example, the overall steps include:

• Acknowledging the situation.
• Issuing a Write To Operator (WTO).
• Watching and listening for a script from the automation product send a beep and e-mail and take action.

Note: In this example, CSA is over allocated (5%).

Acknowledge the Situation

• The Event Console shows an Exception (or Situation) OS/390_Allocated_CSA_Warn. This event shows CSA is over 5% allocated (5% was set up only for display purposes.)

Figure 1: The Tivoli Enterprise Portal view of IBM Tivoli Monitoring

• Next, acknowledge the Situation and request two hours to correct.
• Then right click on the Situation and click on Event Results. This will provide Expert Advice and give you an idea of what the situation is about. You will also see the Initial Value of the CSA used and the Current value of CSA.

Figure 2: Displaying event results

• Expert Advise says Allocated CSA (Common Storage Area) storage exceeds its Warning threshold. A system crash might occur due to exhausted CSA. In "Current Situation Values" identify the address spaces using high amounts of CSA. Nonessential address spaces with high usage should be stopped or canceled to prevent a crash.

Issue the WTO, Take Action

• When the Situation was built, the Action tab was used to issue an MVS Console WTO. This WTO will be trapped by the AUTOMATION product and an automation script will send out a page, send out an e-mail and take any action that is coded in the script, such as shutting down unnecessary address spaces so CSA can be gained.

Figure 3: Assigning an action

For More Information

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