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:

•   Availability Management
  •   Monitor, Analyze and Report Availability

Details

IBM® Tivoli® Data Warehouse facilitates effective availability management by aggregating and reporting your availability data. Tivoli Data Warehouse is a central repository for all historical systems management data. Monitoring data is extracted and collected into Tivoli Data Warehouse from IBM Tivoli Monitoring for the purpose of reporting and analysis. By viewing aggregated monitoring information in Tivoli Data Warehouse, IT personnel are able to analyze their effectiveness of the fundamental business requirement for high levels of availability. Longer-term availability data is used to ensure that previously agreed upon availability targets are attainable. When a revaluation of availability thresholds is needed, data to support the change is easily accessible to all interested parties through the Web-based reporting tool in Tivoli Data Warehouse.

Tivoli Service Level Advisor can be used in conjunction with Tivoli Data Warehouse to join your monitoring statistics with your business availability requirements. Your data in Tivoli Data Warehouse is directly measured against your availability and maintainability targets. This capability gives quantitative measurements that illustrate that your service levels are being met.

The figure below illustrates how Tivoli Data Warehouse fits into your IT enterprise. The numbers in the figure correspond to the numbers in the textual description below:

Figure 1: Fitting TDW into an enterprise

1. Your environment contains many products and services that monitor and manage your IT enterprise. This software can run on a z/OS system or on distributed systems such as Windows, AIX, and other UNIX®-based operating systems. These products and services generate data that is stored in a variety of formats, including relational databases, spreadsheet data, log files, and other formats. This data is called operational data, and the databases and files in which it is stored are referred to as operational data stores. In the Availability Management Process, these operational data stores contain monitoring data from tools such as ITM.
2. Extract, transform, and load (ETL) programs take the data from these various sources and place it in a central data warehouse. This action often requires that the data be aggregated and converted into the standard format for historical data in the central data warehouse. These central data warehouse ETL programs are provided in applications called warehouse enablement packs, hereinafter called warehouse packs, which come from various sources:
   • The product that generates the operational data. For example, IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console® provides a warehouse pack that contains the ETL program to populate the central data warehouse.
   • A product that analyzes data captured by other products. For example, an independent software vendor might write a warehouse pack to extract operational data that is collected by a system management product that does not provide a warehouse pack.
   • A customer-created warehouse pack. For example, if there are no products that analyze the data that is important to your enterprise, you can write your own customized ETL program to capture the specific historical data that you want to analyze.
3. The central data warehouse contains the historical data from all your diverse sources. This data store is optimized for the efficient storage of large amounts of data and has a documented format, which makes the data accessible to many analysis solutions.
4. Another set of ETL programs extracts a subset of historical data from the central data warehouse. This subset of data, called a data mart, contains data that is tailored to and optimized for a specific reporting or analysis task. Like the ETL programs in step 2, these data mart ETL programs are typically packaged in warehouse packs, which come from a variety of sources. A data mart ETL program can access any data in the central data warehouse, including data placed there by the central data warehouse ETL program of another warehouse pack.
5. The data marts, which are subsets of the historical data that satisfy the needs of a specific department, team, or customer, are optimized for interactive reporting and data analysis.
6. You use a program to analyze a specific aspect of your enterprise, such as availability management, using the data in one or more data marts. Tivoli Data Warehouse provides Crystal Enterprise, a Web-based tool, for reporting. It is also possible to use other programs to access Tivoli Data Warehouse data marts and perform OLAP analysis or data mining.

For More Information

For more information about this tool, click on the link for this tool at the top of this page.