Tool Mentor: TDW - Evaluate Event Management Performance
TM084 - How to Use IBM Tivoli Data Warehouse to Evaluate Event Management Performance
Tool: IBM Tivoli Data Warehouse
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Details

IBM® Tivoli® Data Warehouse facilitates effective evaluation of the performance of the event management process. Tivoli Data Warehouse is a central repository for all of your historical systems management data. Vital data is collected and aggregated into Tivoli Data Warehouse from various event-tracking tools, including Tivoli Enterprise Console (TEC) and Tivoli NetView®. Statistics such as the number and type of events, detection time, and time to resolve are centrally located and reported on to analyze event management performance. By viewing your aggregated event information through Tivoli Data Warehouse, trends are identified, effectiveness is measured, and your event management procedures can be adjusted accordingly. Tivoli Data Warehouse is a one-stop, automated repository for your event management historical data. When you use Tivoli Data Warehouse, there is no need for manual data gathering from your various event-tracking tools. Your IT resources spend more time positively impacting your business.

Figure 1 illustrates how Tivoli Data Warehouse fits into your IT enterprise. The numbers in the figure correspond to the numbers in the textual description below:

Fitting TDW into an enterprise
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 that is 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 TDW data marts and perform OLAP analysis or data mining.

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