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
  •   Resolve Incident and Recover Service

Details

The IBM® Tivoli® Enterprise Portal component of ITCAM for SOA 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 ITCAM for SOA agents to the IBM Tivoli Enterprise Portal.

The Enterprise view 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 ITCAM for SOA to address an Incident, the section that follows presents an example that involves a web service disruption caused by the size of message exceeding thresholds previously set by an IT Operator. These thresholds could correspond to a formal, specified Service Level Agreement, could pertain to an overall response time that is being tracked, etc.

In this example, the overall steps include:

• Acknowledging the situation as it appears in the Enterprise View
• Navigating to the ITCAM for SOA agent view and looking at status and expert help
• Taking an action to reject messages.

Acknowledge the Situation

1. The Event Console (using the Enterprise View) shows an Exception (or Situation).

   

2. By clicking on the red x in the tree view on the upper left, we see the actual situations that are being triggered, in this case, a message size threshold has been violated, as well as a performance violation.

   

3. By clicking on the blue link on the left, it will drill down into the particular situation that is being triggered. The two workspaces on the top right show the initial situation values and the current situation values. The bottom right shows the expert help, adding additional context to the nature of the problem or further explaining the parameters of the situation. Finally, on the lower left is the take action menu.

   

4. By right-clicking on the navigator, we can bring up a menu and choose "Acknowledge" situation.

   

   1. This brings up a dialog box that allows you to put information that the situation has been acknowledged, when the problem is expected to be resolved, and any additional notes.

      

Navigate to the Problem

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 message size and the Current value of existing messages.

You can also navigate to the pre-built Performance Summary and Message Summary views to gain additional information and insight regarding the web services incident.

5. Once the event is acknowledged, we can go back to the situation view to review the expert advice.
6. We can also navigate the tree to the pre-built Performance Summary and Message Summary Views to gain more insight as to the nature of the problem

   

   

7. The Expert Advice says message sizes are exceeding a Warning threshold. A violation of a service level could arise from this.

Take Action

8. Use the Take Action workspace to point and click to the AddFltrCrl action.

   

   1. This allows us to start rejecting messages (sending a SOAP Fault) from IP addresses that are sending the large messages. Click on the Arguments button.

      

   2. Then fill out the specific values to create the action to automatically reject messages from a certain IP address.

      

For More Information

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