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:

•   Event Management
  •   Detect and Log Event

Details

In IP networks many devices try to send events to a management system when errors occur, this event delivery is not standard and not guaranteed. IBM® Tivoli® Network Manager (TNM) supports polling network devices to proactively identify problems in the network.

When a device has been discovered and recognized by TNM, it is assigned (instantiated) a management class. A device's class defines the network management policies applied to the device. The management class is a hierarchically defined set of management policies identifying the attributes of the device to poll to understand the health of a device.

Using class-based management policies provides a way to logically group like network element types, and fine-tune monitoring policies for these devices as a group, without the overhead of configuring for each particular device (although this granularity is also available).

TNM (as shipped) polls management and loopback interfaces (all the main IP addresses) on switches and routers every minute. By default, it polls all the other interfaces with IP addresses every 5 minutes. It includes the following default pollers:

• Ping polling – used to ensure that a device is still present, live, and contactable in the network
• SNMP polling – used to acquire MIB-related information from particular network devices. This poller validates the connectivity between network devices

User defined polls are also supported and can be configured through a Web-based user interface.

When a poller identifies a network problem, an event will be raised in the IBM Tivoli Netcool OMNIbus™ Event Server, where further processing or user interaction can be undertaken.

For more information

For more information about this tool, go to the IBM Tivoli Network Manager page.