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

IBM® Tivoli® Netcool/OMNIbus can be used to automate the recovery of a service. If an event is received by the OMNIbus ObjectServer that indicates that a problem is affecting a service, the ObjectServer can either automatically or by operator invocation, launch a task or script to attempt to restore the service.

The advantage of using a task or script launched by OMNIbus is that the task can be a lengthy script that attempts many different things to restore the service and might also involve out of band examination of the situation (for example, the device is down).

An ObjectServer database trigger can be configured to specify an action to be taken automatically in response to an incoming event. For example, if an event indicates that a router is down, the first response might be to set the event to a low severity and launch a script to attempt to restart the router. If a resolution event is not received within a specified time period, then a trigger can increase the severity of the original event and initiate an escalation process.

If an operator does not respond to an event after a specified period of time, the ObjectServer can take additional actions through escalation triggers and scripts. For example, the ObjectServer can send an e-mail notice of the unacknowledged event to an operator. If the operator still does not acknowledge the event, the ObjectServer can then perform further actions, such as paging the operator or sending an e-mail notice to an alternate contact.

In addition to automatically triggering tasks and scripts from triggers in response to events, the operator can launch tasks from the OMNIbus Desktop. These may be a simple as a context sensitive ping or telnet tool that will attempt to connect to the device identified in the alert for operator investigation, or invoke more complex scripts that attempt to resolve the Incident.

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