Policy-based automation

Policy-based automation focuses on separating your business and operational policies from the mechanics of actually performing the automation according to the policies. Policy-based automation focuses on setting your policies and Automation Control deals with implementing them.

Automation Control policy-based automation includes resource information, groups of resources, and relationships in the decision-making process before acting. Resource information defines resource class and name, as well as how to start, stop, and monitor the resource. Resources can be members of system-wide groups and relationships.

The power of a policy

• You are able to define automation requirements easily:

  In a policy, you can define which resources belong together and are managed as one (business entity). For example, a DB2® System consists of many resources. With Automation Control, you can group and aggregate resources to more meaningful manageable entities, for example, My-HumanResource-Application and so forth. You can monitor on this level, issue commands on this level, and manage at the business level rather than at the single IT resource level.

• In policies, you can specify how resources are dependent and related to each other. For example, which of the other resources must be available before a certain resource can be started. In another example, my database must be up and running before my application is started.
• Policy definitions can be reused, copied, and cloned for similar applications elsewhere in the enterprise.
• Because the underlying technology is responsible for the detailed actions, these actions are performed in a consistent and reliable manner. With traditional programming solutions, the testing of abnormal conditions is difficult and prone to be incomplete. The action of automation under these abnormal conditions is, however, critical to the entire automation solution.

The Sample Add-on policy includes automation modules for base operating system, major middleware, and systems management software. Today’s wide range of add-on policies are based on best practices and can help reduce time and effort in creating a policy or updating one.

Another possibility to populate your policy is by using the autodiscovery function. If you use this method, the data of all your address spaces that include the UNIX System Services are gathered on your system.