Self-describing agent feature

Self-describing agents include all the application support files required to recognize and process data from those agents. At startup, self-describing agents automatically push application support updates to their local monitoring server. The data is then replicated to the hub monitoring server and all other Tivoli® Management Services components that require it (such as the OMEGAMON® Enhanced 3270 user interface, the Tivoli Enterprise Portal Server, and the Tivoli Data Warehouse). Self-describing monitoring agents eliminate the need to recycle the monitoring server after application support updates, and to ensure that application support files are current. If the self-describing features is not enabled, application support must be installed manually from a DVD and can easily get out of sync with the agent.

By default, the self-describing agent feature (SDA) is disabled. Before you can enable SDA, you must perform z/OS® UNIX System Services system preparation set-up tasks to create the z/OS UNIX file system. Afterwards, if your enterprise includes self-describing agents, you can enable SDA by changing parameter values for the monitoring agents and servers. You can selectively enable or disable SDA for individual agents or monitoring servers. In addition, SDA provides granular control over the products and versions for which application data is automatically installed.

To administer the self-describing agent feature, including exploiting its granular control of which products and versions are installed, the Tivoli administrative commands (tacmd) Command Line Interface (CLI) is required. The tacmd CLI is a product component that is installed on a distributed system and allows interaction with the monitoring server. For more information about the tacmd CLI, see (If applicable) Installing the tacmd CLI component.

If you are planning to configure a hub monitoring server on a z/OS system and enable the self-describing agent feature, you must create or set aside a z/OS UNIX Hierarchical File System (HFS) or zSeries File System (zFS) where the monitoring server can store the application support files. The file system must have access to a Java™ runtime environment running under IBM®'s 31-bit or 64-bit Java SDK Version 5 (or higher) on an HFS or zFS file system.

Ensure that you complete the following steps before starting the configuration of the hub runtime environment:
  1. Confirm that you have enough space on the z/OS UNIX file system. The amount required depends on the amount of agents you have deployed in your environment.
  2. Confirm that a supported level of Java is installed and note the z/OS UNIX path for your Java home directory.
  3. Determine the data set name of your SBXEXEC library.
  4. Determine the z/OS UNIX path prefix where your runtime environment will store self-describing agent packages. These directories do not need to be created in advance; the configuration process will create them if needed.