This section describes the architecture of the IBM® Tivoli® Monitoring
products and provides information to help you plan your deployment
and prepare to install or upgrade the base components of the product.
Tivoli Monitoring products
use a set of service components (known collectively as Tivoli Management Services) that are shared
by a number of other product suites, including IBM Tivoli XE
monitoring products, IBM Tivoli Composite Application
Manager products, System Automation for z/OS®,
Web Access for Information Management, and others. The information
in this section is also relevant to these products.
Tivoli Monitoring products,
and other products that share Tivoli Management
Services, participate in a server-client-agent architecture. Monitoring
agents for various operating systems, subsystems, databases, and applications
(known collectively as Tivoli Enterprise
Monitoring Agents) collect data and send it to a Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Server.
Data is accessed from the monitoring server by Tivoli Enterprise Portal clients
and by dashboard users of the Dashboard Application Services Hub.
A Tivoli Enterprise Portal Server provides
presentation and communication services for these clients. Several
optional components such as an historical data warehouse extend the
functionality of the framework. Figure 1 shows the configuration
of an IBM Tivoli Monitoring environment.
IBM Tivoli Monitoring also includes Jazz™ for Service Management which brings together
the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) community's open
specifications for linking data and other shared integration services,
including administrative, dashboard, reporting, and security services.
You can use IBM Tivoli Monitoring components to extend the Jazz for Service Management functionality
for your monitoring environment as shown in Figure 1 and Figure 2.
Before deciding where to deploy the components of the Tivoli Monitoring product in your environment,
you should understand the components of the product, the roles that
they play, and what affects the load on these components.
Figure 1. IBM Tivoli Monitoring environment
A typical environment comprises the following components:
- One or more Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Servers,
which act as a collection and control point for alerts received from
the agents, and collect their performance and availability data. The
monitoring server also manages the connection status of the agents.
One server in each environment must be designated as the hub.
- A Tivoli Enterprise Portal Server,
which provides the core presentation layer for retrieval, manipulation,
analysis, and pre-formatting of data. The portal server retrieves
data from the hub monitoring server in response to user actions at
the portal client, and sends the data back to the portal client for
presentation. The portal server also provides presentation information
to the portal client so that it can render the user interface views
suitably.
- One or more Tivoli Enterprise Portal clients,
with a Java-based user interface for viewing and monitoring your enterprise. Tivoli Enterprise Portal offers
two modes of operation: desktop and browser.
- Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring
Agents, installed on the systems or subsystems you want to monitor.
These agents collect data from monitored, or managed, systems and
distribute this information either to a monitoring server or to an
EIF or SNMP event server such as Netcool/OMNIbus.
- One or more instances of the tacmd Command Line Interface (CLI).
This CLI is used to manage your monitoring environment and can also
be used to automate many of the administrative functions performed
using the Tivoli Enterprise Portal.
The CLI commands either send requests to the Hub monitoring server
or to the Tivoli Enterprise
Portal Server.
- z/OS only: Tivoli Management Services: Engine (TMS:Engine)
provides common functions, such as communications, multithreaded runtime
services, diagnosis (dumps), and logging (RKLVLOG), for the Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring
Server, monitoring agents, and components of XE products running on z/OS.
- An Eclipse Help Server for presenting help for the portal and
all monitoring agents for which support has been installed. The help
server is installed with Tivoli Enterprise
Portal Server.
An installation optionally includes the following components:
- Tivoli Data Warehouse
for storing historical data collected from agents in your environment.
The data warehouse is located on an IBM DB2® for Linux, UNIX,
and Windows, DB2 on z/OS,
Oracle, or Microsoft SQL
database. To store data in this database, you must install the Warehouse Proxy Agent.
To perform aggregation and pruning functions on the data, you must
also install the Summarization and Pruning Agent.
- Event synchronization component, the Event Integration Facility,
that sends updates to situation events that have been forwarded to
a Netcool/OMNIbus ObjectServer
or a Tivoli Enterprise Console® event server back to the monitoring server.
- IBM Dashboard Application
Services Hub is a Jazz for Service
Management component that provides dashboard visualization and reporting
services. Operators of the dashboard access it through a web browser
interface. You can install the following types of applications into
the Dashboard Application Services Hub:
- The IBM Infrastructure Management
Dashboards for Servers application displays situation event information,
managed system groups and key health metrics for Windows OS agents, Linux OS agents, and UNIX OS agents. Situation events and monitoring
data are retrieved from the Tivoli Enterprise
Portal Server using its dashboard data provider.
Note: - Other monitoring products such as IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Virtual
Environments and IBM Smart Cloud
Monitoring might provide their own management dashboard applications
that use the dashboard data provider. You can also create custom dashboard
views that display monitoring data using the Dashboard Application
Services Hub user interface.
- To use monitoring dashboards, you must enable the dashboard data
provider component of the Tivoli Enterprise
Portal Server. IBM Dashboard
Application Services Hub sends requests for monitoring data to the
dashboard data provider which uses the portal server services to retrieve
agent data through the monitoring servers.
- The Tivoli Authorization
Policy Server application is used to create authorization policies
that control which managed system groups and managed systems can be
viewed by a dashboard operator. The authorization policies are created
using the tivcmd Command Line Interface for Authorization Policy and
stored at the Authorization Policy Server. The policies are enforced
in the dashboard data provider component of the Tivoli Enterprise Portal Server. The dashboard
data provider retrieves the policies from the Authorization Policy
Server.
- Tivoli Common Reporting
can be used to gather, analyze, and report important trends in your
managed environment using historical data from the Tivoli Data Warehouse. The Tivoli Common Reporting user interface is
installed with Dashboard Application Services Hub and can be used
to display predefined reports provided by monitoring agents and to
create custom reports. Tivoli Common
Reporting accesses the Tivoli Data
Warehouse directly (this interaction is not depicted in Figure 1.
- A shared user registry is an LDAP server such as Tivoli Directory Server or Microsoft Active Directory that can be
used to authenticate portal server users, IBM Dashboard Application Services Hub users,
and optionally Netcool/OMNIbus Web GUI users. When a shared user registry
is used, users are authenticated by the first server that they access
and authentication tokens are passed to the other servers so that
the user is not required to re-enter their credentials. A shared user
registry is strongly recommended if you plan to use IBM Dashboard Application Services Hub with monitoring
dashboards. It allows you to take advantage of the authorization features
supported by IBM Tivoli Monitoring and to enable single signon
when the portal client is launched from IBM Dashboard
Application Services Hub.
- Tivoli Performance Analyzer
for predictive capability with Tivoli Monitoring
so you can monitor resource consumption trends, anticipate future
performance issues, and avoid or resolve problems more quickly.
Figure 2. IBM Tivoli Monitoring environment
using Open Services Lifecycle Collaboration for product integration
When IBM Tivoli Monitoring uses Open Services Lifecycle
Collaboration and linked data principles for product integration,
the IBM Tivoli Monitoring environment is extended
by adding the following components:
- The Tivoli Enterprise
Monitoring Automation Server is installed with the Hub monitoring
server. It extends the Hub monitoring server by providing the Open
Services Lifecycle Collaboration Performance Monitoring (OSLC-PM)
service provider. The service provider registers monitoring resources
such as computer systems, software servers, and databases with the
Registry Services and also responds to HTTP GET requests for resource
health metrics from OSLC clients.
- Other products such as Tivoli Application
Dependency Discover Manager can also provide OSLC service providers
that register shared resources such as computer systems, software
servers, and databases with Registry Services and that respond to
HTTP GET requests from OSLC clients.
- Registry Services is a Jazz for
Service Management integration service that provides a shared data
repository for products in an integrated service management environment.
It reconciles resources registered by multiple service providers.
OSLC client applications can retrieve a single record for a shared
resource such as a computer system from Registry Services. The record
contains URLs that the OSLC client application can use to retrieve
additional details about the resource directly from each service provider
using HTTP GET requests.
- Security Services is an optional Jazz for
Service Management service that enables non-WebSphere based servers
such as the Tivoli Enterprise
Monitoring Automation Server to participate in Lightweight Third Party
Authentication (LTPA) based single sign-on with OSLC clients installed
on WebSphere® servers.
For the V6.3 release of IBM Tivoli Monitoring, the Performance
Monitoring service provider assumes that Registry Services and Security
Services are installed into the same WebSphere Application Server.
- OSLC client applications are configured with the location of Registry
Services. They query Registry Services to determine if a service provider
has registered resources that they are interested in such as ComputerSystem
resources. From Registry Services, the OSLC client also discovers
the URLs that can be used to retrieve more information about a resource
from the service providers that registered the resource. The OSLC
client can then issue HTTP GET requests to the service provider to
retrieve resource information in either RDF/XML, compact XML, or HTML
format. Some OSLC clients can display the information retrieved from
the service providers in a hover preview on the user interface so
that the operator does not have to launch a separate application to
see the details. For example, Tivoli Business
Service Manager v6.1.1 can display hover preview in its service tree
user interface to show health metrics for resources registered by
the Performance Monitoring service provider and configuration and
change history information registered for the same resources by Tivoli Application Dependency
Discovery Manager version 7.2.1 FP4 or later.