Configuring alerts

IBM® Business Monitor manages action services and event emissions using Monitor action services. The Monitor action services receive situation events emitted by applications, select appropriate actions based on user-defined rules and policies, and invoke one or more actions in the form of alerts.

About this task

Important:

If you stopped the Monitor database, the Monitor action services must be stopped from the WebSphere® Application Server administrative console first. Otherwise, incoming alert situation events might be lost by Monitor action services.
When security is enabled on the Monitor server, various roles must be updated.

Managing Monitor action services involves the following tasks:

Stopping and restarting action services
After you make any change to the configuration of the Monitor action services, you must stop and restart them so that the change can take effect.
Configuring properties for alerts
IBM Business Monitor manages action services and event emissions using Monitor action services. The Monitor action services receive situation events emitted by applications, select appropriate actions based on user-defined rules and policies, and invoke one or more actions in the form of alerts.
Working with action templates
A system administrator uses the Business Monitor action services to notify the appropriate people about events that occur in a model. These notifications can take the form of a dashboard alert, an email, a call to a cell phone, or a call to a pager. Notifications can also be sent to Web Services Notification or Service Component Architecture (SCA) services. A systems administrator creates an action template, which defines the publish type, subject and body of the notification, and the federated repositories or Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) query, that defines which users receive alert notifications. The cell phone and pager types are email publish types that are processed by the cell phone or pager provider (if supported) and sent to the cell phone or pager device.
Creating situation events
Situation events are generated either by IBM Business Monitor (using metrics, key performance indicators (KPIs), counters, or triggers) or by other software. They describe business situations that need attention, such as a printer running out of paper or a metric exceeding a certain value. The administrator defines situation events, which cause the action to be executed.
Binding situation events to action services
After creating the action templates, an administrator for IBM Business Monitor, using the WebSphere Application Server administrative console, binds situation events to action services by associating an action template with a situation event. The Monitor action services receive situation events, parse the received events, and select an appropriate action by looking up the action in the action catalog, where information about bindings is stored. Finally, the Monitor action services invoke the selected action.
Viewing situation events
After an administrator has correctly bound situation events to action templates, dashboard users can then view all bound situation events that they have permission to view.
Action logging service
Use the action logging service to track whether an action has been taken based on the logging data from the emitted events.
Registering an action service
The system administrator uses the WebSphere Application Server administrative console to register each action service. An action service notifies defined users about a situation, invokes a web service application, or both.
Using the Monitor action services export and import tool
If you want to move a template from a development system to a production system, you can use the Monitor action services data export and import tool to export the defined actions and templates data, which are stored in the Monitor database, to an XML file. You can also use the tool to import this XML file into another Monitor database.