EIF Connector

IBM® Tivoli® Directory Integrator Uses the capabilities of the Event Integration Facility in the process of integration with enterprise systems like Netcool/OMNIbus and IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console. EIF enables Tivoli Directory Integrator to create and send alerts and status information that can be recognized by the Netcool/OMNIbus Event Management system as events.

The EIF Connector allows Tivoli Directory Integrator to both send and receive EIF event messages, facilitating bi-directional communications with EIF-capable systems like TEC and Netcool/Omnibus.

Sending is done using the Connector AddOnly mode, while reading events is handled by Iterator mode.

Introduction to IBM Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus

IBM Tivoli Netcool®/OMNIbus is a service level management (SLM) system that collects enterprise-wide event information from many different network data sources and presents a simplified view of this information to operators and administrators.

This information can then be:

• Assigned to operators.
• Passed to helpdesk systems.
• Logged in a database.
• Replicated on a remote Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus system.
• Used to trigger automatic responses to certain alerts.

Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus can also consolidate information from different domain-limited network management platforms in remote locations. By working in conjunction with existing management systems and applications, Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus minimizes deployment time and enables employees to use their existing network management skills.

Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus tracks alert information in a high-performance, in-memory database and presents information of interest to specific users through individually configurable filters and views. Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus automation functions can perform intelligent processing on managed alerts.

The IBM Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus documentation Web site is available at http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/tivihelp/v8r1/index.jsp?toc=/com.ibm.netcool_OMNIbus.doc/toc.xml

Introduction to Tivoli Enterprise Console

The IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console (TEC) product is a rule-based event management application that integrates system, network, database, and application management to help ensure the optimal availability of an organization's IT services.

The Tivoli Enterprise Console product:

• Provides a centralized, global view of your computing enterprise.
• Collects, processes, and automatically responds to common management events, such as a database server that is not responding, a lost network connection, or a successfully completed batch processing job.
• Acts as a central collection point for alarms and events from a variety of sources, including those from other Tivoli software applications, Tivoli partner applications, custom applications, network management platforms, and relational database systems.

The Tivoli Enterprise Console product helps you effectively process the high volume of events in an IT environment by:

• Prioritizing events by their level of importance.
• Filtering redundant or low-priority events.
• Correlating events with other events from different sources.
• Determining who must view and process specific events.
• Initiating automatic corrective actions, when appropriate, such as escalation, notification, and the opening of trouble tickets.
• Identifying hosts and automatically grouping events from the hosts that are in maintenance mode in a predefined event group.

Refer to the IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console User's Guide Version 3.9, SC32-1235, for more information about this product and its components.

Introduction to the Event Integration Facility

The IBM Tivoli Event Integration Facility (EIF) is an event distribution and integration point for the event console. With the Tivoli Event Integration Facility toolkit, you can build event adapters and integrate them into the IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console environment.

IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console adapters are the integration link. Adapters collect events, perform local filtering, translate relevant events to the proper format for the event console, and forward these events to the event server. A variety of adapters for systems, Tivoli software applications, and third-party applications are available. To monitor a source (such as a third-party or custom application) that is not supported by an existing adapter, you can use Tivoli Event Integration Facility to create an adapter for the source.

You can use Tivoli Event Integration Facility to:

• Specify the event information to send to the event server for processing.
• Create an adapter to filter, translate, and then forward event information to the event server.
• Filter and correlate events near the source by using state correlation.
• Create an application that can receive events.

Refer to the IBM Tivoli Event Integration Facility User's Guide Version 3.8, GC32-0691-01, for more information.

Schema

The EIF Connector schema will be retrieved from the Netcool gateway mapping file if it is specified in the Schema File (eifSchemaFile) configuration parameter. For more information, see Configuration.

Iterator mode

When the EIF Connector is in Iterator mode, it will feed the AssemblyLine with entries that comply with the following structure:

where slotname is the name of the slot specified in the received event.

AddOnly mode

When the EIF Connector is in AddOnly mode, it will send an event to a remote system. The event to be sent is specified as an Entry. The connector expects the provided to it entry to comply with the following structure:

Configuration

The EIF Connector expects the following parameters:

EIF Config File

This text field contains the path to the config file or a block of text representing properties recognized by the underlying library. When properties are being specified, an "!" should be the first character in this field.

Schema File

This optional string parameter contains the path to the Netcool EIF gateway's mapping file used for retrieving the schema. If the specified file can not be found, opened or read an error message is logged and only the "msg"attribute is added to the schema (old behavior).

Break on Error

This Boolean parameter specifies whether the connector should throw an error if unable to establish connection initially. The default value is true.

GetNext Timeout

This numeric parameter specifies the time to wait (in seconds) for an event message to be delivered (-1 - wait forever, 0 - get the next available message without waiting, N - number of seconds to wait). The default value is -1.

Terminate Timeout

This numeric parameter specifies the time to wait (in seconds) when closing the connection with the remote server. The default value is 120.

Detailed Log

Check this parameter for more detailed messages in the log.