Availability and performance are important topics in today's IT environment. In addition, they are the basic requirements for any IT system in order to support the business operations smoothly. To meet the business requirements for availability and performance, IT administration must have related management processes to follow to ensure the availability and performance of the business systems. Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL® ) is a good approach. ITIL provides the best practice for IT service management, and the most relevant ITIL processes for availability and performance are the Availability Management and Capacity Management processes. Many aspects of infrastructure management can be described through a management maturity model. This model can be used to illustrate the evolution phases that lead from a resource management-focused approach to a service management-centric approach. We also introduce the IBM® service management concept, its content, and the alignment with ITIL recommendations. After understanding the logical structure of the systems management solution set, we also show how to position that systems management solution set to build a comprehensive blueprint. In this IBM Redguide™ publication, we also provide a more detailed discussion of the Tivoli® solutions. This discussion provides a structured approach to the broad set of Tivoli solutions in the availability and performance management area. You can find descriptions of key offerings at these areas and summaries

A composite application is a distributed implementation of an application, in which it spans several application servers and crosses platform boundaries. This circumstance can create an operations challenge. The condition has gotten worse with the advent of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) because many applications have become loosely coupled, meaning that programs can find connections and services at run time, depending on the available environment. Operations management for composite applications is a complex issue. Applications are generally designed based on functionality, not manageability. An operator has to rely on management tools to decode any problem on these applications and recover them. This paper describes an approach for designing a management solution for operators to manage composite applications. It also provides step-by-step instructions for implementing this solution for a sample application, the Trader application, which has been enhanced with Web Services calls and access to Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) mediation functions.

The purpose of this Tivoli Field Guide is to share some perspectives for developing monitoring with IBM Tivoli Monitoring 6.1(ITM). Customers with a long history with Tivoli Software are experienced with Distributed Monitoring and how it was up to the customer to create monitors. There was a demand for "best practices" monitors with the product. With the arrival of ITM 6.1, the technology is different than our previous products, and understanding how to migrate monitoring from DM 3.x and ITM 5.x is a very p

This IBM Redpaper positions the new IBM Director V5.20 against the other IBM systems management products. Although IBM systems management software products include several choices as Cluster Systems Management and IBM Tivoli Management suite, and some features might seem to overlap, each product targets a specific environment. This paper will help you to install, tailor, and configure the IBM Director software on IBM System p servers running AIX 5L V5.3 and various Linux enterprise distributions. This paper provides practical examples of how to use various functions of IBM Director and helps you to understand the choices that you have to manage IBM System p servers.

The ITM Middle Layer (DMML) provides a number of ITM applications; e.g. Data Collector, Heartbeat, and Web Health Console, access to data. All of these depend on ITM DMML knowing which Framework Endpoints have a working ITM engine on them. This is done by ITM maintaining a Middle Layer endpoint cache on each Managed Node, which has a Gateway installed on it, referred to as the epcache.db. This epcache.db is used by the ITM applications to access ITM engines on their Framework Endpoint correctly; this is don

This IBM Redpaper was developed to help you as you study and prepare to take Certification Test 593: IBM Tivoli Monitoring V5.1.1 Implementation . This test leads to certification for the Tivoli Certified Deployment Professional for IBM Tivoli Monitoring. The scope of the certification tests your ability to demonstrate the following areas of expertise required for IBM Tivoli Monitoring V5.1.1: Prerequisite knowledge for IBM Tivoli Monitoring Planning the implementation Installation prerequisites The installation process Configuration of the IBM Tivoli Monitoring server Problem determination General operations IBM Tivoli Monitoring Workbench You can find the information that you need about these topics all in this IBM Redpaper. Plus, you have a chance to test your knowledge using the sample test questions at the back of this paper. This publication does not replace practical experience, nor is it designed to be a stand-alone guide for any subject. Instead, it is an effective tool which, when combined with education activities and experience, can be a very useful preparation guide for the exam.

Shell is a method provided by the ITM engine’s Service object to allow resource model developers to execute scripts or binaries externally to the model itself. The use of this Shell method is very straightforward, which in its simplicity, can create confusion. Many implementers share the same common requirements for implementing the Shell method. That is, how do I pass parameters to my external script or executable and how do I receive more than one line from StdOut when my external task completes? T