Overview

Read this article, the seventh installment in the series, "Architecting on demand solutions," to learn how to use Tivoli Business Systems Manager to create a single view of business and IT systems. A single view of its business operation and its IT operation lets an organization monitor and manage both the business process side and the IT side of service delivery. By analyzing the data and events from your business operation and your IT operation, your company can make decisions that better align IT resources with business priorities.

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Introducing Tivoli Business Systems Manager

Tivoli Business Systems Manager enables an organization to view its IT resources and the existing relationships they have with each other. Within Tivoli Business Systems Manager, an object model describes the hierarchical relationships of the resources as they exist in the real world. For example, a database can be placed as a child of a physical server where the database is running. Because the concept of a resource is generic in Tivoli Business Systems Manager, you can use it to represent business processes and applications by following some well-defined patterns. As a result, enterprises can now use Tivoli Business Systems Manager to manage their IT resources within the context of the business services they provide.

When the relationships between the resources are defined within Tivoli Business Systems Manager, you can enable active monitoring of your system by using events. For example, if a resource fails or a certain performance level is not attainable, events indicating the problems can be forwarded to Tivoli Business Systems Manager. It can then associate these events with the particular resource, informing you about the impact on the rest of the system. The alerts display graphically on the console, allowing operators to act on a problem as soon as the alert appears.

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Installing Tivoli Business Systems Manager

Because of the software it depends on, installing and configuring Tivoli Business Systems Manager can be challenging. Currently Tivoli Business Systems Manager requires Microsoft® SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition. All the object definitions, states, and business view information are stored in the Microsoft database. The MKS Toolkit is also required for running the configuration scripts. In the future, IBM intends to remove these restrictions, but for now, you must install the Microsoft database before you can install Tivoli Business Systems Manager.

Tivoli Business Systems Manager relies on receiving events from your monitoring infrastructure. Tivoli Enterprise Console and IBM Tivoli Monitoring can send events to Tivoli Business Systems Manager. In this article, you use the enterprise console to feed events into Tivoli Business Systems Manager. The relationship between Tivoli Enterprise Console and Tivoli Business Systems Manager is shown in Figure 1. The Tivoli Business Systems Manager event enablement component must be installed separately into the Tivoli Enterprise Console server. This component facilitates the forwarding of events from the enterprise console server to the Tivoli Business Systems Manager servers using rules defined in the Tivoli Enterprise Console server.

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Creating Tivoli Business Systems Manager business systems for a loan application

"Part 3: Use BPEL to create business processes" discusses a personal loan application, which uses a process model and a number of IT resources. In this section, we'll show you how to map this business service to Tivoli Business Systems Manager. And we'll use Tivoli Business Systems Manager to monitor and manage the operation of the business service.

The personal loan application has a portal front end and uses BPEL to implement a long-running loan process that invokes different services. The loan process consists of many activities, including:

• Validating the loan request and creating a new loan application for the customer
• Performing a credit check
• Approving or rejecting the application

Each activity can invoke one or more services that are deployed on different systems. For example, the validate activity can invoke a customer profile service running on IBM CICS® systems to validate that the applicant is, in fact, a bank client. The credit check activity can invoke another service to confirm that the applicant has good credit standing. All of these different services are crucial in the operation of the personal loan application. A failure in a single service can significantly affect the overall performance of the business.

Using Tivoli Business Systems Manager, you can see the relationships between business activities and the related IT resources. Not all activities comprising a business process have to be represented in Tivoli Business Systems Manager. (Some activities, such as the loan-approval step, require a person for processing and don't map to any IT resource.) For those activities that do map to IT resources and require monitoring, a Tivoli Business Systems Manager business system with exactly the same name can be created for the activity. The activity can then drill down to the applications it invokes, to the middleware the application is running on, and finally, to the IP address of the machine. The Tivoli Business Systems Manager mapping for the personal loan application to IT resource can be created using the Tivoli Business Systems Manager console. The resulting topology view is shown in Figure 2.

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Defining Tivoli Enterprise Console events and rules

Now that the business systems are defined in Tivoli Business Systems Manager, the next step is to design the data that should be sent to it in the form of Tivoli Enterprise Console events. The data should contain information to identify the business system, along with any messages or performance data. Event classes must be defined in the Tivoli Enterprise Console event server before the events can be sent.

A Tivoli Enterprise Console event class is defined in a file with a .baroc extension. In our prototype, we created a BPEL_Event class, shown in Listing 1, that extends the base Tivoli Enterprise Console event class. The BPEL_Event class contains additional fields to capture the BPEL-specific data, including the process name and the activity name.

				

TEC_CLASS: BPEL_Event ISA EVENT DEFINES
{
    process: STRING;
    activity: STRING;
}; END

To forward events from Tivoli Enterprise Console to Tivoli Business Systems Manager, you must create rules that do the forwarding. The rules must be compiled and loaded into the Tivoli Enterprise Console event server. Listing 2 shows an example of a simple Tivoli Enterprise Console rule, which is defined in a file with a .rls extension.

A Tivoli Enterprise Console rule consists of two parts: event filter and action. The rule in Listing 2 is triggered when an event of class BPEL_Event arrives. The reception_action tag marks the action part. It uses a utility called ihstttec to send this event to Tivoli Business Systems Manager using the event enablement component in the enterprise console. The agent listener in Tivoli Business Systems Manager receives the event. (To download the event class definition and the event rule, click the Download icon. The zip file also contains batch file commands that can be used to import and compile the event definition and rule.)

				
rule : bpel_rule: (
  description: 'Send BPEL events to TBSM',
  event: _event of_class 'BPEL_Event'
      where [
         hostname : _hostname,
         severity : _severity,
         process : _process,
         activity : _activity,
         msg : _msg
      ],
  reception_action: (
    exec_program(_event,
     '../../TDS/EventService/ihstttec',
     ' -b "%s;%s" -i "%s:%s" -d "%s:%s" -p "%s" -s "%s" -m "%s" -h "%s" 
        -t "%s"',
 ['BPEL', '1.0', _process, _activity, _process, _activity, _activity, 
     _severity, _msg, _hostname, 'EXCEPTION'], 
     'YES')
  )

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Sending events

The final step to get your system ready for Tivoli Business Systems Manager is to enable your business and IT resources to generate the appropriate Tivoli Enterprise Console events. In Part 5: Use BPEL and the Common Event Infrastructure, you enabled your BPEL business processes to generate business events using the Common Event Infrastructure. Other applications may already have existing mechanisms that emit events. To convert the events into Tivoli Enterprise Console format, a simple adapter will need to be developed. The Event Integration Facility (EIF) Software Development Kit (SDK) is available to help with the development of these adapters. The adapter converts events into the Tivoli Enterprise Console event format and sends them to the enterprise console event server. In the future, Tivoli Business Systems Manager and other systems will adopt the Common Base Event as the standard way to describe events, reducing the need to build adapters to handle the conversions.

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Performing root-cause analysis

A system outage can be caused by many scenarios -- the database used by the loan services can be disconnected, the gateway can be down, or the CICS regions can receive a short-on-storage exception. Events can be generated from these scenarios and rules can be developed to map error messages to the appropriate business system in Tivoli Business Systems Manager. Once the affected system is identified by Tivoli Business Systems Manager, it can automatically show you any additional business systems that this problem impacts.

Figure 3 shows an example of such root-cause analysis capability. The LoanService is down and, as a result, when the approveLoan activity invokes an operation on the LoanService, it receives an exception that is written to the IBM WebSphere® Application Server Fast Failure Data Capture (FFDC) file. By enabling the FFDC file to send the appropriate Tivoli Enterprise Console events to Tivoli Business Systems Manager to identify the LoanService, Tivoli Business Systems Manager is able to show the implication of the LoanService nonavailability to the entire business. Figure 3 shows the affected business systems in red.

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Taking action

Through Tivoli Business Systems Manager, the IT administrator can be alerted to problems that are affecting the business process. To resolve any issues, the administrator may need to contact different support teams to investigate different problems. In this example, the administrator could contact the operator to check that the servers running the LoanService are in good health. The IT administrator can also use the Tivoli Business Systems Manager admin console to indicate that he has taken ownership of the problem, as shown in Figure 4, and create a problem ticket.

Once the problem is owned, the red problem indicators related to it on the business systems disappear, and a person icon is displayed beside the resource under investigation. The icon indicates that the resource has one or more open, owned events, as shown in Figure 5.

The ownership can be closed manually and doing so causes the associated problem event to also be closed. Alternatively, a clearing event can be automatically sent to indicate that the problem has been fixed. When the clearing event arrives, the ownership is closed automatically. The clearing event is sent using the ihstttec utility described in Listing 2 by using the same -p parameter as the one used by the problem event, but using severity HARMLESS in contrast to severity CRITICAL, as used by a problem event.

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Summary

In this article, we discussed simple patterns you can follow to bridge the higher level-business view and the underlying IT infrastructure. We used a simple personal loan application as an example. You learned how to:

1. Model your business processes to IT relationships in Tivoli Business Systems Manager.
2. Design your event infrastructure, including rules and actions.
3. Enable your services and IT resources to emit events.

Once this environment is configured, you can use Tivoli Business Systems Manager as the single entry point to begin monitoring and managing both your business and IT infrastructure using events. Tivoli Business Systems Manager allows you to maximize your IT resources and helps you improve system availability, saving your business time and money.

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Download

Information about download methods

Resources

• IBM Tivoli Business Systems Manager provides an overview, and links to technical support, technical documentation, product manuals, and other related links.
  
  
• Visit Business Performance Management to learn how to gain a comprehensive view of your organization.
  
  
• Visit the Manage business performance series for a collection of articles on using business performance management to exploit business intelligence data.
  
  
• Consult the IBM Redbook, Business Service Management Best Practices , a key component of IBM's On Demand Automation Blueprint.
  
  
• Visit the Tivoli Resource Center for white papers, articles, analyst reports, redbooks, code, demos, and more.
  
  
• View a Tivoli Business Systems Manager demo for a quick, comprehensive overview of the solutions that simplify the management of your IT system and resources, helping you to see what's happening, what it means, and what to do about it.
  
  
• To learn more about Tivoli products, visit the developerWorks Tivoli zone. You'll find technical documentation, how-to articles, education, downloads, product information, and more.
  
  
• Get involved in the developerWorks community by participating in developerWorks blogs.
  
  
• Innovate your business with IBM products. Try IBM trial downloads to find out how.
  
  
• Browse for books on these and other technical topics.
  
  

About the authors

Christina Lau is a Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM. Christina is an architect on the On Demand Development team focusing on the next-generation technologies and service-oriented architecture (SOA) engagements for the On Demand Operating Environment. Contact Christina at clau@ca.ibm.com.

Hendra Suwanda is currently working on the Eclipse TPTP project at the IBM Toronto Laboratory. He previously worked in the On Demand Development and Incubation team. Contact Hendra at suwanda@ca.ibm.com.

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Table of contents

• Overview
• Introducing Tivoli Business Systems Manager
• Installing Tivoli Business Systems Manager
• Creating Tivoli Business Systems Manager business systems for a loan application
• Defining Tivoli Enterprise Console events and rules
• Sending events
• Performing root-cause analysis
• Taking action
• Summary
• Download
• Resources
• About the authors
• Comments

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