Situations

A situation describes a condition or set of conditions that you want to examine to determine if a potential problem exists in the systems and resources you are monitoring. A condition consists of an attribute, a predefined value, and a comparison operator.

When a situation is activated the attribute is compared to the predefined value to determine if the condition is met. For example, the N3T_CPU_Pct_Critical situation is true when the value of the CPU Percentage attribute is greater than or equal to the predefined value of 10 percent.

You can create complex situations that contain multiple conditions, allowing you to examine multiple attributes that represent characteristics of specific problems. When all of the conditions of a situation are met (the situation is triggered), an event is registered. The operator is alerted to events by indicator icons that appear in the Navigator. Operators can also be alerted by sound. As you move up the Navigator hierarchy, multiple situation events are consolidated to show only the indicator with the highest severity: critical, followed by warning, then informational. The graphical views also display the event indicators. Event states can be Critical, Warning or Informational.

A situation can include a take action command that runs when the situation is triggered. This allows you to automate a response to a specific system condition. In addition, each situation can include text describing the probable cause and expert advice allowing you to address and resolve problems quickly.

Any triggered situation raised by IBM® Tivoli® Monitoring or any of the OMEGAMON® V4.2 monitoring agents can be forwarded to the Netcool® OMNIbus Event List or IBM Tivoli Event Console. IBM Tivoli Monitoring and the OMEGAMON agents monitor systems and can proactively alert you to warnings or detect critical situations when they occur. Those alerts or situation events can be forwarded by means of the Event Integration Facility, (EIF). The Netcool OMNIbus Event List and the Tivoli Event Console show details like the severity of the event, (Warning, Critical, informational) and the status, (open, closed, acknowledged).

The capability to drill down into the event to determine what thresholds were exceeded or which parts of the network are affected is available with Event Integration. If the Netcool OMNIbus user determines that the problem is being addressed, the user can acknowledge it, attach a journal entry, or close the event. The user can also escalate events or suppress escalation.

All severity and status changes are synchronized back to the Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Server that forwarded the event originally, and the updates are displayed at the Tivoli Enterprise Portal. By default, the Tivoli Enterprise Portal provides more event detail than the Netcool OMNIbus Event List or IBM Tivoli Event Console. On the Event List the most significant information is forwarded, though the user can customize the event list and the Event Integration Facility to forward specific attributes that might be helpful. The user can also choose which events to forward using the Event Integration Facility.

IBM Z OMEGAMON Network Monitor provides a set of default situations to enable you to start monitoring your enterprise as soon as the product is installed. You can use the Situation Editor to modify the default situations or create new situations to meet the needs of your enterprise. See the performance considerations section in the IBM Z OMEGAMON Network Monitor: Planning and Configuration Guide for information about how situation processing affects performance.

A list of the predefined situations provided with IBM Z OMEGAMON Network Monitor and descriptions and formulas for the situations, can be found in the user assistance distributed with IBM Z OMEGAMON Network Monitor or in Identify common mainframe network problems using situations.