Predefined workspaces, situations, and more
Every agent is designed to monitor specific attributes of an operating system or other type of software. With these attributes, come definitions for use with the Cloud Pak System Software Monitoring Portal functions.
Use the definitions that have been designed for your product to
begin monitoring and visualizing data immediately. Some definitions
are ready to use; others are dormant until activated:
- Workspaces
- The workspaces that open when you click a Navigator item or select
from the
Workspace
Gallery, are predefined. They provide visual feedback of real-time
values from managed systems, and historical values when historical
data collection has been configured. They provide a starting point
for designing your own workspaces. - Queries
- The predefined workspaces are populated with data gathered as a result of queries, which are also predefined. Creating your own queries from these predefined queries enables you to add or remove attributes, apply a sort order, and pre-filter the data to keep data retrieval at a manageable level and to enable you to more easily see data of interest.
- Take action commands
- Some agents have predefined take action commands, such as the Windows OS agent Start Service and Stop Service commands. They are available for selection and they provide examples of the kinds of actions that you might want to define for maintaining managed systems.
- Situations
- The tests for conditions that you want to be alerted for are available
in the predefined situations. To avoid an overwhelming number of events
opening in a newly managed environment and, conversely to avoid missing
important events because the comparison criteria was set too low,
many of the predefined situations for an agent are not set to start
automatically. They remain stopped until you either start them manually
or set them to
Run
at startup. A good way to find out which situations are
set to run at startup and which ones are not, is to filter the Situation
editor tree with 
Show
Situations, which is available when the Situation editor is opened
from the Navigator menu. As agents report monitoring data, and especially
when that data is being collected and stored in a data warehouse,
you can better determine the values and circumstances that are worthy
of an alert, such as high CPU activity on a transaction server at
peak times. - Policies
- The predefined policies that are available with some products are not set to start automatically. This is primarily because policies automate activities, as described in the policy workflow.
- Managed system groups
- The Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Server and every Cloud Pak System Software Monitoring Server product has at least one predefined managed system group, indicated by an asterisk at the beginning of the list name, such as *NT_SYSTEM for the Windows OS agent. When you assign one of these managed system groups to a situation, policy, historical collection configuration, or custom Navigator, all managed systems with that agent installed are selected.
- Navigator views
- Some products have custom Navigator views for access to special features.