Situations reference

A situation is a logical expression involving one or more system conditions. Situations are used to monitor the condition of systems in your network. You can manage situations from the IBM® Cloud Pak System Software Monitoring Portal by using the Situation Editor or from the command-line interface using the tacmds for situations.

About situations

The monitoring agents that you use to monitor your system environment include a set of predefined situations that you can use as-is. You can also create new situations to meet your requirements.

Predefined situations contain attributes that check for system conditions common to many enterprises. Using predefined situations can improve the speed with which you can begin using the Monitoring Agent for IBM Cloud Pak System Software. You can change the conditions or values being monitored by a predefined situation to the conditions or values best suited to your enterprise.

You can display predefined situations and create your own situations using the Situation editor. The left panel of the Situation editor initially lists the situations associated with the Navigator item that you selected. When you click a situation name or create a situation, the right panel opens with the following tabs:
Formula
Formula describing the condition being tested.
Distribution
List of managed systems (operating systems, subsystems, or applications) to which the situation can be distributed. All the Cloud Pak System Software Agent managed systems are assigned by default.
Expert advice
Comments and instructions to be read in the event workspace.
Action
Command to be sent to the system.
EIF
Customize forwarding of the event to an Event Integration Facility receiver. (Available when the Tivoli® Enterprise Monitoring Server has been configured to forward events.)
Until
Options to close the event after a period of time, or when another situation becomes true.

Enabling situations for the external Cloud Pak System Software Agent

If the Cloud Pak System Software Agent is installed on a computer that is not part of Cloud Pak System Software, do the following steps to enable situations for the agent:

  1. Open the ITM_HOME/config/tep.jnlpt file, where ITM_HOME is the installation directory of IBM Tivoli Monitoring.
  2. Search the tep.jnlpt file for the following property definition:
    <property name="vbroker.agent.enableLocator" value="false"/>
  3. Add the following property definition after the definition for the vbroker.agent.enableLocator property:
    <property name="cnp.eventflyover.maxlength" value="64"/>
  4. If the Tivoli Enterprise Portal Server is installed on a Linux system, reconfigure the Tivoli Enterprise Portal Server. If the Tivoli Enterprise Portal Server is installed on a Windows system, reconfigure the Tivoli Enterprise Portal browser client.

Additional information about situations

For a list of the predefined situations and information about each individual situation for this monitoring agent, see Predefined situations.