Defining your objectives

A vital part of your IBM® Sterling Control Center Monitor implementation is the process of identifying your business issues and translating them into business objectives.

The business objectives you have for IBM Sterling Control Center Monitor are the beginning of your IBM Sterling Control Center Monitor planning process. A successful implementation depends on a comprehensive, multifaceted plan that you formulate before you configure the building blocks that tell IBM Sterling Control Center Monitor the work you want it to do. You need to consider the following types of questions when identifying your IBM Sterling Control Center Monitor objectives:

General

  • What do I have in my environment?
    • What type of servers?
    • How many servers?
    • What function do the servers have?
    • Are my servers at the minimum maintenance level required to be monitored by IBM Sterling Control Center Monitor?
    • How active are the servers in terms of number of file transfers per hour and per day?
  • What historical data do I want to preserve, how much, and for how long?

Service level management

  • What do I want to know about the health of my environment?
    • Are my servers up/down?
    • How many processes are running on my servers?
    • Do I need a daily report on server activities or other information collected by IBM Sterling Control Center Monitor?
    • What is the status of my adapters?
    • What is the health of my Sterling B2B Integrator cluster?
    • Have queue depths (Execution, Timer, Hold, Wait, Q0-Q9) exceeded some threshold?
  • What do I need to know about my data transfers?
    • Success/failure?
    • Did the transfer happen?

      Yes - Action to take?

      No - Action to take?

    • Did it happen on time?

      Yes - Action to take?

      No - Action to take?

    • Was it bigger than X?

      Yes - Action to take?

      No - Action to take?

    • Was it smaller than Y?

      Yes - Action to take?

      No - Action to take?

    • Did it make it to the target destination?

      Yes - Action to take?

      No - Action to take?

    • Did it make it to the target destination on time?
    • Did it take too much or too little time whenever it ran?
    • How many transfers are failing?
    • Are my queue sizes too large?
  • Overall, what actions do you want to take?
    • Send email
    • Send SNMP trap
    • Send email to a distribution list
    • Run a program
    • Send a command to a server
  • Do I want to limit the data users can view and manage?

Asset management

  • Where is my software installed and running?