About actions

IBM® Sterling Control Center Monitor performs an action when the occurrence of an event triggers a rule.

An IBM Sterling Control Center Monitor action can perform one or more of the following kinds of activities.

Activity Description
Email An email address or addresses, or an email list, to which notifications will be sent when the corresponding rule is triggered.

Specify the address or addresses, or the email list, to which to send the email, along with the sender email address, a subject line, and message text. You can specify variables to define the email addresses, subject line, and message. You can also send a test email message to make sure an email address is valid.

Rather than type multiple addresses individually, you can import a list of email addresses.
Alert Generates an IBM Sterling Control Center Monitor alert that an event has occurred. Alerts are displayed in the Active and Handled Alerts monitors.
SNMP trap Generates an SNMP trap to the SNMP host defined in the IBM Sterling Control Center Monitor SNMP Host settings. SNMP Host system settings must be configured to generate traps.
Operating system command Executes the specified executable command file on the computer where the IBM Sterling Control Center Monitor engine is installed, and passes an XML string of the event that triggered the rule to the command file (if no other parameters are passed to the command).

You must specify the full path to the command.

You can also pass parameters to the command. These parameters can use variables (such as &processName;) which are replaced by the event values. If you designate parameters to pass to the command, IBM Sterling Control Center Monitor will not automatically pass the entire XML string of the event to the command.

A sample command may be a user-created script that, if a Process fails, writes Process statistics data to a Help desk file. Any user-created scripts should be validated thoroughly before you use them with IBM Sterling Control Center Monitor.
Server command Executes the specified command on a Sterling Connect:Direct® server. You can either select a command template from a list box or type the entire command.
Note: This activity is not available for Sterling B2B Integrator, Sterling Connect:Enterprise®, Sterling Connect:Direct for i5/OS, or FTP servers.

The command template contains variables for Process name (&processName;) and Process ID (&processId;). When IBM Sterling Control Center Monitor submits the command to the Sterling Connect:Direct server, it replaces the variables with the Process name and ID values from the event that triggered the rule.

For example, if a Process named SENDDATA and numbered 00087654 triggers a rule that sends a DELETE command to the Sterling Connect:Direct server, the command template:

delete process pname=&processName; pnumber=&processId;

translates to:

delete process pname=SENDDATA pnumber=00087654
No operation Performs no action. Useful when you do not want an alert generated or another action taken.

For example, you could have two rules with the same criterion, such as Server down, and define them with differing actions:

  • The first rule has a schedule attached to it (for example, 22:00-23:00 Saturday) when server maintenance is applied.
  • The second rule has no schedule attached and sends an email to the System Administrator about the server being down.

When a server down event occurs during the maintenance window, no email is sent.

You create an action to define an activity that IBM Sterling Control Center Monitor performs when an event triggers a rule. Note the following:

  • You can define more than one activity for an action.
  • You can import a list of email addresses for the Email page.
  • IBM Sterling Control Center Monitor ships with some predefined actions.