Metadata rules

You can use metadata rules to append additional elements and values to IBM® Sterling Control Center Monitor events before they are processed by both the rule and the SLC services.

Metadata rules are applied to all IBM Sterling Control Center Monitor events (if they occur during the schedule associated with the metadata rule), unless you explicitly set them not to be applied for statistics collected from specific managed servers. The additional metadata type elements and values are logged in the IBM Sterling Control Center Monitor Events database. When a metadata rule matches an event, IBM Sterling Control Center Monitor appends metadata to the event as lists of key value pairs.

You can use these metadata fields as matching criteria when defining conventional rules and SLCs. Metadata can also be used as filter criteria for reports and alert monitor or activity monitor data. So not only can metadata rules simplify the specification of rule and SLC criteria, they can also be used to simplify specification of report criteria.

Note: Metadata can be used to analyze only new activity. You cannot do retroactive analysis of existing data.

There are four metadata fields (USER_DATA_1 – USER_DATA_4). IBM Sterling Control Center Monitor also provides 10 server metadata fields (SERVER_DATA_1 – SERVER_DATA_10) whose values are set when a monitored server is defined. Every event generated by the server contains the specified values for the 10 fields. The values can be evaluated by metadata rules and regular rules. You can also name the metadata fields to something more meaningful.