zEnterprise sensor

To discover the zEnterprise® environment, the sensor uses the Enterprise Common Collector (ECC). The ECC is a single entry point for querying all inventory data about the zEnterprise components, both hardware and software.

The Agile Service Manager zEnterprise sensor establishes a secure connection with the ECC and gathers all necessary data to create a tree of CDM objects. Then, the sensor stores them into Agile Service Manager and thus no entry into each of the components is necessary. The ECC is a web application that is deployed on a web server. Therefore, the zEnterprise sensor depends on the Port sensor to identify the port that the ECC listens on. The zEnterprise sensor stores objects that describe the physical and virtual structure of zEnterprise, zBladeExtension, and computer systems.

If you want to discover a virtual computer system, you must install and start the Guest Platform Management Provider agents that deliver information about the operating systems to the ECC.

The sensor stores the following objects that describe the physical, virtual, and logical components:
  • zEnterprise: physical packages, appliances
  • zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension: BladeCenters, chasises, racks, blades
  • Computer systems: System z®, z/VM® LPARs, PR/SM LPARs
  • Logical Components: Ensemble, Workload Resource Groups
  • Virtual Components: Virtual Servers, Virtual Networks, Virtual Storage Resources
Note: For virtual computer systems, the objects are placeholders.

Sensor name that is used in the GUI and logs

com.ibm.cdb.discover.sensor.sys.zenterprise_1.0.0.

Prerequisites

For the zEnterprise discoveries, ensure that the following prerequisites are met:
  • The Enterprise Common Collector (ECC) version 1.1.0.2

    The ECC is shipped as a distinct component. You must install and configure it separately. However, the sensor can use an ECC instance that is already installed and configured for use by another application, such as the zEnterprise Monitoring Agent shipped with IBM® Tivoli® Monitoring.

  • The Guest Platform Management Provider agents

    You must install, configure, and run the GPMP agents on each of the virtual computer systems. Without those agents, the sensor is unable to detect the operating system and the unique identification of the discovered computer systems.

Security issues

The zEnterprise sensor needs an IP address and port to communicate with the ECC. This information is required because the sensor calls the ECC RESTful API, receives the data, and then puts it into a data object structure which is then passed to Agile Service Manager to be stored.

Limitations

Virtual computer systems
Reconciliation of objects that are stored by the zEnterprise sensor and operating system sensors, such as the Linux® computer system sensor, AIX® computer system sensor, and Windows computer system sensor, is not always possible because there are cases when the ECC cannot recognize the type of a virtual computer system or its identification data if a Guest Platform Management Provider agent is not running there.
By default, the sensor stores only known virtual computer systems with correct identification set. Any virtual computer system that does not fulfill this requirement is skipped and an appropriate warning message is displayed.
You can, however, enable storing all discovered virtual computer systems, even the ones of an unknown type. Such computer systems are visible in the Other Computer Systems section. If possible, reconciliation matches the MAC address from the unknown computer system that is discovered by the zEnterprise sensor with the L2Interfaces MAC addresses of the computer systems discovered by the platform sensors, and merges them. To make the computer systems merge automatically, you must first run the platform sensors, and then the zEnterprise sensor. The reverse sequence of discovery, that is launching the zEnterprise sensor first, does not assure the automatic merging.
LPARs
Before you discover the zEnterprise environment with the zEnterprise sensor for the first time, check if any previously discovered LPARs became a part of the zEnterprise environment, and thus are visible through System z Hardware Management Console or the ECC. In such case, run a discovery of those LPARs with the Linux computer system sensor to avoid duplicates.