Configuration data flow for monitoring a virtual environment with IBM Tivoli Monitoring

You can set up a virtualization fault event management system by integrating Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus, the Probe for Tivoli EIF, IBM Tivoli Monitoring, and an IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Virtual Servers agent.

The different components of this system can be distributed across several host computers or can all run on a single powerful host. For test purposes, components can also run on virtual computers within the cluster that is being managed. However, this configuration is not good practice for a production environment.

The basic configuration setup for the components in the integrated environment, where VMware Virtualization software is used to create a virtual environment, is as follows.

  1. A VMware ESXi cluster is configured with two or more physical server hosts. A VMware ESXi hypervisor is installed on each physical server. The hypervisor is used to partition the servers into multiple virtual machines (VMs) that share the hardware resources. The VMs also all run probes, which are configured to acquire event data and to forward the data directly to the ObjectServer, as alerts.
  2. The VMware ESXi cluster is managed from a single, central ESXi control center. The VMware VirtualCenter application is used to manage and monitor the VMware servers and virtual machines, and to migrate the virtual machines between servers. The ESXi control center can be run on a virtual machine on the cluster.
  3. The VMware VI Agent monitors the ESXi control center from a remote host. The agent collects monitoring information for memory, CPU, system, disk, and network usage for the VMware ESXi servers and the virtual machines. The agent also monitors events and alarms related to faults on the VMware ESXi servers and virtual machines.
  4. The Tivoli® Enterprise Monitoring Server acts as a collection and control point for situation events received from the VMware VI Agent. One or more remote and hub monitoring servers can be set up, based on your requirements. A Tivoli Enterprise Portal Server provides the presentation layer for the data that is collected. The portal server retrieves data from the monitoring server in response to user actions from one or more Tivoli Enterprise Portal clients. The portal server sends the data to the portal clients for presentation, analysis, and manipulation.
  5. The monitoring server can be configured to forward the situation events to Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus ObjectServers. The monitoring server uses the Tivoli Event Integration Facility (EIF) interface to forward the situation events to an EIF receiver. In this case, the receiver is the Probe for Tivoli EIF.
  6. The Probe for Tivoli EIF receives the situation events, processes the event data, and maps the data to ObjectServer fields. The probe then sends alerts to the ObjectServer. The probe rules file needs to be modified, to map the event data to ObjectServer fields. The ObjectServer needs to be configured to process and store the alerts. The IBM Tivoli Monitoring event synchronization component needs to be installed on the ObjectServer host. This component provides customization resources that enable the ObjectServer and the Probe for Tivoli EIF to handle generic situation events and predictive events. The event synchronization component also includes a Situation Update Forwarder process, which enables updates to alerts to be sent back to the originating hub monitoring server.
  7. The situation events that are inserted into the alerts.status table can be viewed in the Active Event List, or in the desktop event list.