Understanding situation events

IZSME and the products in your environment come with a set of predefined situations. You can use these unmodified or use them as templates to create your own custom situations.

Situation formula
Situation formulas consist of one or more expressions. For example, a situation that checks for free disk space below 20% has an expression that uses the Logical Disk attribute "Free Megabytes" and reads as Free Megabytes < 20. The situation will read data samples taken at the managed system at set intervals, such as once a day for the disk space situation in our example.

Other situations might be more elaborate, such as the predefined situation called Bottleneck Memory. It embeds two situations: one that tests for excessive memory paging activity (>100 pages per second), and one that tests for processor time over 70%. If both of these situations are true at the same time, the Bottleneck Memory situation becomes true and opens an event.

Situation event indicators

When a situation is associated with a managed system, it also has a state: Fatal, Critical, Minor, Warning, Harmless, Informational, or Unknown. As you move up the Navigator hierarchy, multiple events are consolidated to show only the indicator of the highest severity. Go to the lowest level of the hierarchy in the Navigator and you see the event indicator over the attribute category for which it was written.

Situation Event Console
The Enterprise Status workspace includes the Situation Event Console view.
When there are more than 100 situations, the Situation Event Console will be paginated, instead of displaying the entire list of situations in one scrollable list. At the bottom of the Situation Event Console, the number of items per page will be displayed, along with an indicator of how many pages of situations are available; for example, 1 of 2 pages, with arrow buttons that let you bring up the next or the previous page. You can change the Items per page to display 100, 150, or 200 situations; the default is 100. Click the Items per page field, then select the number of situations per page. Sorting is unaffected by the number of situations displayed. Regardless of the setting, the entire list of situations will be sorted.
Event flyover list
In the Navigator, you can click the event indicator icon to the left of a list item (for example, the list item for your managed systems might be z/OS Systems), to open a listing of open situations, with this information for each:
  • Event state
  • Situation name
  • Name of the system on which the event occurred
  • Event timestamp
  • Display item, if one was specified
  • Situation status

You can click on an event in the list, then use the right-arrow key to display columns to the right of the ones shown initially.

To display the Situation Event Results workspace, right-click on a situation.

Situation Event Results workspace

The Situation Event Results workspace shows the values of the attributes at the time when the situation first became "true" (Initial Situation Values) and at the present time (Current Situation Values). The Expert Advice panel at lower-right displays advice for the situation.

Expert advice is currently available only for product-provided situations. The advice is not editable, and when you create a new situation or use a situation created at your site with Tivoli Enterprise Portal, the advice will not be available in the Expert Advice panel.