Event forwarding

If you use the Netcool/OMNIbus product, in addition to the Tivoli Enterprise Portal, to manage events in your enterprise, you can configure a hub monitoring server to forward situation events to the event servers for correlation and management.

A hub monitoring server contains a Situation Event Forwarder component. The Event Forwarder maps Tivoli Enterprise Portal situation events to Tivoli® Event Integration Facility (EIF) events and uses the EIF interface to send the events to an OMNIbus EIF probe (the EIF receiver). The event receiver receives the forwarded events, and expand and format the events for the event servers. On the OMNIbus console, users can view, acknowledge, or reset situation events. The updated situation status is returned to the originating hub monitoring server and reflected in the OMNIbus console on the Tivoli Enterprise Portal.

The EIF is an application programming interface (API) that external applications can use to create, send, or receive events. These events are referred to as either EIF events or TEC/EIF events. For complete information about EIF, see the IBM® Tivoli Enterprise Console Event Integration Facility Reference. In the IBM Tivoli Monitoring: Administrator's Guide, the section Customizing event integration with Tivoli Enterprise Console discusses the mapping of situation events to Tivoli Enterprise Console events; the section Customizing event integration with Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus discusses the mapping of situation events to OMNIbus events.

The hub monitoring server must be configured to enable EIF forwarding and specify the default destination server.

If situation event forwarding is enabled, by default all situation events are forwarded to the EIF destinations defined when you configured the monitoring server. However, you can configure additional EIF receivers and selectively forward situation events to different destinations by using the EIF tab of the Tivoli Enterprise Portal Situation editor. You can also use the EIF tab to assign an OMNIbus severity to a situation.

The severity of EIF events is derived from the situation name. The severity is determined as follows:
  • If the suffix of the situation name is either _Warn or _Warning, the EIF event severity is set to WARNING.
  • If the suffix is either _Crit or _Critical, the severity is set to CRITICAL.
  • If the severity cannot be determined from the suffix, a severity of UNKNOWN is assumed.

    You might have to use the EIF tab to set the severity for situations that display in the OMNIbus console with a severity of UNKNOWN. See the IBM Tivoli Monitoring: Tivoli Enterprise Portal User's Guide for instructions on using the Situation editor to assign a situation severity.