A policy is a logical expression that describes a series, or workflow, of automated steps, called activities, whose order of execution you control. You can create policies that implement fully automated workflow strategies and policies that require user intervention.
- Policy workflow
- A policy begins by waiting for a situation to become true, then
starts a series of actions. The simplest policy will simply wait until
a situation is true and then take some action. For example, the predefined
Windows OS policy named NT Disk Busy is activated when
the NT Percent Disk Time situation
becomes true (disk busy more than 95%). Then 
NT Missing Process situation is evaluated.
If the situation is true 
, a script is run at 1 A.M.; if the situation is false 
, the net start
command is run to start that service; if it is in error 
, a script is run at 1
A.M.
- Workflow activities
- A policy consists of activities that can automate responses to
events or routine operator tasks. An activity can be an activity program,
a situation, or another policy. The workflow elements, activities
and
connectors, are represented in the Grapher
view in the Workflow window much as they would be in a flow chart:
Some activities flow directly to the next activity, while others branch
off depending on the result of the previous activity. - Policies can have these types of activities:
- Predecessor activities, which directly precede other activities; successor activities, which directly follow other activities. They act on the basis of the endcode of their predecessor.
- Parallel activities that run at the same time.
- Sequential activities that run one at a time in succession.
- Workflow endcodes
- When an activity ends, it returns an endcode. Endcodes control the flow of activities in a policy.
- Policy distribution
- Policies are distributed to the managed systems that you want to monitor and send commands to and controlled by the Tivoli® Enterprise Monitoring Server that the monitoring agents connect to.
- A policy starts after you save it if
Auto
start is enabled (the default setting). A policy also
starts after you select it and click 
Start
Policy in the Workflows editor or Manage Policies at Managed
Systems window. - If the policy distribution is changed manually or dynamically, the policy is restarted. Dynamic updates happen after a new agent comes online or after an agent connection switches from one monitoring server to another.
- Predefined policies
- Some monitoring agents provide predefined policies that you can use as is or modify for your environment. See the user's guide for your product for a description of any predefined policies.
