A monitoring context instance is information collectedat a specific point in time within a monitoring context.

For the IBM? Intelligent Operations Center amonitoring context instance is analogous to a CAP alert. When a CAPalert is received a monitoring context instance is created or reusedand the metrics within that context instance are populated with theCAP alert values based on the monitoring context.

A monitoring context can be defined to create a new instance foreach CAP alert or to reuse an existing instance. For example if youwant a KPI to calculate the average weekly water level for a givenresource with the water level sampled daily you would create a newmonitor context instance for each CAP alert. Each instance would containthe daily water level and the KPI would average the measurements overthe seven day period.

KPIs are calculated using the metrics defined for a monitoringcontext. When defining an aggregation KPI you specify the monitoringcontext and metric used as input to the KPI aggregation function.When the KPI is evaluated the metric values for the monitoring contextinstances are used by the aggregation function to calculate the KPIvalue.