Overview of the Blue Medora Agent for Files and Directories

Blue Medora Agent for Files and Directories allows customers to optimize their existing IBM Tivoli Monitoring (ITM) infrastructure to provide deep monitoring and alerts for file and directory related activities on their critical enterprise servers. This results in less complexity, increased security, more uniform operations management, and a significant reduction in costs due to the elimination of redundant infrastructure and multiple platform-specific tools. This chapter provides a description of the features, components, and interface options for the Blue Medora Agent for Files and Directories.

IBM Tivoli Monitoring overview

IBM Tivoli Monitoring is the base software for the Blue Medora Agent for Files and Directories. IBM Tivoli Monitoring provides a way to monitor the availability and performance of all the systems in your enterprise from one or several designated workstations. It also provides useful historical data that you can use to track trends and to troubleshoot system problems.

IBM Tivoli Monitoring is used to perform the following tasks:

Monitor for alerts on the systems that you are managing by using predefined situations or custom situations.
Establish your own performance thresholds.
Trace the causes leading to an alert.
Gather comprehensive data about system conditions.
Use policies to perform actions, schedule work, and automate manual tasks.

The Tivoli Enterprise Portal is the interface for all IBM Tivoli Monitoring related products including the Blue Medora monitoring agents for IBM Tivoli Monitoring. By providing a consolidated view of your environment, the Tivoli Enterprise Portal permits you to monitor and resolve performance issues throughout the enterprise.

Capabilities and Features of the Blue Medora Monitoring Agent for Files and Directories

Blue Medora Agent for Files and Directories provides deep insight into files and directories on both an individual and collective basis at the files-system level of Windows, Unix, and Linux servers. Using a simple directive file, an IT administrator can quickly and easily set up complex monitoring scenarios that, when combined with ITM-based Situations, Take-Actions, and Policies, can be used to implement automated workflows that provide alerts for scenarios such as when changes to a file have or haven’t been made, whether files have been created or deleted, or the size of a given set of files exceeding the expected limits.

With Blue Medora ITM Agent for Files and Directories, you gain the ability to monitor:

File or directory size in bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, and gigabytes.
The number of files in a particular directory
The number or size of files matching a naming pattern in a particular directory.
The number or size of files matching a naming pattern in a directory and its subdirectories (recursion).
The number of files in the entire file system matching a naming pattern.
Whether a file or directory exists.
Whether a file or directory has been removed.
Whether a file, file set, or directory is growing or shrinking.
Delta Changes (Size).

Blue Medora ITM Agent for Files and Directories has been designed from the ground up to look, feel, and operate like existing IBM-developed ITM agents in terms of ITM remote deployment, manageability via ITM command-line utilities, and installation and configuration.

Blue Medora ITM Agent for Files and Directories:

Takes advantage of ITM's Tivoli Enterprise Portal (TEP) visualization capabilities to include best practices, expert advice, customized workspaces, and historical data gathering.

Integrates with Tivoli Data Warehouse (TDW) to provide file and directory focused historical data collection and analysis.

Provides the ability to send application-specific events to Tivoli Enterprise Console (TEC) and Netcool OMNIbus for advanced correlation and automation.

Components of the IBM Tivoli Monitoring environment

After you install and set up the Blue Medora Agent for Files and Directories, you have an environment that contains the client, server, and monitoring agent implementation for IBM Tivoli Monitoring that contains the following components:

Tivoli Enterprise Portal client with a Java™-based user interface for viewing and monitoring your enterprise.

Tivoli Enterprise Portal Server that is placed between the client and the Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Server and enables retrieval, manipulation, and analysis of data from the monitoring agents. The Tivoli Enterprise Portal Server is the central repository for all user data.

Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Server that acts as a collection and control point for alerts received from the monitoring agents, and collects their performance and availability data. The Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Server is also a repository for historical data.

Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Agent, Blue Medora Agent for Files and Directories (one or more instances of the monitoring agent). The instances communicate with the systems or subsystems that you want to monitor. This monitoring agent collects and distributes data to a Tivoli Enterprise Portal Server.

IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console is an optional component, which acts as a central collection point for events from a variety of sources, including those from other Tivoli® software applications, Tivoli partner applications, custom applications, network management platforms, and relational database systems. You can view these events through the Tivoli Enterprise Portal (using the event viewer), and you can forward events from IBM Tivoli Monitoring situations to the IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console component.

Tivoli Common Reporting (TCR) is a separately installable feature available to users of Tivoli software that provides a consistent approach to generating and customizing reports. Some individual Blue Medora monitoring agents for IBM Tivoli Monitoring contain report packages that are designed for use with Tivoli Common Reporting, and have a consistent look and feel.

User interface options

Installation of the IBM Tivoli Monitoring software and other integrated applications provides the following interfaces that you can use to work with the resources and data provided by your Blue Medora monitoring agents for IBM Tivoli Monitoring:

Tivoli Enterprise Portal browser client interface: The browser client interface is automatically installed with the Tivoli Enterprise Portal Server. To start the Tivoli Enterprise Portal browser client in your Internet browser, enter the URL for a specific Tivoli Enterprise Portal browser client installed on your Web server.

Tivoli Enterprise Portal desktop client interface: The desktop client interface is a Java-based graphical user interface (GUI) on a Windows® or Linux® workstation.

IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console: An event management application that integrates system, network, database, and application management to help ensure the optimal availability of an IT services for an organization.

Manage Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Services window: The window for the Manage Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Services utility is used for configuring the agent and starting Tivoli® services not already designated to start automatically.

Tivoli Common Reporting: A Web user interface for specifying report parameters and other report properties, generating formatted reports, scheduling reports, and viewing reports. The user interface is based on the Tivoli Integrated Portal