Availability Guide for Problem Management

Monitoring Event Messages
Availability Guide for Problem Management–125509
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Managing System Event Messages With EMS
Managing System Event Messages With EMS
The Event Management Service (EMS) allows you to manage system event messages
and the information they provide from the generation of a message in the subsystem
environment to the generation of text for display in the operations environment.
EMS provides the following event message management capabilities:
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Event message building. EMS includes several library procedures that both Tandem
and user-written subsystems use to build event messages. One procedure initializes a
buffer, ensuring that a message has the correct format and provides some of the
standard information found in all event messages. The subsystem then calls other
procedures to add different kinds of information to the event message.
•
Event message collection and logging. The EMS primary and alternate collectors
accept event messages from subsystems and write them to log files.
•
Event message filtering and distribution. The EMS distributor processes provide two
major functions:
•
Selection or filtering of event messages. Filtering is the process of evaluating
event messages and selecting only those in which a particular requester has
expressed interest.
•
Distribution of event messages. Distribution is the process of returning a
selected event message to a requester through the appropriate interface. EMS
can distribute event messages to processes, files, collectors on other nodes, and
display devices such as terminals and printers.
•
Text formatting. EMS includes a procedure that returns text suitable for display to an
operator.
Why Is System Event Message Management Important?
System event message management is important because it allows operators to be
notified quickly of error conditions, state changes, and threshold limits that have been
exceeded. In some instances, problems can be prevented if operators are able to read and
react to system event messages. For example, if one processor goes down because of a
problem with a communications line, and the operator does not respond to the event,
problems with a second processor can bring down the whole system.
What Is the Goal of System Event Message Management?
The goal of system event message management is to solve the “information overload”
problem. Typically, large systems generate so many event messages that operators
cannot concentrate on reading and responding to the important messages.
Some of the areas in which system event messages can be used to advantage include: