Availability Guide for Problem Management

Monitoring Event Messages
Availability Guide for Problem Management–125509
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Managing Application Event Messages
Managing Application Event Messages
When your company offers a new business function, you must identify and meet the
service objectives of that function. If the application is down frequently or requires a
significant amount of operations support, you fail to meet your service-level objectives,
and the cost of providing the business function or service escalates.
Restarting a downed communication line is an obvious task; however, the problem can
go undetected because of human oversight or because the application did not issue
proper notification. If the application notifies an operator (either human or automated)
that the line is down, it can be restarted. Properly managing application event messages
can help to prevent, detect, and repair problems in the shortest possible time.
What Is Application Event Message Management?
EMS allows you to manage event messages produced by your application just as
effectively as managing your system event messages. EMS provides the following
application event message management capabilities:
•
Event message building. EMS includes several library procedures that applications
use to build event messages.
•
Event message collection and logging. The EMS primary and alternate collectors
accept event messages from applications 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 Application Event Message Management Important?
Managing your application event messages helps to reduce information overload.
Operators can receive notification quickly of error conditions, state changes, and
threshold limits that have been exceeded. Operators can focus on critical events instead
of having to react to every event. When a critical event is displayed on the system
console, it can be highlighted. The operator can receive an online description of the
problem and the recommended procedures for handling the problem. Managing
application event messages also provides a chronological list of events to aid in problem
detection and resolution.