Availability Guide for Problem Management

Monitoring Event Messages
Availability Guide for Problem Management–125509
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What Are the Goals of Application Event Message
Management?
What Are the Goals of Application Event Message Management?
The most important goal of application event message management is to solve the
“information overload” problem. Large applications may generate so many event
messages that operators cannot concentrate on reading and responding to the critical
messages that require intervention.
Managing your application event messages can also allow you to:
•
Take advantage of Tandem’s event message management facilities (EMS) for
application event messages
•
Understand the cause-and-effect relationship between system and application
problems
•
Detect trends, for example, when a certain type of event message is reported more
often or less often
Getting Control of Application Event Message
Management
Managing application event messages effectively to predict, prevent, and detect
unplanned outages is essential for you to meet the service-level objectives required by
your end users.
The steps necessary to controlling application events include:
1. Instrumenting applications to generate EMS event messages
2. Analyzing application event messages
3. Filtering application event messages
4. Writing recovery steps for critical event messages
Step 1—Instrumenting Applications to Generate EMS Event Messages
EMS allows you to collect and distribute event information, and it accepts event
messages both from Tandem subsystems, such as Pathway and Expand, and from user-
written applications. You can design a program that can produce event messages and
send them to EMS for collection and distribution. You can also design an event-
reporting strategy that allows your application to integrate smoothly into an operational
environment that includes other user-written applications and Tandem subsystems.
Designing and implementing an event-reporting strategy involves the following tasks:
•
Deciding which events to report
•
Deciding what information to include in event messages
•
Creating a data-definition file for your applications
•
Writing the EMS-interface portion of your program
•
Establishing standards for generating EMS events