Availability Guide for Problem Management

Monitoring Event Messages
Availability Guide for Problem Management–125509
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Step 1—Instrumenting Applications to Generate
EMS Event Messages
In general, make things as easy as possible for the recipients of event messages. A
particular event-message type is implemented only once, but it may be filtered, retrieved,
and displayed many times.
Creating a Data Definition File for Your Applications
If you would like your program to send SPI-compatible event messages (event messages
containing tokens that aid in filtering and processing the messages programmatically),
your program must use a subsystem ID—a structured value that uniquely identifies the
subsystem.
You define the subsystem ID in the Data Definition Language (DDL) source file that
includes all of the definitions required for the programmatic interface (or interfaces) to
your subsystem. This file is then used to produce data definition files in the language in
which your subsystem is written, and in any languages used to write applications that
will retrieve event messages from your subsystem.
For event messages, the DDL file would include definitions for these (and other) items,
in addition to the subsystem ID:
•
Symbolic names representing the possible values of the ZEMS-TKN-
EVENTNUMBER token.
•
Tokens that represent the possible subjects of the event messages.
•
Tokens that contain information describing the event that occurred.
The SPI Programming Manual provides specific information about how to define a
subsystem ID. The Data Definition Language (DDL) Reference Manual provides
additional information about the DDL.
Writing the EMS-Interface Portion of Your Program
To implement the EMS interface that you have designed, you need to include the
following steps in your program:
•
Open an EMS collector process (once only)—either the primary collector ($0) or an
alternate collector.
•
Build an event message for each type of event your subsystem reports.
•
Send the event message to the collector.
•
Close the collector at the end of the program.
Establishing Standards for EMS Event Generation
To integrate successfully your application event messages into the console facility, you
need to establish standards specifying that applications use EMS to generate events. This
should be relatively easy for event generation and management that applies to new
applications.
The EMS Manual describes a set of standard events that subsystems and applications
should generate to support operations management and conform with future