Availability Guide for Problem Management

Availability Guide for Problem Management–125509
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Monitoring Objects
Overview
Monitoring important objects in your system environment can help you predict, prevent,
and detect problems that may result in unplanned outages.
This section defines object monitoring, describes the types of objects you should
monitor, and gives examples of tools available to help you monitor critical objects
effectively.
What Is Object Monitoring?
Your system environment may consist of thousands of physical objects such as
terminals, communications lines, processors, disk drives, and controllers. In addition,
you may have thousands of software objects, such as processes, transactions, application
logical threads or sessions, files, and logical communications sessions. Your operations
staff is responsible for monitoring the presence and health of these objects to ensure that
they are working together to provide computing services to end users.
As the size of your network grows and your applications become more complex,
monitoring even the most important of these computing objects becomes more
challenging to your operations staff. Operators cannot possibly verify the health of such
a system manually. Object monitoring is the process of identifying and then monitoring
or supervising the objects critical to maintaining system and application availability.
What Is an Object?
An object is a distinct entity configured on your system that has specifically definable
behavior. Some examples of objects include processors, disks, and files.
Why Is Object Monitoring Important?
Object monitoring is important because it allows you to be proactive in your problem
management strategy. For example, when a disk or file becomes full and operators are
not aware of this disk-full or file-full condition, a serious problem may occur. This and
other conditions should be detected before they have a negative impact on system or
application availability. By becoming aware of potential problems rather than waiting for
a problem to occur, you may be able to prevent unplanned outages in your environment.
Object monitoring allows you to react promptly to single failures before they become
catastrophic double failures.