Availability Guide for Problem Management

Monitoring Objects
Availability Guide for Problem Management–125509
5-2
What Should You Monitor?
What Should You Monitor?
To effectively manage your system environment for higher availability, you need to
develop an appropriate object monitoring strategy. Tandem products allow you to
monitor objects and object states, as well as performance and critical resource
utilization.
Determining What to Monitor
The first step in developing an effective object monitoring strategy is to determine what
to monitor. The size and complexity of your system environment may make it inefficient
(and perhaps unnecessary) to try to monitor all of your objects. To determine what to
monitor, begin by taking an inventory of your objects.
The best way to inventory your objects is to divide them into categories, such as
processors, disks, processes, spooler objects, NonStop Transaction Manager/MP
(TM/MP) transactions, and so on. For each object type, create an inventory that defines
which objects are critical and what action to take when an object such as a printer stops
working. (Critical objects are those that might affect the availability of the system or
network.) Your inventory should also indicate what to do when an object exceeds a
predefined threshold, such as when a disk becomes more than 80 percent full or a
process has changed priority. After gaining experience with one or two objects, you will
be able to plan for the remaining objects with increasing efficiency.
Objects and Their Relationships
After the objects are identified, you need to understand how they relate to one another,
that is, how their constraints affect one another. A constraint is a functional relationship
between objects—a statement about a condition or relationship that must be maintained
as true. For example, objects in a Pathway application must satisfy the following
constraints:
•
A Pathway system can have only one PATHMON process.
•
A PATHMON process manages one or more terminal control processes (TCPs) and
one or more server classes.
•
A TCP manages one or more terminals.
•
A terminal can execute one or more programs.
Figure 5-1 is an object diagram that shows the constraints between Pathway objects.