EMS Manual

Configuring EMS
EMS Manual—426909-005
12-12
Consumer, Forwarding, and Printing Distributors
Consumer, Forwarding, and Printing Distributors
Event-message distributors let you choose event messages from one or more log files
by using a filter and route these messages to an appropriate destination.
Using Distributors
Using consumer, forwarding, and printing distributors is optional. You can start and
stop these distributors either programmatically or interactively at any time. Any number
of each type of distributor can be running, subject to the limit of the maximum number
of opens for each type of collector. For a description of these limits, see Primary
Collectors on page 12-2 and Alternate Collectors on page 12-2.
Several application programs (up to a maximum of 15) can have a distributor open at
the same time to get status and version information. However, only one of these
application programs can retrieve event messages and control distributor and logging
attributes. The way these distributors start and stop depends on distributor type.
Each consumer distributor serves a single controlling (main) application program. The
main application typically starts its own consumer distributor, which it opens to retrieve
event messages. After the main application and any other openers have closed it, a
consumer distributor automatically stops, unless the AUTOSTOP attribute is specified.
Printing and forwarding distributors, on the other hand, do not necessarily depend on a
particular application. Operators and network applications start these distributors as
needed. A network application can open one of these distributors, change distributor
and logging attributes, and close the distributor, as appropriate. When retrieving event
messages from a log file specified by the LOGFILE keyword or ZEMS-TKN-LOGTIME
token, the distributor stops automatically at the end of file. Otherwise, printing and
forwarding distributors continue to run until stopped by an operator or a network
application.
The printing distributor allows distribution of events to selected destinations. The
destinations are determined in the filter on an event basis, and a list of routing IDs is
passed by the filter interpreter to the distributor event processing logic. All potential
destinations are defined as profiles in the filter source and are stored in the filter object.
The term routing distributor in this manual describes a printing distributor with a filter
that contains destination profiles. For more information about event routing, see
Section 16, Event Routing.
Distributor Type Message Destination
Consumer Application program
Forwarding Collector (usually on a remote node)
Printing Disk file, device, or process