OSI/MHS Orientation Guide

Building Your Message Handling System
OSI/MHS Orientation Guide—424829-001
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What You Need to Know
OSI/MHS reports the specified events to a process called an EMS collector, which
records the messages in a disk log. All messages are timestamped and contain various
descriptive information.
There are three main interfaces through which you can find out which events have
occurred:
•
You can have the text form of messages printed on a printer, using an EMS printing
distributor.
•
You can use the ViewPoint application or the EMS Analyzer to display messages on
a screen.
•
You can write a billing application that retrieves the messages in a special form
convenient for programming.
In all these cases, you can monitor events as they occur or review a log of past events;
you can specify filters to extract precisely the types of events of interest to you; and you
can set up a configuration in which events occurring on distributed systems are
forwarded to selected systems for processing.
What You Need to Know
To develop a billing application, you need to be familiar with the following topics:
•
The architecture and concepts of Distributed Systems Management (DSM),
especially the Subsystem Programmatic Interface (SPI) and the Event Management
Service (EMS)
•
The filter language and procedures for specifying filters for event messages
•
The programmatic interface for retrieving event messages, including the procedure
for applying a filter
•
The procedure for forwarding event messages from one system to another
•
Event-message elements and semantics for OSI/MHS, and certain elements that
apply to event messages in general
•
The C, TAL, or COBOL programming language and the Compaq Data Definition
Language (DDL)
•
The locations of files containing data definitions for use with management
applications in general, and with OSI/MHS event-management applications in
particular
•
How to specify to OSI/MHS the accounting events you want reported and the
location to which you want them reported
Note. The programmatic interface for retrieving event messages is based on the Subsystem
Programmatic Interface (SPI). Using other interfaces based on SPI, you can write applications
to automate virtually any management function required by OSI/MHS and related software.