PAM Management Programming Manual

Introduction
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Distributed Systems Management (DSM) Facilities
Distributed Systems Management (DSM) Facilities
The PAM subsystem supports the DSM facilities provided by Tandem for subsystem
management. DSM provides two types of management interfaces to subsystems:
•
Commands are used to perform operations on subsystem objects. This type of
management interface is referred to as control-and-inquiry.
•
Event messages are generated to report significant events detected by the subsystem.
This type of management interface is referred to as event management.
The PAM subsystem supports both interactive and programmatic interfaces for control-
and-inquiry and event management.
Programmatic Interfaces
The DSM programmatic interfaces for control-and-inquiry and event management
enable applications to perform the same kind of monitoring and control operations that
users of SCF and EMS printing and compatibility distributors can perform interactively.
The Subsystem Programmatic Interface (SPI) is used for building commands to,
decoding responses from, and obtaining event messages issued by the PAM subsystem.
The commands, responses, and event messages that are sent to and received from the
PAM subsystem are made up of special codes called tokens. Each token contains a
particular piece of information, such as the command number of a command or one
element of an event message. Tokens can be single values or structures consisting of
several values. Some tokens, called header tokens, are present in every command,
response, and event message.
Why Management Programming?
In some situations, it is desirable to use a programmatic interface rather than an
interactive interface to manage a subsystem such as PAM for the following reasons:
•
It is efficient to transfer as many routine network-management tasks as possible to
programs running on the computer network, freeing operators and other network-
management personnel to do the work that requires judgement and creativity.
•
Information obtained through programmatic interfaces can be translated directly into
procedures, reports, and so on.
The capability to write your own management applications enables you to tailor them to
the needs and configuration of your network.
Interactive Interfaces
The DSM interactive interfaces for control-and-inquiry and event management are as
follows:
•
The Subsystem Control Facility (SCF) is a control-and-inquiry interface that enables
a human operator to send commands to Tandem data communications subsystems,
including PAM.