Safeguard Management Programming Manual (G06.29+, H06.08+, J06.03+)

Safeguard Management Programming Manual—422086-028
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2
Management Programming for the
Safeguard Subsystem
As the previous section describes, there are interactive and programmatic interfaces to
the Safeguard subsystem. In some situations, the programmatic interfaces are
preferable to the interactive interfaces:
•
It is efficient to transfer as many routine network-management tasks as possible to
programs running on the network itself, freeing operators and other network-
management personnel to do other work.
•
Information obtained through the programmatic interfaces can be used directly by
a management application to control its actions, produce reports, and so forth.
A management application that uses the control-and-inquiry and event-management
interfaces can perform tasks that once required the use of two or three interactive
interfaces. Such an application can also communicate with multiple subsystems. In
addition, writing your own management applications allows you to tailor them to the
needs and configuration of your network.
For example, you could write a management application that uses the control-and-
inquiry interface that determines the number of errors occurring on all lines in a
network and stops lines that have too many errors. A management application could
monitor the events occurring in the subsystem and react to the notification that a line is
going down by starting another line.
Management applications can communicate with other subsystems as well as with the
Safeguard subsystem. For example, you could write an application that uses a given
subsystem to bring up a line to a remote system and that uses the PATHWAY
subsystem to restart terminals on the remote system.
A management application uses the programmatic control-and-inquiry interface to the
Safeguard subsystem by sending commands to and receiving responses from $ZSMP.
Management applications use the Event Management Service (EMS) to retrieve event
messages generated by the Safeguard subsystem by sending commands to and
receiving responses from an EMS distributor process.
Communicating With the Safeguard
Subsystem
Control-and-inquiry communication with the Safeguard subsystem is accomplished
through $ZSMP, as Figure 2-1 shows. A management application calls SPI procedures
to build a message and then sends the message to the Safeguard manager process,
$ZSMP.
These basic tasks are involved in communicating with the Safeguard subsystem: